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 (Dec. 2023) 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!
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.
Automated Testing
We have automated testing! Our CiviCARROT tests the Canada Tax Receipts code. Every Merge Request on CiviCRM Gitlab triggers a Github Action that assembles a full Drupal/CiviCRM environment and runs all the phpunit and Functional Javascript tests on Canada Tax Receipts. We live on the edge - testing against CiviCRM dev-master to pick up future regressions before they are released.
