Record a received IRA/QCD gift
Updated 7 days ago
Use Giving source: IRA / QCD on the donation form to record a qualified charitable distribution from an individual retirement account that your organization has already received. This records money that arrived. It does not initiate a distribution, contact a custodian, or determine the donor's tax treatment.
Before you start
Have the remittance or distribution advice in hand. IRA/QCD gifts accept received payment methods only: Cash, Check, Wire Transfer (including incoming EFT), and External Processor. Card, ACH, PayPal, and in-kind methods are not offered for this source. A received payment has one giving source across all of its allocations, including split gifts.
Record the gift
From a donor profile, select Add donation.
In Giving source, select IRA / QCD.
In IRA owner, search for and select the account owner. The owner is the financial owner of the donation and receives the hard credit.
Optional: in IRA custodian, select the firm that holds the account. Leave it blank when the custodian is unknown; the record stays Custodian not recorded.
Optional: in Distribution reference, enter the check or distribution number. This field is not for account numbers.
Enter the amount, donation date, and designations, and select a received payment method.
Optional: for each allocation, select Apply to sponsorship to cover periods of an existing commitment. See Apply a received gift to sponsorship coverage.
Select Save, review the Confirm donation summary, and confirm.
The confirmation summary shows the giving source, the financial owner, the IRA custodian (or Not recorded), any reference, the allocations, any sponsorship coverage, and the acknowledgment plan.
Choosing the IRA owner
The IRA owner must be an individual. If the owner has no donor record yet, select Add donor in the picker: it opens the Add Donor form with the donor type locked to individual, and the new record is selected for the gift without saving the donation. Add donor appears only when your role can manage donors and a donor form is available.
The IRA custodian
The custodian is optional and is recorded separately from the owner. The custodian is recorded as the intermediary, not the financial donor: the individual IRA owner receives the hard credit. The picker offers your existing giving institutions, matching ordinary organizations (Gratona asks you to confirm before converting one to a giving institution), a starter directory, and an Add institution option for a new record. Selecting a directory entry is not a connection to the custodian. Giving institutions are not ordinary supporters and do not receive donor portal access.
Tax treatment
Gratona records every IRA/QCD gift as non tax deductible. The Non tax deductible checkbox is checked and locked on the form, for single gifts and split allocations alike. The amount is excluded from tax-deductible totals and stays in Total recorded giving and reconciliation views.
On the donor's Tax Summary, the gift appears under Excluded from tax-deductible total with its own IRA qualified charitable distributions subtotal.
Gratona does not determine the donor's tax treatment and does not certify QCD eligibility.
Acknowledgments
IRA/QCD gifts use a dedicated IRA / QCD receipt variant. A newly created IRA / QCD variant starts disabled, and the parent Donor Payment Receipt template in the applicable email set must also exist and be enabled; enabling only the variant is insufficient when the parent receipt is disabled. Review and enable these in Automated email before relying on email acknowledgments. If a required variant is missing or disabled, that acknowledgment is not sent, and the standard receipt is never used as a fallback. An email address, recipient email preferences, suppression, and per-gift opt-outs also affect delivery, so check the confirmation acknowledgment plan. To skip the acknowledgment for one gift, check Don't send the IRA distribution acknowledgment to the owner.
When the required acknowledgment variant is available and can render, an owner without an email address can use Print acknowledgment from the confirmation preview. Printing is manual and does not send email.
Edit an existing gift
To reclassify an existing gift, open it from the Donations Table and choose to edit it. Use Giving source to change the source explicitly where permitted, and review the changed financial owner, source, and recognition before you save. Older gifts remain Direct until someone intentionally changes them, and the Giving source control is available when editing them. Ownership changes can be locked by integration mappings, recorded refunds, or reconciliation requirements. Do not delete or duplicate the gift to work around a lock.