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Transferring Payments

You may need to transfer payments. You can do this by changing the payee, changing the beneficiary, or converting a payment into a donation.

Change or Correct the Payee

If you accidentally assigned the Payment to the wrong person when using the Add a Payment Tool, complete the following steps.
  1. Go to Products & Payments > Payments, and open the payment record.
  2. Click Edit Record.
  3. Change the Contact to the correct Payee.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Use the jump link to jump to the Payment Detail record(s).
  6. Make any edits, if needed.
  7. Use the jump link to jump to the Invoice Detail record(s).
  8. Make any edits, if needed.
  9. Use the jump link to jump to the Invoice record.
  10. Make any edits, if needed.

Change or Correct the Beneficiary

The following steps only work if the person receiving the "gift" already has an Invoice and has already paid a Deposit.

Occasionally a scenario comes up where one person pays a deposit for an event then decides to cancel, but they want their deposit applied to another person.
Note: Separate action is needed to set the Event Participant record of the person who is no longer attending to canceled and to modify their invoice to reflect that future payment is not expected.
  1. Go to Products & Payments > Payments, and open the payment record of the person no longer attending.
  2. Click to open a Payment Detail record that you want to "transfer" to some other person's Invoice.
  3. Click Edit Record on that Payment Detail.
  4. Click the [...] (ellipsis) button next to the Invoice Detail.
  5. Select the Invoice Detail record of the person who benefits from the gift.
  6. Click OK to set this Invoice Detail.
  7. Click Save.
Note: This change may need to be followed up with a journal entry in your accounting system if the payment originally credited a different income account then the one used by the event.

Convert a Payment into a Donation

A registrant may request that their payment for a canceled event be kept by the church as a donation. This is possible and requires multiple steps. Basically, you'll issue a refund in MinistryPlatform (not actually refunding money, but treating the records as though you are), and then add the donations through the Batch Manager Tool (BMT).

Update the Invoice and Invoice Detail record

This ensures that the registrant won't get confused if they look at the My Giving widget, so it won't look like they owe what they requested become a donation.

Update the related Invoice record:

  • Invoice Total to 0.00
  • Invoice Status to Cancelled

Update the related Invoice Detail record(s):

  • Line Total to 0.00

Reverse the Payment

You can reverse the payment in MinistryPlatform. We recommend using the Copy/Reverse Payment Tool.
  1. Go to Products & Payments > Payments.
  2. Open the payment or select payments to reverse.
  3. From the Tools menu, select Copy/Reverse Payment.
  4. Review the summary information to be sure you have the correct payments selected.
  5. Set the date. It defaults to the current date, but you can click the calendar icon to change it.
  6. Select to reverse the payment amounts.
  7. Enter a name for the batch. It defaults to "[Date] Reversal", but you can change it if needed.
  8. Select whether to mark the payment records as "Processed".
  9. Click Copy Payments.
  10. Close the tool.

You've copied the payment(s) and, if selected, created a reversing entry for each payment. If selected, the payment records are marked as "Processed" in the Platform.

You can then export the Payment if you are also going to export the donation for the GL records. If you are going to do a manual journal entry, then mark the payment exported.

It may be helpful to also add a Note to those payments indicating they've been moved over to donations.

Add the Donation with the BMT

Transfer a donation using the Batch Manager Tool.

Note: If you did not export both the refunded payment and new donation to your general ledger you will need to add a manual journal entry to address these. Also, if you have separate processing accounts for Donations and Payments, it is likely that the payment records cannot be "moved" so the transfer should be noted/tracked as needed internally for reconciliation purposes.
  1. In the BMT, with appropriate rights, start a new batch.
  2. Click New to create a new donation.
  3. Add the donor name, amount, and appropriate distribution information.
  4. Use the Payment Type of the original donation. Add a note saying this donation was transferred from a payment.
  5. Finalize the Batch.
  6. Put the Batch in its own deposit.
  7. Export if you exported the deducted payment, otherwise edit the deposit and mark it exported and make sure you adjust the GL appropriately with a manual entry.

When all these steps are complete, you have created a new Donation/Distribution and credited a negative Payment/Payment Detail record.