I recently noticed you can now do e-Receipts in web view - which would be a huge improvement over our current database view e-Receipt process, which is very slow and frequently crashes. However, there are three areas that are thus far insufficiently developed, preventing us from being able to switch to the web view feature yet.

The available merge fields are very limited. There are only three categories of field to select: Constituent, Gift, and My Organization.

The Constituent category only has three options: First Name, Last Name, and "selected name format". The latter refers to a setting you have to set elsewhere in the options, which forces you to choose one type of Addressee/Salutation for all receipts. The problem here is, what if I want the Constituent's Addressee at the very top of the receipt (full formal name, for IRS tax deductible receipt purposes), then I want their Informal Salutation down in the body where we greet them ("Hi Sara, thanks for your gift...") And what about Nickname? What about the Constituent's address? I believe the IRS likes to see address, too. This doesn't meet our needs for Constituent Info.

Then there's the gift info, and this is where we get some major problems. I would not consider our needs to be overly complicated. But our donors DO need to see the split gift info so they know how their gift was credited. Now, there is a field called "Fund", but this option exports only a list of the Fund Descriptions, without the breakdown of the amounts for each fund. Strangely, the only way to get the list to include the Amount for each Fund is to select the merge field "Transaction details". BUT, this field spits out a long list of all sorts of info - and, very problematically for us, the first piece of info shown in that list is what web view likes to call the "Gift Type". I say this because, as old-school RE users will know, web view has oddly dismantled the actual database view Gift Type table. In our case, what ends up happening here is ALL our gifts end up being labeled as "One-Time Gift" by this field - even the recurring ones! Because we don't have BBMS or use Recurring Gift types due to their complexity, we enter our recurring gifts in similar fashion to one-time gifts. Of course it would be incredibly confusing for our recurring donors to receive an email stating that their gift was "One-time" when in fact it was not. So, what we're left with is an unworkable situation. If only you could get the Fund split amount details as its own field instead of needing the full "Transaction details", we could clear this piece.

Finally, the My Organization stuff is not really relevant because it's stable information, so why wouldn't you just type that info hard coded into the message body? Well, that's what I've done anyway.

Again, it's very encouraging to see that Blackbaud has continued to develop more features in the web view - but in the case of email receipts, it seems like again something very basic was released without sufficient testing or consideration as to what organizations actually need to do with those receipts. Once the filtering and the available merge fields are further developed, I'm sure this will be a useful feature.