Whether your organisation receives donations, membership fees, event income or all three, money in CiviPlus is recorded and reported through a small set of shared concepts. This page introduces them, and points you to the right guides for setting finance up and for working with it day to day.
Why finance in CiviPlus?
CiviPlus provides powerful features for codifying and reporting financial information. Whilst not essential for using CiviPlus, configuring CiviPlus for accurate financial reporting can provide a wealth of benefits including:
Data Reporting
With clear financial configurations, you can generate detailed and accurate reports on donations, membership income, event revenue, and other financial activities split by various types and categories. These reports provide actionable insights for stakeholders and aid in decision-making.Finance System Integration and Reconciliation
CiviPlus also allows you to extract financial data which will import to accounting systems like Xero, Sage or QuickBooks. It also streamlines reconciliation processes by ensuring transactions in your CRM align with your organisation’s financial records.
By configuring your finance settings correctly, you lay the foundation for accurate reporting, seamless integration with accounting systems, and efficient reconciliation processes, enabling your organisation to operate with greater transparency, accountability, and operational efficiency.
Contributions: how CiviPlus records money in
Every payment your organisation receives is recorded as a contribution — a donation, a membership fee, an event fee, a grant instalment. One contribution is one incoming transaction, and it holds everything about that money: who it came from, what it was for, and how it was paid.
Whenever you see “contribution” in CiviPlus, read it as “a record of money in”.
Two details are worth knowing from day one:
Line items. Each contribution is made up of one or more line items — the individual things the money is for. Every line item carries a financial type, and the financial type is what drives your reporting and your accounting (see the table below).
Payments are separate records. The contribution describes what the money is for; the payment records the money actually arriving. For donations the two usually happen together — an online gift arrives as a contribution with its payment already recorded.
A contribution’s status tells you where it stands: Completed means the money has been received in full; Pending means it has not — most often an online payment that was never finished or, for organisations that bill, an amount that has been requested but not yet paid.
For organisations that bill: contributions as invoices
If your organisation asks for money before it arrives — membership fees, subscriptions, event bookings — the contribution doubles as your invoice: you create it first as the amount owed, send it to the contact, and record the payment when it comes in. CiviPlus can produce a PDF invoice from any contribution, track the outstanding balance, and handle credit notes and refunds. Invoicing in CiviPlus is the place to start.
If your organisation mainly receives donations, you can ignore invoicing entirely — your contributions record each gift as it arrives, and everything else on this page works exactly the same.
Financial types, accounts and payment methods
Three configuration concepts turn contributions into accounting-ready data. They are set up once for your organisation — normally as part of configuring CiviPlus Finance — and everything above sits on top of them:
Item | Description |
Financial Types | At the most basic level, you can use Financial Types to categorise transactions based on their purpose (e.g., donations, event fees, or membership dues). These types serve as the foundation for accurate reporting and integration with financial systems.
Whilst you can simply use financial types as a field to categorise income via contributions, you can also link financial types to financial accounts (see below). This is where the magic of CiviCRM financial power starts to happen! |
Financial Accounts | CiviPlus creates journal entries for all transactions. You can configure these CRM transactions to specific Financial Accounts matching your Accounting systems general ledger (or chart of accounts) in order to maintain consistent records between systems and enable seamless reconciliation. |
Payment Methods | Payment methods are CiviCRM's equivalent to "bank accounts". For each payment method you can record income into a relevant bank financial account. |
Where to go next
Setting up finance — one-off configuration, usually done by an administrator:
How to configure CiviPlus Finance — the full setup walkthrough: financial types and accounts, VAT, payment methods and invoice settings.
Companies and Multiple Company Accounting — if you run more than one legal entity.
Stripe payment processor — take card payments online.
GoCardless Direct Debit — collect payments by Direct Debit.
Working with contributions day to day:
Invoicing in CiviPlus — create a contribution and send it as an invoice (for organisations that bill).
How to create and allocate credit in CiviPlus — credit notes: reduce or cancel what someone owes.
How to issue a refund in CiviPlus — return money without breaking your records.
Creating a Sage 50 Export file — batch and export transactions for your accounts system.