Donation Invoice

Overview

A donation invoice is a payment request or contribution record that specifies a donation amount, campaign, recipient, currency, and payment instructions. Unlike a commercial invoice, it normally does not represent payment for delivered goods or services.

It can still provide a unique reference, expiration, donor information, and transaction status for reconciliation, acknowledgment, and restricted-fund accounting. Donation Invoice recipients should also preserve donor privacy, campaign attribution, and the exact settlement evidence. Related operational concepts include payment request and overpayment policy. They should remain connected through identifiers and evidence without being treated as the same payment state, control, or financial result.

Within Donation Invoice, and especially at the boundary with Donation Link, the recipient should also preserve donor privacy, campaign attribution, and the exact settlement evidence. The record can be denominated in fiat while allowing payment in supported cryptocurrencies. The authoritative record for Donation Invoice should also show the rule version, responsible system, permitted state transition, and any downstream action such as fulfillment, settlement, refund, or manual review.

Risks include duplicate contribution records, treating an unpaid pledge as cash, issuing misleading tax documentation, wrong campaign attribution, and accepting payment after the quoted amount expires. Documenting those handoffs keeps duplicate events, delayed updates, and manual corrections for Donation Invoice traceable to the correct object.

Operational ownership for Donation Invoice should cover configuration changes, access, monitoring, customer treatment, accounting, and escalation. This supports the central requirement that donation invoices improve traceability, but they must remain distinct from sales invoices and preserve campaign, valuation, payment, expiry, and acknowledgment evidence.