Canada Tax Receipts - 10-year Anniversary and Giving Tuesday

Published
2023-11-28 10:21
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If you want to know what we're giving away - read this post all the way!

Hearts and Tulips

Canada Tax Receipts Extension - New Release

Just in time for Giving Tuesday, we have issued a new release 1.9.0 for Canada Tax Receipts Extension (formerly known as CDN Tax Receipts). We're rebranding!

This extension allows users to issue Canadian Tax Receipts including single or annual/aggregate tax receipts, with distribution by email or print, detailed reporting, press ready PDF template possible.

Some highlights for this release:

  • Prevent problems when changing the name of the inkind financial type.
  • Speed improvement when contributions are already known to be ineligible.
  • Some translation improvements.
  • Misc administrivia (php notices etc).

https://civicrm.org/extensions/cdn-tax-receipts
Current number of non-profit organizations using it: 1,067 🥳

Our Story

In 2011 we had just migrated one of our now long term CiviCRM clients from a desktop application called Income Manager to CiviCRM. Only to discover that their semi-retired administrator operating out of a basement office in rural Ontario was exporting Contributions from CiviCRM and then importing them into Income Manager in order to issue Charitable Canadian Tax Receipts! Thankfully, the Chair of their Org was (is!) happily married to a BDO Partner CPA, CA, CFP, TEP with direct phone numbers for CRA contacts and lived in my timezone. So we worked with him to get the requirements sorted and issued a first release of CDN Tax Receipts as a Drupal module back in 2011.

You do what Lobo tells you to do

I demo-ed the then Drupal module issuing live CiviCRM TaxReceipts at CiviCON 2012 in Berkeley, complete with a fake Lobo's signature. Lobo saw my presentation and told me to make that into a CiviCRM Extension right away! And back then -> you did what Lobo told you to do! We started to work on that - added way more features and functionality in the process collaborating with most notably Peaceworks and Freeform Solution and the Extension was available for download in March 2014.

Shoutouts - for our 10y anniversary

Special shoutouts to Jake (now a Salesforce consultant - oh Jake...), Lola (FreeForm Solutions), Alan (Blackfly Solutions), Samuel (Coop SymbioTIC) and others who have contributed over the years. 

Ongoing work, maintenance and test infrastructure for the Canada Tax Receipts Extension is funded by Semper IT with DaveD and KarinG as primary developers.

Funding orgs

So many organizations have funded Canada Tax Receipts code over the past 10 years.  I'd like to thank La Leche League Canada specifically to help fund our time on the initial work in 2011. I'd also like to thank BC New Democratic party for giving me a phone call in 2013 and asking me about our CDN TaxReceipts code back in 2013 and funding major improvements like Annual receipting, PDF layouts, Track email opening, more reporting, among other bits and pieces. And more orgs over the years contributed to features like Aggregate receipting, automated receipting, and more! La Leche League Canada and BC New Democratic are some of our long time Semper IT CiviCRM clients that we still interact with almost daily and I can't believe it has been >10years!

Tax Receipt

Not just for Canada

Canada Tax Receipts code for Charitable Tax Receipts is used in other countries as well. It features hooks to override what gets printed on a receipt. It has good math (down to non-deductible amount on line item level), extended reporting and lots of features, like a PDF template letterhead feature.

Developers

If you've forked our Canada Tax Receipts to meet e.g. specific requirements in France (I'm talking to you Usha 😊) MRs are welcome! Because we have automated testing! CiviCARROT tests the Gitlab code. Every MR on CiviCRM Gitlab triggers a Gitub Action that assembles a full Drupal/CiviCRM environment and runs all the phpunit and Functional Javascript tests on Canada Tax Receipts - or any Extension of your choice. We live on the edge - testing against CiviCRM dev-master to pick up future regressions before they are released.

Ask if CiviCARROT is right for you

If you maintain a CiviCRM extension on https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions CiviCARROT (Civi CiviCRM Automated Runner Running Otomated Tests) is for you! This will give you a quick way to enable both front and backend automated testing against your extension on every single Merge Request and/or periodic scheduled testing. CiviCRM developers can use our infrastructure FREE (as long as Github does not start charging me that is.). We'll even help get you started.

https://civicrm.io/civicarrot-registration

CiviCamp Montreal

I also want to give a shout out to: https://civicrm.org/events/civicamp/montreal-2024 - Conferences take a lot of work to organize and I'd like to thank the team from SymbioTIC Coop (Mathieu and Myriam) and from CiviDesk (Virginie) for taking on the work to organize a CiviCamp in Canada again. I've got my tickets - do you?

Giving Tuesday

If you're a Canadian non profit organization and you're using our Canada Tax Receipts (CDN Tax Receipts) Extension - we're giving away 10 Peace Love Canada stickers (must be in Canada, for me to get the free shipping).

1. Ping me @karing at Mattermost and or email me frontdesk@semper-it.com

2. And tell me which PLC sticker you'd like https://peacelovecanada.ca/collections/official-plc-stickers

PS - Terms and conditions apply - like including but not limited to only 1 sticker per non profit organization.

Peace Love Canada