Donations: taking one-off gifts

Donations let your storefront take a gift instead of a sale. A donor names an amount, pays it, and you get a record of who gave what. It is a separate thing from selling: there is no cart, no shipping and no order.

Donations are off in every store until someone turns them on.

Turning donations on: two switches, not one

This trips people up, so it is worth reading before you go looking for the page.

Switch one turns the module on. Donations are a module, and like Standing Orders the module starts off in every store. Go to Settings → Modules, turn Donations on, and save.

Donations are still in limited rollout, so the sidebar link is hidden even after you switch the module on. Ask us to open it for your store. Everything else on this page works, and the AI assistant can already answer how much you have raised.

Switch two opens donations to the public. That one lives on the Donations page itself. Until you press it, your storefront cannot take a gift.

They are separate on purpose. Ticking a module in your dashboard should never quietly open a payment endpoint on your website to the internet, so the second one is a deliberate act on a page that tells you what it does.

You also need a payment provider connected. A store with no provider cannot take a donation at all, and the request is refused rather than quietly recorded.

If you would rather not click through the dashboard, the AI assistant can do the second switch for you: "Turn on donations for this store." It cannot do the first one, so turn the module on yourself.

Why my donation page shows an error

Because donations have not been opened on the Donations page, or you have no payment provider connected. Turning the module on is not enough by itself: that only reveals the page in your dashboard.

This is worth calling out because donations behave differently from every other optional feature in Brainerce. Most features hide themselves when they are not set up: a coupon box with no coupons just does not appear, and nothing breaks. Donations do the opposite. While they are switched off, every donation submitted is rejected, so a donation page that is already live will take a donor's name, email and card details and then fail on the last step.

If you asked a developer or an AI to build you a donation page, tell them to check the store's donationsEnabled setting and show nothing when it is off. That is the fix; it is a one-line check.

What the donor fills in

A donation page is one form on one page. What Brainerce supports:

• A donation amount. Preset buttons (many organisations use something like 18 / 36 / 72 / 180 / 360 / 1000) plus a free "other amount" box so a donor can type any figure.
• Their email, which is required, and their name, which is not.
• A tribute: "in honour of" or "in memory of", plus the name of the person. If a donor picks a tribute, the name is required, and the donation is refused without it.
• An anonymous checkbox. See "What anonymous actually means" below, because it is narrower than most donors assume.
• A message to your organisation.
• "Cover the processing fee", a checkbox that adds the card fee on top of the gift so you receive the full amount. Worth offering: research on donation forms puts acceptance at roughly 55-60% when the option is there.

The fee cover is charged on top of the gift and never taken out of it. A ₪180 donation with a ₪6.30 fee cover charges the card ₪186.30 and records the gift as ₪180.

What anonymous actually means

An anonymous gift hides the donor's name on your public pages: a donor wall, a thank-you screen, anything a visitor can see.

You still see who they are. The name and email are on the donation record exactly as with any other gift, because you need them for your own records and for saying thank you.

Say this on your donation form. Donors read "anonymous" as "untraceable", and if they later discover you have their name they will feel misled, even though nothing went wrong.

Donations do not appear in Orders

A donation is not an order and never shows up in the orders list, in any order report, or in your sales figures. That is deliberate: a gift is not a sale, and mixing them makes both numbers wrong.

So if you search Orders for a donation and find nothing, that is not a bug and it does not mean the donation failed. Ask the AI assistant for your donation totals, or "list donations", instead.

A donation that a donor started and never finished paying sits as pending. Pending money is not money raised, and it is left out of your totals for that reason.

Refunding a donation

You can refund a donation in full or in part, and it returns real money to the donor's card. Ask the AI assistant, or use the API.

Refunding is different from voiding: a paid donation is refunded, and a pending one (a gift that was started and never paid) is simply voided, because there is no money to send back.

What Brainerce does not do

Read this list before you promise anything to a board or a donor.

No tax receipts

Brainerce does not issue tax receipts and does not report anything to any tax authority. It records the donation: the amount, the donor, the date and the payment reference. Issuing the receipt itself stays with whatever your organisation already uses for it.

This applies everywhere, including Israel's Section 46 reporting and Canada's CRA charitable receipts. If your organisation has a receipting obligation, keep the system you use for it. Brainerce is not a replacement for it and does not connect to it.

No monthly donations from the storefront

A donor cannot set up a monthly gift themselves. The donation page takes one-off gifts only.

Repeating donations do exist, as standing orders, but you start those yourself from the dashboard for a donor who already saved a card at a previous payment. See Standing orders.

If someone builds you a donation page with a "monthly" toggle on it, the toggle does not do what it says: it produces a single one-off gift and the donor is never charged again.

Standing-order donations do show up here, though. Every time a recurring donation charges, that cycle appears in this list marked "From a standing order", and it counts toward your raised total. So the page is the full picture of what came in, however it arrived. See Standing orders.

No campaigns, funds or goal meters

You cannot split donations between funds ("building fund", "scholarships"), attach them to a named campaign, or show a "₪45,000 of ₪60,000 raised" progress bar. Every donation is simply a gift to the store.

No donor wall or public donor list

Brainerce records who gave. It does not publish that anywhere. If you want a donor wall, whoever builds your storefront builds it from the donation data.

No matching gifts, pledges, or gift-in-kind

There is no employer-matching lookup, no pledge you can record now and collect later, and no way to record a non-cash gift.