Year Comparison Transaction Reports

Year Comparison Transaction Reports

Generate a transaction report with year columns, giving you an instant comparison of activity from one year to the next.

Here are some examples of what you can do with such a report:

• Compare how much a donor contributed this year compared to last year.
• Get reports on who contributed over $100 last year but did not yet contribute that amount this year. (You can pick the amounts and years.)
• How well did the Pesach fundraiser (Category: Donation\Pesach) do over that last five years. (You can choose the category and year range.)

To generate Year Comparison reports follow these steps:

1. Click Reports > Transactions.
2. On the General tab under Options, choose the Show Totals Only option.
3. In the Total Columns By drop-down, choose Years.
4. The Total By drop-down will determine how the rows on the report are totaled. For example: If you choose Name/Company, you will get a report that will show you how much each contact contributed over the years; if you choose Category, the report will show how each category did over the years.
5. Use the other tabs on the Transaction Report screen to choose other criteria such as Date Range, Categories, etc.
6. Click OK to generate the report.

This report will show all donation of all contacts limited to the criteria you chose. The report will display it in a format of rows (by what was chosen in the Total By) and columns (by what was chosen in the Total Columns By).

If you want to restrict the report to show only contacts who contributed a total of x dollars during x year but not this year and other such options, you must first build a custom query.

Follow these steps to build this query:

1. On the Other tab, click the Year Comparison button.
2. In the Comparison Builder window, enter comparison information. For example: In the "Contacts who have contributed..." section, on the first row type 2020 for the year and $100.00 for the amount. In the "But have not yet contributed..." section, on the first row type 2021 for the year and $50 for the amount. (In simple words you are choosing everyone who contributed $100 or more last year but have contributed only $50 or less this year.)
3. Enter a Query name. This name is used later when choosing this query (see below). For example: enter YearComp. Do not use spaces or dashes in the query name.
4. Click the Save button to save the query. You will get a message confirming that the query was saved successfully.
5. Click the Close button.

Now that a query has been created, you can use this query anytime to generate transaction reports, including the Year Comparison report above.

• Follow steps 1-5 above (Generate Year Comparison reports).
• Do not click OK (step 6), rather, click the Custom Query button on the Other tab.
• Select the query you created. In the example above "YearComp" (Note: it will have the letters "CUS" before the name of the query, "CUSYearComp".)
• Click the Open Report button to generate the report.

And there you have it. The report will now be limited to the criteria of the custom query, displaying (in the example above) only those who have contributed over $100 last year but less than $50 this year.