Skip to main content
Haven sends a receipt email for every donation — one-time and each cycle of a recurring subscription. Member donors can download a print-ready PDF version on demand from their portal. Org admins customize the receipt template once; the system handles formatting, merge-tag substitution, sequential numbering, and idempotent send-once delivery.

​
What a donor gets, when

Donation typeEmail receiptPDF download
One-time, donor is a Haven member✅ Immediately after payment✅ Anytime from /member/donations
One-time, donor is not a member✅ Immediately after payment❌ (Stripe also sends a Stripe-branded receipt)
Recurring, each cycle✅ Immediately after each charge✅ Per-cycle PDFs from member portal
The email comes from your organization’s branded sender (configured under Settings → Emails). It includes the donor’s name, the amount, the designation, the date, the deductible amount, the receipt number, and your organization’s name and address.
A donation that completes a Stripe Checkout session generates exactly one Haven receipt — even if Stripe re-delivers the webhook. The send is keyed to payment_records.receipt_sent_at, which is set to the timestamp of the first successful Resend delivery.

​
Customize the receipt template

From the Donations → Form tab, scroll to Receipt email:
  • Subject line — defaults to “Thank you for your donation”. Personalize freely.
  • Body — supports merge tags listed below. Leave blank to use Haven’s IRS Pub 1771-compliant default template, which covers the required elements (org name + address, date, amount, deductible portion, statement that no goods/services were provided beyond what’s described).

​
Merge tags

The body text can include any of these placeholders. Each renders as the donor’s actual data when the receipt is generated:
TagWhat it renders
{{donor_name}}Donor’s name (their member name if they’re a member; otherwise the name they entered on the form)
{{amount}}Total donation amount, formatted as $50.00
{{designation}}Name of the fund the donor selected (or “the General Fund” when no designation)
{{date}}Donation date, formatted as April 25, 2026
{{deductible_amount}}Tax-deductible portion (= amount unless you’ve recorded fair-market-value goods provided in exchange)
{{premium_description}}Auto-rendered explanation when FMV > 0 (otherwise empty)
{{receipt_number}}Sequential per-org receipt number
{{org_name}}Your organization’s name
{{org_address}}Your organization’s address (multi-line, joined with line breaks)
{{tax_id}}Currently empty — EIN field on organizations is on the roadmap
Tags that don’t match a known field render as empty string, so a typo in your template won’t surface as raw {{unknown_tag}} in donor emails.
The default template is designed to satisfy IRS Publication 1771 minimums for US 501(c)(3) organizations. If you customize the body, keep the deductible amount language and the no-goods-provided statement intact. We’re not your tax attorney — verify with one before launching.

​
Receipt numbering

Every donation gets a sequential per-org receipt number, starting at 1 for your organization’s first donation and incrementing by 1 thereafter. Numbers are unique within your organization and never re-used, which gives you a clean audit trail. The numbering is enforced by a unique database index. Under heavy concurrent load (Giving Tuesday, year-end campaigns), if two donations race for the same number, one of them retries with the next number. The donor never sees the retry — the receipt that arrives in their inbox always has a unique number.
Receipt numbers are per-organization, not per-designation. A donation to your Scholarship Fund and a donation to your Building Campaign in the same minute will have consecutive numbers (e.g. #847 and #848), not separate fund-specific sequences.

​
On-demand PDF download

When a member donor visits /member/donations, the donation history table includes a PDF button per row. Clicking it opens the receipt as a print-ready PDF in a new tab. The PDF is generated on demand each time, so it always reflects the current state of the donation record (including any admin edits to the org’s address or template). Receipts are never cached or pre-rendered. The PDF layout includes:
  • Your organization’s name + address + contact info as the header (your branding accent color is the underline)
  • A meta grid showing receipt number / date / amount
  • The same merge-tag-substituted body as the email
PDFs are letter-sized with 0.75-inch margins, suitable for printing or attaching to a tax filing.

​
Annual consolidated receipts (planned)

The Send consolidated annual receipts toggle in the Form tab reserves the schema for this feature, but the year-end cron job that generates a single donor-by-donor summary delivered in early January isn’t shipped yet. For now, donors who want a year-end summary can download each donation’s PDF individually from their portal.

​
What admins see

Under Donations → Donations, each row in the table shows the receipt number assigned to that donation. Clicking a row opens a drilldown sheet with the full payment record — useful when responding to “I never got my receipt” donor questions:
  • Check receipt_sent_at (visible as the “Receipt sent” timestamp in the drilldown). If it’s set, Haven did send the email — the donor’s inbox or spam filter is probably the culprit.
  • Resending an individual receipt is on the roadmap (the server already supports it; the button isn’t wired into the drilldown yet).
Refunds processed in the Stripe dashboard automatically update the corresponding payment_records row to status='refunded' via the webhook. The receipt email already sent isn’t recalled — for accounting purposes you’d issue a refund acknowledgment from your own records.