Donation products let donors choose their gift amount instead of buying at a fixed price. Legacy import products are read-only placeholders Rhythm creates for invoice lines your association moved from an earlier system. You can view legacy import products and correct where their sales post, but you cannot edit the products themselves.
Donation Products
Prerequisites
- You need the miscellaneous products permission in Setup.
- To credit gifts to a fund automatically, your fundraising settings must already have that option turned on. The fund, and any campaign or appeal you use, must already exist.
Where to Find It
Go to Finance & Billing › Setup › Donation Products to see all donation products in your account. Select Create Donation Product to add one, or open a row to edit an existing product.
To offer a donation product during membership or event checkout, open the membership or event process. Turn on Override checkout settings, then turn on Prompt for donation at checkout and select the donation product you want to use.
Warning
When the donation product's business unit differs from the business unit of the product being purchased, the donation prompt has caused checkout to split the purchase into two separate card payments instead of one. Keep the donation product and the purchased product in the same business unit if you want one combined charge.
The Settings
| Setting | Options | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Unit | The business units in your account | The business unit you are working in | Sets which unit's accounts the product's financial setup uses |
| Code | Letters, digits, and the characters your account allows | The business unit's identifier and a dash, added for you | Identifies the product |
| Name | Any text | Empty; required | Sets the label donors and staff see |
| Status | Active, inactive | Active | Controls whether the product can be chosen for a new gift |
A donation product does not include price, member price, or foreign-currency price fields, because the donor chooses the amount. The Console also leaves out purchasing-eligibility rules, special prices, and the control that hides a product from the Portal. Other options from the ordinary product editor remain available, including bundled products, bulk pricing by quantity, purchase limits, entitlements, confirmation emails, coupon eligibility, related tasks, and installment plans.
A donation product's financial setup, including its revenue G/L accounts, works the same way as other products (see Product Financial Setup). The accounts you can choose from are filtered to the product's selected business unit, so changing the business unit changes the available accounts. The G/L accounts you need must already exist before you can assign them, so create any missing accounts in your chart of accounts first. If you just created a new account and do not see it yet, wait a moment and check again; a new account can take a short time to appear in a donation product's financial setup.
Warning
A Finance & Billing donation product cannot have its own direct public payment link. If you need a standalone link people can use to give without going through a purchase, use the fundraising application instead, which offers direct donation links through a separate flow.
Mapping Gifts to a Fund
| Setting | Options | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fund | Your account's funds | None; required when shown | Credits a gift through this product to the selected fund |
| Campaign | Your account's campaigns | None | Attributes the gift to the selected campaign |
| Appeal | Your account's appeals | None | Attributes the gift to the selected appeal |
This card appears only when your fundraising settings create gifts automatically from donations. Rhythm saves the donation product first, then saves the mapping as a second step and rewrites your whole fundraising settings record with the added mapping. You can also set or change the same fund, campaign, and appeal mapping from Fundraising & Gifts under Setup › Settings instead of from the donation product.
A donation added directly as an invoice line item, rather than through your fundraising gift-creation flow, does not create a fundraising gift record or appear on the donor's Gifts tab. Rhythm records it as ordinary Finance & Billing revenue instead.
Tip
A donation product used through membership or event transactions and an ordinary donation tied to the same fund come from different sources. To see both sets of records when you report on a fund's total giving, query by each source's donation product or donation identifier rather than by fund alone.
Warning
The product save and the fund-mapping save are separate steps. If the fund-mapping save fails after the product save succeeds, Rhythm saves the product without a mapping. Because the mapping save rewrites your whole fundraising settings record from a copy loaded when you opened the editor, saving a donation product can also undo a fundraising settings change someone else made at the same time. If you maintain fund mappings in more than one place, confirm the mapping after you save.
Deleting a donation product also removes its financial configuration, but it does not remove its fund mapping from your fundraising settings. If you delete and later recreate a product for the same purpose, check whether you need to reapply an old mapping.
Rules That Do Not Apply to Donation Products
Donation products do not have to follow the identifier and business-unit rules that apply to other Finance & Billing products:
- The identifier does not have to start with the business unit's identifier.
- You can change the business unit after the product is created.
- If the product bundles other products, Rhythm does not run the bundle price or SKU-tracking checks that apply to other product bundles.
Legacy Import Products
Where to Find It
Go to Finance & Billing › Setup › Legacy Products to see the products Rhythm created for invoice lines your association brought over from a previous system.
What You Can Do
The list is read-only, so you cannot create, edit, or delete a legacy import product from it. This keeps the placeholder consistent with the migrated history that names it. Each row includes one available action, Financial Setup, which lets you correct the general ledger (G/L) accounts and other financial configuration where a migrated product's sales post, without changing the product record itself.
Tip
If you regenerate open invoices that were originally migrated from your previous system, use Financial Setup on the matching legacy product to make sure its accounts are correct going forward.
Financial Setup on a legacy product uses the same financial configuration dialog as any other product. Choose the accounts, splits, and deferral settings for the configuration's business unit, then save. Rhythm lets you change a legacy product's financial configuration at any time, including after sales have already posted against it. The Console does not warn you that a change here can affect how historical reports read those older sales.
Permissions
Creating, editing, or deleting a donation product requires the miscellaneous products permission in Setup. Opening a legacy product's Financial Setup requires a separate financial-setup permission for products. Without that permission, the Financial Setup action does not appear on the row.
Validation and Errors
| Message contains | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| The name or business unit will not save empty | A required field on a donation product is missing | Fill in the field |
| The Save button on the Fund Mapping card stays disabled | No fund has been chosen | Choose a fund before saving |
| "Financial Setup" is missing from a legacy product's row menu | You do not hold the financial-setup permission for products | Ask an administrator to grant it |
| A revenue G/L account will not save on Financial Setup | The selected account does not belong to the configuration's business unit | Choose an account from the same business unit |