Knowledge Base

Enabling EFT payments

Enable EFT payments on your platform to provide another option for entrants to donate.

What is it?

Unlike regular paid for donations, when donating via EFT, the donation will be marked as a Pledge (unpaid donation) until proof of payment has been made.

What are the benefits of using it?

Offer an alternative method for supporters to make a donation.

What are EFT payments?

EFT stands for Electronic Funds Transfer. In the context of Funraisin, it's making a donation by transferring funds from the donor's bank account to the charity's bank account.

This article will show you how to enable EFT payments as well as how they work differently to all other payment methods.

To enable EFT payments, you'll need to pop a support ticket in for the team to enable.

How it works

A donor will make a donation as usual, but on the payment step they can choose the EFT option and add a reference and confirm. The reference can be the details they're going to use when making the direct bank transfer.

The donation will create a donation record, but it will be marked as a Pledge, so will not appear on any fundraising pages or against totals until it is marked as Paid by an admin.

The initial confirmation email that gets sent to the donor will not use the standard thank you email with the tax receipt attached, but will instead use a separate automated email.

Platform Setup > Automated Emails > Receipt to Sponsor (EFT only) - ID58. 

This email will need to be enabled, and commonly includes steps for the donor to make the successful transfer such as bank details. 

Once the donation has been received by the charity, you will need to mark the donation as Paid. This can be done by:

Editing the donation > Payment Details > Scrolling down and ticking Process this donation and mark as paid > Save.

Once marked as paid, a tax receipt will be generated and the donation will appear within running totals / on a fundraisers page. If you'd like to send a tax receipt to the donor, this can be done within the donation record by ticking the box Yes, resend tax receipt and then Save. 

Enabling

Once enabled at the platform level EFT will appear as a payment option on all fundraisers pages. 

To add EFT as an option to a donation page, this needs to be enabled at page level by editing the donation page:

Donation Settings > Payment Settings > Payment Methods > Tick the box that says Enable EFT Donations > Save > Publish.

Currently paying via EFT is supported only for offline donations (donations entered by the Fundraiser from within their login area), sponsored donations (donations made to a Fundraiser), and specific donation pages.  They are not supported for any payments made during a registration flow.

You can add optional instructional copy on the payment step if required, such as how to make payment and/or guidance for the donors reference. This can be edited in:

Platform Setup > Payment Settings > Scroll to the bottom of the page

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The above copy would look like the below on the payment step.

Click to expand

Using with Offline Donations

Offline donations are donations that have been added by a Fundraiser from within their logged in dashboard. You can enable/disable the ability for them to be added as well as enforce whether or not they need to be paid for or not at the time they are added.

To enable EFT as a payment method simply go to:

Platform Setup > Fundraiser Options > Login Area Options > scroll down to the My Donations section.

Here you can enable/disable the ability for a Fundraiser to add offline donations, and you can also enable EFT as a payment method. 

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Reporting

EFT donations will create a donation record that can be pulled into your Donations reports. Their payment method will be EFT.

As they have not made a transaction through the platform, they will not appear in the Transactions reports.

If you’d like further help please pop in a support ticket from your Funraisin admin and our team will assist you.