Paritek Software Archive 15

Printing Income Tax Receipts

The whole reason you record weekly donations is so that you can issue an official income tax receipt for your contributors. Those people that actually pick up their receipt can then use it to reduce the amount of income tax they pay in April. Once you are certain that all donations from a given year are recorded, you can issue receipts for everyone at once.

Preparing the Receipts
Before you can print a receipt, it must be "prepared". Preparing a receipt marks the donation record as complete for the year which means that no further donations can be recorded for the specified contributor. You can prepare a single receipt during the current year or multiple receipts for the previous year. Preparing receipts is done through the same module as printing receipts (Reports > Donations > Income Tax Receipts).

You must start by selecting a sort order and a year to print. Once you have entered these two fields, you will be able to select which receipt or receipts you wish to prepare. To print a single receipt, enter the sort name or envelope number for the contributor in both fields. The program will not allow you to prepare the receipt if it cannot find the name or number you specify.

If you are getting ready to print receipts for everyone that contributed in the prior year, leave the "from name" and "to name" as the values that were filled in by the program. Because the receipts will be printed in the same order that they are prepared, you will need to decide which order you want to print before you prepare the receipts.

When you are ready to prepare the receipts, click on the Prepare button. Once you confirm that you want to start preparing the receipts, the program will proceed. When it has completed preparing the receipts, you will be able to print official income tax receipts.

Receipt Options
Like other reports in Paritek, you preview the income tax receipts on your monitor before you send them to the printer. If you have prepared the receipts, the options you chose will be locked until the batch of receipts are "finished". However, you may change the format of the receipts and generate them as many times as you want between "preparing" them and "finishing" them. It is very important that you do not "finish" the receipts until you have printed them the way you want.

If you preview your receipts and need to change how they look, close the preview window, return to the receipts report and click on the Options button. From this window, you will be able change information relating to the receipts. You can also change these options by going through Edit > System Setup > System Defaults and clicking on the Receipts tab.

Field	Usage
Business Number	This is your government-assigned business number which allows the receipts you issue to be used for income tax purposes. It is extremely important that this number be entered and correct.
Signing Authority	This is the name that will be printed beneath the signature line or graphic. Obviously, this person should be authorized to sign the receipts on behalf of your church. While this field is not required, it makes sense to identify the person whose signature is on the receipts.
Signature Graphic	Paritek has the ability to print a signature directly on each receipt. Because the graphic file must be a specific size and format, you will need to contact me for information on how to create such a file (or allow me to create the file at no cost to you).
If donations exceed...	You are able to enter one or two "thank you" messages based on the amount of money received from each contributor. For example, you could say "Thanks" if the donations were more than $100 and "Special Thanks" for donations exceeding $1,000. If the lower value is greater than zero, anyone who donated less than that amount will not be thanked at all. In the above example, people who contributed less than $100 would not receive the "thanks" line.
Print copy of tax receipt for church	No matter which options you choose here, a receipt will be issued for the contributor. However, you can choose to print a second copy of the receipt for your own church records. This second copy will not be an "official" receipt, but will look similar to the receipt issued to the contributor.
Print copy of tax receipt for family	You may wish to issue a second receipt for each contributor. This allows them to send one copy to the government and keep a copy for their records. Check this box to issue that second receipt. Because receipts are printed three on a page, you can generate one full page for each contributor by checking both "copy" boxes.
Print detailed tax receipts	The detailed receipt will print a standard receipt on the top third of the page and a weekly breakdown of contributions underneath. You cannot print a detailed receipt and copies of the receipts (you must choose one or the other).
Print cut lines on receipts	If you are using perforated receipt paper, you will not need (or want) cut lines to be printed. However, if you need to cut the receipts by hand, you will want the cut lines printed so you know where to aim your paper cutter. Some parishes get their receipts cut at a commercial print shop. In this case, you may want to print a page of test receipts with cut lines and the rest without. That way, if the printing or cutting is a bit off, no one will notice.
Receipt Font	You are able to print receipts in any font you choose. Be careful, though, as information could be lost if you use an exceptionally wide font. Only the font name is used; you cannot specify a font size or colour.
Last receipt in...	Each year, the program starts counting receipts over at 0001. If you need to set this number to a higher value, you may use these fields to do so. Use caution as you cannot change this value back once you have saved your changes.

Once you have set the options the way you want, you can preview the receipts. Remember that you can select which pages you want to print before printing. For example, let's say that receipts 0031 to 0033 were printed on a page that went into the printer crooked. You would generate all the receipts a second time, find which page number receipts 0031 to 0033 were on and print only that one page.

If you need an exact duplicate copy of the receipts (complete with registration number and signature), you can print the entire report a second time. This is required if you are issuing receipts for contributors from Quebec. When all the receipts have been printed (and checked), you can proceed with the next step.

Finishing the Receipts
The final step in printing receipts is "finishing" them. This step tells the program that the receipts were printed properly and can now be printed using the duplicate receipts option. This step also allows you to print more (different) receipts.

Return to the receipt report (Reports > Donations > Income Tax Receipts) and click on the Finish button. After asking you to confirm that you want to proceed, the program will work its way through the receipts until it is complete.

Once you have completed this step, you should print the summary per contributor report (Reports > Donations > Summary per Contributor). Check this list to ensure that each contributor has a receipt number and a "Yes" in the Printed column. Contributions without a receipt will need to be prepared, printed and finished. Contributions without the "Yes" have been prepared but not finished.

Because this report shows about fifty contributors per page, it will be much shorter than a second copy of the actual income tax receipts. You may want to keep this report as a permanent record of what receipts were issued. Simply hole-punch the pages and file them in a binder each year.

Duplicate Receipts
Undoubtedly, you will have contributors who lose their receipt before they have a chance to send it to the government. If they request a copy of their receipt, you can print a duplicate income tax receipt (Reports > Donations > Duplicate Receipts).

Once again, you can issue the receipt by name or envelope number. By setting the range of receipts to print, you can preview a single receipt or the entire batch of receipts. If you want to print a single receipt from the entire batch, you can select which page(s) to print. These receipts will look just like the original receipt, except that they will be labelled as a "Duplicate Receipt" and have the exact receipt number which was printed on the original.

If you need to adjust the dollar value of an income tax receipt, you can do this with the Edit > Donations > Adjust receipt module. For example, if Mr. Jones has cancelled cheques in the amount of $250 and you issued a receipt for $200, you could adjust his receipt by $50. To ensure that the contributor does not submit both receipts, you should request that the original receipt be returned before issuing the adjusted receipt (you may want to keep this receipt for your records with a note as to why it was adjusted).

In the Adjust receipt module, you need to find the appropriate receipt and click on the Adjust button. This will give you the option to add an amount to the receipt. If you need to reduce the amount of the receipt, you would enter a negative amount. The program will display the adjusted total of the receipt. You can then print this receipt using the Duplicate Receipts module. The receipt will be labelled as an "Adjusted Receipt".

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