Feature
An issued receipt can go to a donor on WhatsApp with the PDF attached as a document and your own wording as its caption. The number it leaves from is one your organisation links itself, and every send is recorded against the receipt beside anything that was emailed, downloaded or printed.
Your organisation links its own WhatsApp number once, by scanning a QR code from WhatsApp on that phone. After that an issued receipt can be sent to a donor’s mobile number — the one on the donor record, or one typed at the time of sending — carrying the receipt PDF as a WhatsApp document with your message as its caption.
Whether that happens automatically on issue, by hand, or only when the person issuing the receipt says so is a setting the organisation chooses. Every send is written to the receipt’s delivery history, so a WhatsApp receipt is accounted for the same way an emailed one is.
Five steps, done once. Only the last of them is repeated per receipt.
The screen is behind its own permission, kept apart from the rest of receipt settings: linking a handset puts a live WhatsApp session on somebody’s actual phone, which is not the same kind of decision as changing a receipt’s footer.
Scan the QR code from WhatsApp on that phone, exactly as you would to use WhatsApp Web. A pairing code is offered as well, for a trustee doing this over a call with their accountant who cannot photograph one screen with another.
Automatically on issue, by hand from the receipt, or asked each time it is issued. A trust that has never chosen is on “send by hand”, because sending on a donor’s behalf without anybody deciding to is the one mistake that cannot be taken back.
Pick one of the ready-made wordings or write your own, with the donor’s name, the receipt number and the amount filled in from the receipt. The editor previews the finished message against sample values before it is saved.
The receipt PDF goes as a WhatsApp document and your message is its caption, so the donor gets one bubble rather than two. The send is written to the receipt’s delivery history like every other copy.
Three modes rather than a switch, because trusts genuinely differ: a volunteer at a collection desk, an administrator with half-complete donor numbers, and a trust that does both in the same week do not want the same behaviour.
A donor reads the trust’s words under the trust’s number. Nothing on the message says which software produced it.
Linking a handset, wording the messages and sending a receipt are three different decisions, and they are three different permissions.
Yes. An issued receipt can be sent to a donor on WhatsApp with the receipt PDF attached as a document and your own message as its caption.
It is sent from a WhatsApp number your organisation links itself, so the donor sees a message from the trust rather than from a platform they have never heard of.
Your own. The organisation links one handset by scanning a QR code from WhatsApp on the phone whose number the trust already uses, and receipts leave from that number.
The number currently linked is shown on the settings screen, so there is never a question about which phone the trust is sending from.
That is the organisation’s choice, and there are three: “send automatically”, “send by hand” and “ask each time”.
An organisation that has never chosen sends by hand. Automatic sending is a deliberate setting, not a default somebody discovers after the messages have gone.
Yes. Messages are written by the organisation, up to 1,024 characters, and can hold any of 9 named values from the receipt: donor name, organisation name, receipt number, receipt date, donation amount, donation head, payment method, financial year and verification link.
A template is text with named holes in it and nothing more — there is no expression language and no way to reach a value that is not on that list. A name the system cannot fill in is refused when the message is saved, rather than reaching a donor as an empty gap.
Yes, by default. The PDF is sent as a WhatsApp document and the message becomes the document’s caption, which is why the two arrive together as one item rather than as a file followed by an unrelated block of text.
1,024 characters is the limit on the message for exactly that reason: it is WhatsApp’s own limit on a document caption, which is lower than its limit on a plain message.
You can tell that WhatsApp accepted it. Every WhatsApp send is a row in the same delivery history as email, downloads and prints, showing who asked for it, the number it went to and what happened.
You cannot tell that it was read. The gateway confirms it handed the message to WhatsApp and reports nothing after that — there are no delivered or read callbacks — so the row settles at “delivered”, meaning accepted by WhatsApp, and never advances to “read”. Treat it as proof the trust sent the receipt, not as proof the donor opened it.
Sending stops, and the settings screen says why in those words rather than leaving receipts to fail quietly.
A phone can walk away — somebody opens WhatsApp on a laptop and evicts the session, or the handset is reset — so the connection status is read back from the gateway each time rather than remembered. A receipt can still be emailed, downloaded or printed while the handset is being re-linked.
No. It links a WhatsApp account on a phone the trust already has, in the way WhatsApp Web does, and sends from that account.
That is why there is no message template approval to wait for and why the wording is entirely yours — and equally why the linked handset has to stay linked, and why sends are paced rather than issued in a burst.
Register your organisation, link the phone the trust already uses, and send an issued receipt with its PDF attached and your own wording under it.
