CiviAccounts Specifications-Official Receipting

The Canadian government has strict receipting procedures for Charities, which also apply to political parties in at least one party. We expect that implementing the full functionality (see http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/chrts/prtng/rcpts/whtnf-eng.html) will make CiviCRM compliant with official receipting requirements in other jurisdictions like Australia.

• Note: some of this functionality has been implemented in a couple of Drupal modules that have similar functionality. They are oriented towards requirements around unique receipt numbers, using a pdf with a background image (not part of the official requirements), and being able to issue duplicate receipts with a clear indication that they are duplicates. As of June 2011, they did not sign the pdf with an encrypted key to indicate who had created it, nor support workflows where one receipt covered multiple payments (eg all of the payments during a calendar year). The estimate does not account for code re-use that may be possible when re-implementing this functionality in CiviCRM or a CiviCRM extension.

Amounts marked as contributions, which may include only part of an event ticket price (eg the amount in excess of the cost of the dinner), are tallied for each contact for the year and a single receipt issued for all donations in the year. An optional not needed by the BC NDP is to issue a receipt as each donation is received, so long as only a single receipt is issued for each eligible donation.

The information about the person making the contribution, their address, the amount of the donation, and other information must not be able to be edited after the fact. The organization administering CiviCRM will be responsible for meeting Revenue Canada obligations with regard to making backups on media that cannot be changed (e.g. CDs), and for entering appropriate fair market values for events, and complying with Revenue Canada's de minimis rules (see http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/chrts/prtng/rcpts/splt-eng.html#deminimis).

Official receipts must be issued with a unique sequential number. Re-issued receipts must include this number.

NB: Joe Murray notes January 24th that Revenue Canada requires signatures on electronically issued receipts (see http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/chrts/prtng/rcpts/cmptr-eng.html), so we will need to build in support for signing pdf's. Some pdf libraries for php support digital signatures.