Importing a Donation Platform Batch

Donation platforms love to batch. Twenty people give at your gala, and the platform drops one payout into your bank a few days later. If you record that as a single line, you lose the donor-by-donor detail you need for giving statements, fund tracking, and your year-end numbers.

Aggregator Batch Import reads the platform's own export file and creates one recorded donation per gift, with the card-processing fee split out per donation and any platform fee recorded separately. You get the detail back, and the whole batch lines up against the real bank deposit when it lands.

These two tools look similar but solve different problems. A quick way to choose:

• Use Aggregator Batch Import when you have an export straight from a donation platform in that platform's own layout. It knows the format already — there's no column mapping to do.
• Use Spreadsheet Import when you have your own CSV or Excel file (history from QuickBooks, a hand-built spreadsheet) and you want to map the columns yourself.

If you're not importing a platform's native export, Spreadsheet Import is almost always the one you want.

A few things have to be in place:

• Your plan and role. Batch import is a Standard-plan feature, and you'll need an admin-level (accountant) role to use it. You may still see it in the sidebar without those — opening it just shows an upgrade or permission prompt instead of the import page.
• The platform connection has to be set up once. Before your first import, NP Ledger needs to know where these gifts go — which fund (a fund is a separate bucket of money within your organization, each tracked on its own) and which accounts the platform's fees are recorded in. Today that one-time setup is done for you behind the scenes.
• Right now, GiveSmart Events (auctions), GiveSmart Fundraise, and PayPal Giving Fund exports are fully supported. More platforms are on the way. If you pick a platform that isn't ready yet, the page will tell you plainly rather than fail halfway.

Step 1: Open Aggregator Batch Import

In the sidebar, under Transactions, open the Tools group and click Aggregator Batch Import. You'll land on the upload page, with a Recent batches list of anything you've imported before.

Step 2: Get your export from the platform

• GiveSmart Fundraise: go to Reports > Disbursements > Batch Export and download the file.
• GiveSmart Events / auctions: go to Reports > Other > Custom Report > Format a custom report and export it. Include at least the donor's email, first and last name, amount paid, date, item name, and event name — those are the fields NP Ledger needs to book each gift. Extra columns are fine.
• PayPal Giving Fund (Facebook / Meta fundraisers): sign in to the PayPal Giving Fund charity portal, open Reports, and download the donor report (a 90-day donor list). Include the donation date, amount, donor name, donor email, and the fundraiser name if the report lets you pick columns. The exact column labels have shifted over the years and between report types — NP Ledger recognizes the common ones automatically, so you don't need to rename anything.

Leave the file exactly as the platform produced it — don't rename columns or rearrange them. NP Ledger expects the platform's own layout.

Step 3: Pick the aggregator

Choose the platform your file came from in the Aggregator dropdown. Each option shows the default fund those gifts will go to, so you can confirm you've got the right one.

Step 4: Add your file and upload

1. Drag your export onto the upload area, or click to browse for it. Accepted formats are .csv and .xlsx, up to 5 MB.
2. Click Upload & parse.

NP Ledger reads the file and takes you straight to the result page for that batch.

The result page leads with four counts:

• Total rows: every donation and fee line NP Ledger read from your file. Platform fees are counted as their own rows, so this can be a little higher than the number of gifts.
• Created: gifts (and fee entries) that became records in your books.
• Skipped (duplicate): rows NP Ledger didn't record again because it had already brought them in from an earlier import. This is the safety net — see below.
• Failed: rows that couldn't be recorded, with a reason for each.

Below the counts you'll see the file name, who uploaded it and when, and — if anything failed — a Failed rows table.

When someone buys an item at a silent auction or gala, only part of what they paid is a tax-deductible gift — the rest is what they got in return. The deductible portion is the amount paid minus the item's fair-market value (FMV) (this is IRC §6115, the quid-pro-quo rule). A pure cash gift ("Monetary Donation" in the export) is fully deductible and books straight through; an item purchase needs its FMV before NP Ledger can record it correctly.

So when a GiveSmart Events batch includes item purchases NP Ledger doesn't yet have a value for, those rows are held back rather than booked as fully deductible — and the result page shows a short grid to fill in:

1. Enter the FMV for each item in the grid. Two shortcuts sit above it: FMV = $0 (the whole purchase was a gift — the item had no real value) and FMV = amount paid (a straight purchase with no deductible gift at all).
2. Click Save FMVs & book items. NP Ledger records those gifts with the deductible portion set correctly, and remembers each item's value for next time.
3. Blank rows stay unresolved — you can leave one and come back to finish it later; nothing is booked until you give it a value.

This is why a donor's auction purchase shows a smaller deductible amount than what they paid on their year-end statement — and why that number is right.

If you run fundraisers on Facebook or Instagram, the money doesn't come to you gift by gift. PayPal Giving Fund — the charity PayPal pays those donations through — collects them and sends you one lump-sum deposit every couple of weeks, with no donor breakdown attached to the deposit itself. That's the gap this closes: download the donor report and every gift behind that deposit comes into your books as its own recorded donation.

A few things worth knowing:

• These are straight cash gifts. A Facebook fundraiser donation is a plain donation — nothing was bought, so the whole amount is deductible. There's no fair-market-value step here the way there is for auction items.
• The deposit and the gifts are matched separately. Each donor's gift lands in a holding account (Donations in Transit, a temporary bucket that parks money until the real deposit shows up) the moment you import the report. When the biweekly deposit hits your bank, you clear that holding account against it on the Settling Payouts page — so the gross gifts, any fee, and the net deposit all tie out.
• PayPal Giving Fund doesn't hand out a payout number you could match on automatically, so the deposit is lined up by date and amount. If two payouts land close together and it's ambiguous, you pick the right deposit yourself — you're always in control of the final match.
• Anonymous gifts are fine. Facebook lets donors give without sharing their name or email. Those still come in and still count — they're recorded under a general "PayPal Giving Fund donor" so your totals stay complete.
• No tax receipts go out for these — on purpose. PayPal Giving Fund is itself a registered charity, and it's the one that gives each donor their tax receipt for a Facebook gift. So NP Ledger records these for your own donor history and fund tracking, but it doesn't email a second receipt and it leaves them off the year-end giving statements — you'd otherwise be handing a donor a tax letter for a gift they already have one for. You still see who gave and how much; the tax paperwork just stays with PayPal Giving Fund, where it belongs.

If some rows failed, you don't have to redo the whole batch.

1. Click Download failed rows as CSV. You get just the rows that didn't make it, each with an extra column explaining what went wrong.
2. Fix those rows in the downloaded file (or in your original export).
3. Upload the corrected file again. Because the rows that already succeeded are remembered, only the rows you actually changed get recorded — nothing doubles up.

• "This file was already imported." You're uploading a file NP Ledger has seen before, so the whole upload is held back and nothing new is created. If you meant to add corrections, fix the rows and re-upload — only the changed ones come in.
• A gift lands in a closed accounting period. If any gift in the file is dated inside a fiscal year you've already closed, NP Ledger holds back the whole batch — nothing posts — so you don't end up with a half-finished import. The result page shows you exactly which rows triggered it. Fix those dates (or reopen the period), then re-upload.
• A platform isn't in the dropdown yet. The one-time setup for that platform hasn't been done. Reach out and we'll add it.

• How Donor Giving Works, End to End — where batch import fits in the whole donor-giving flow
• Importing from Spreadsheets — for your own CSV or Excel files
• Settling Payouts and Clearing Balances — match the bank deposit back to the gifts behind it
• Giving Statements — year-end statements built from the donor detail this brings in

Open the AI Help panel and try:

• "What file do I upload for a GiveSmart batch?"
• "Why did some rows fail to import?"
• "How do I fix and re-upload failed donations?"