Through the Recurring section of your CRM, you can view and manage your recurring payments. This article explains how to work with them in your account. Here, we'll cover the following topics:
Types of recurring payments and payment methods
Types of recurring payments
We support 4 types of recurring payments:
Recurring monthly payments
Recurring yearly payments
Payments in Smart Installments
Payments in regular installments (Israel only)
We accept recurring donations both by credit card and Paypal.
What is the difference between the four types of recurring payments?
Recurring yearly payments will repeat every year on the same day. So a donation made on August 1st, 2021 will repeat on August 1st, 2022.
Recurring monthly payments will repeat every month on the same day of the month. So a donation made on August 1st, 2021 will repeat on September 1st, October 1st, and so on.
If your recurring payment falls on the 31st, then on months without a 31st day we'll make the charge on the 30th of the month, and then revert to the 31st on the following month. So a payment made on March 31st will next be billed on April 30, and then the following month on May 31st.
When a donor pays in Smart Installments, their payment is divided into recurring monthly donations. So if on January 1st a donor chooses to donate $10,000 in 10 smart installments, in practice he's making a recurring donation of $1,000 for 10 months.
When a donor pays in regular installments (Israel only), they are billed and receipted for the full amount on the date that the payment is made, and the payment is then paid out to you monthly over the number of installments selected. For example, if on January 1st a donor donate ₪10,000 in 10 regular installments, she'll receive a receipt for ₪10,000 dated January 1st, but the funds will only be paid out to you proportionally over 10 months (₪1,000 each month).
Note that in the All Donations section of the CRM you'll see only one transaction, but by clicking the following button in the Recurring section you can see the amount and dates when you'll be paid out the individual installments:
Searching and filtering your recurring payments
There are a number of filters that you can use to view and manage your recurring payments:
Search your payments by donor name, or email address
Filter by the status of the payment (running, stopped)
Filter by payment method (credit card, Paypal, etc.)
FIlter by payment currency, or donor country
Filter by campaign
Filter by the date of the last payment
Filter by payment type (recurring monthly, smart installments, et
Viewing and managing your recurring payments
You'll see a number of columns of information for each recurring payment:
The type of recurring payment. If it's a payment in installments, you can see the number of installments that have been processed, and how many left to go.
Its status (whether running or stopped)
The sum of the recurring payment, and the total that you've received from this recurring payment to date
The name of the donor. If you click on the name, you'll be taken into the donor's CRM record, where you can view their entire giving history.
The name of the campaign that the payment was made on (if any).
The start date of the recurring payment, and the date when the last payment was made
The expiry date of the credit card (if the payment was made by credit card)
If the recurring payment failed, the reason why it failed, and the date on which it failed.
The date of the next charge that we'll make for this payment.
Making changes to your recurring payment
You'll then see a number of actions that you can take for each recurring payment:
 | By clicking this icon, you'll be able to immediately charge the recurring payment. So if a recurring monthly payment was started on January 1st, it will next run on February 1st. But let's say that today is January 20th, and you decide that you want to process this recurring payment early - clicking this button will allow you to do so. Note that the recurring payment will then repeat every month on the date that chose to you run it - in this example, on the 20th of every month. |
 | By clicking this icon, you can stop a recurring payment. |
 | By clicking this icon, you can re-start a stopped recurring payment. |
 | By clicking this icon, you can change two things:
|
 | By clicking this icon, you can view all payments that were made for this recurring payment (sum and date). |
Automatically replace expired or cancelled credit cards
Recurring donations can stop for many reasons, but the most common is that the card has expired, or was lost and replaced with a new card. To prevent this from impacting your recurring payments, we have a system called Infinity Donations, where we automatically update your donor's payment method with the new replacement card, without either you or the donor needing to do anything.
Failed attempts to process a recurring payment
If a recurring payment still fails, we'll try to process it an additional 2 times (so if we process a payment on February 1st, we'll try again on the 2nd and the 3rd).
If the recurring payment is successful on one of the additional tries, we'll process the recurring payment on that new date every month (ex. on the 3rd of the month).
For Israeli Shekels, if we receive an error message indicating that the card might not have enough funds to cover the payment (error number 3 or 4), we'll run the recurring payment once again on the 21st of the month.
Creating a recurring-first donation page
When creating a MYSITE donation form, you can add different frequencies to your donation form. If you select "monthly", then donors will be able to make recurring monthly donations on your donation form.
To load the donation form with the "monthly" frequency open by default, just add freq=2 to the URL of your donation form. So if your donation form's URL is usually
https://secureddonation.com/en/pay/leket2
just change it to:
https://secureddonation.com/en/pay/leket2?freq=2
To learn more about adding parameters to your donation form, click here.
Monthly suggested donation sums
You are able to select suggested donation sums specific for monthly donations. So while you can select larger sums like 100, 200, 500, 1000, and 5000 as suggested sums for your one-time donations, you can select smaller sums like 20, 50, 75, 100, and 200 as your suggested monthly sums.
Note that if you don't select suggested donation sums, we'll just use our platform's default sums.
Note as well that SmartSums, our AI algorithm that creates suggested donation sums based on your donor's donation history, will create custom monthly sums for your donor as well.
Creating a campaigns for collecting recurring payments
We have two ways of creating campaigns aimed at collecting recurring payments. Click here to learn more.
Receipting recurring payments
When a donor makes their first donation, we'll send them a customizable email confirmation, and a PDF tax-receipt in your organization's name. Then, every time the donation recurs, we will create a new receipt but not email it to the donor.
We do this for strategic reasons - we don't believe that it's good fundraising to "remind" your donor every month that they're still donating - it's best just to let the donation become part of their monthly routine.
The donor at any time (or come tax-time) can access all of their receipts through their account. Similarly, copies of receipts always appear in your account, so you can at any time export the donor's receipts for any set period and email them the ZIP file.
However, if you prefer that donors receive their receipts by email on a monthly basis, just let us know and we can configure this for you.
Limiting the number of recurring monthly donations (new!)
If you like, you can allow your donors to limit the number of months that their recurring donation will run for. While this may encourage them to do so when they might not have, you always have the ability, at the end of their giving cycle, to encourage them to continue their monthly donation for an additional period.
Add this feature through the last step of the MYSITE wizard of your donation form
If at a later time you want to extend or change the number of months that a recurring monthly donation will run for, you can do by clicking the pencil icon in the recurring donations page of your CRM:
You'll then see this popup, where you can alter the number of monthly payments:
Tracking Installment Payments
By clicking button you can export an Excel list of all of the upcoming payments of the donations that you received in regular installments. You'll see columns with:
The donor's name
The donation ID
The original transaction date
The "full sum" (the sum total of the installments)
The installment number (ex. 5 out of 12)
The sum of each payment to be paid
When the first charge was made
When this individual installment was paid out
Whether or not the donation in installments was abruptly stopped by the donor.