We almost missed acknowledging and issuing a tax receipt for a $2,000 donation because of this. Regardless of preference on inactive records and whether they should be deleted, here's the problem: when RE NXT receives a donation from an Online Giving Donation Form and finds two or more potential matching constituent records with identical or strongly corresponding biological data, it doesn't default to the Active record. It should. In my case, our donor's biological data is identical in both the Active and Inactive records (name, address, email address, phone number); the Active record is the Target record of a previous merge, and the Active record contains all the giving history, relationships, and event-participation... But RE NXT still matched their recent donation with the old, previously-merged, Inactive Source record. I was not prompted to choose between the two records. Ultimately, this means our receipting and acknowledging queries didn't export the donation data for our mail merges (the queries are often preset to exclude Inactive constituents). I only noticed we hadn't generated a tax acknowledgment because I know the donor personally; otherwise, we would have completely ignored a donor's generous contribution.

I would argue RE NXT should either 1. Prioritize Active records in these instances, 2. Give us the option to choose between potential matches, or 3. At the very least, alert us to the fact that we're approving a donation to an Inactive constituent record.