Record a received IRA/QCD gift
Updated last week
Use Giving source: IRA / QCD on the donation form to record a qualified charitable distribution from an individual retirement account that your organization has already received. This records money that arrived. It does not initiate a distribution, contact a custodian, or determine the donor's tax treatment. On a new gift the custodian is required and receives the financial donation credit, while the IRA owner is recognized with an automatic soft credit.
Before you start
Have the remittance or distribution advice in hand. IRA/QCD gifts accept received payment methods only: Cash, Check, Wire Transfer (including incoming EFT), and External Processor. Card, ACH, PayPal, and in-kind methods are not offered for this source. A received payment has one giving source across all of its allocations, including split gifts.
Record the gift
From a donor profile, select Add giving in the header, then select Add Donation.
In Giving source, select IRA / QCD.
In IRA owner, search for and select the account owner. The owner must be an individual and receives the automatic soft credit for the gift.
In IRA custodian, select the firm that holds the account. A new gift requires a custodian: it receives the financial donation credit.
Optional: in Location (optional), select the custodian office associated with the distribution, or leave Not recorded. The selected location applies to the whole payment, including split allocations.
Optional: in Distribution reference, enter the check or distribution number. This field is not for account numbers.
Enter the amount, donation date, and designations, and select a received payment method.
Optional: for each allocation, select Apply to sponsorship to cover periods of an existing commitment. Coverage attaches to the IRA owner's commitments. See Apply a received gift to sponsorship coverage.
Select Save, review the Confirm donation summary, and confirm.
The confirmation summary shows the giving source, the financial owner, the IRA owner, the custodian, any reference, the allocations, any sponsorship coverage, and the acknowledgment plan.
Choosing the IRA owner
The IRA owner must be an individual. The owner is the person Gratona recognizes for the gift: on a new gift the owner automatically receives a soft credit, and sponsorship coverage from Apply to sponsorship attaches to the owner's commitments. A QCD gift cannot start a new recurring schedule.
If the owner has no donor record yet, select Add donor in the picker: it opens the Add Donor form with the donor type locked to individual, and the new record is selected for the gift without saving the donation. Add donor appears only when your role can manage donors and a donor form is available.
Financial owner and recognition
On a new gift, the custodian is required: Gratona validates Choose the IRA custodian receiving the financial donation credit. The custodian receives the financial donation credit, and the IRA owner receives automatic soft-credit recognition. The manual Add Soft Credit control is available only for Direct gifts and is hidden for IRA / QCD; the owner's recognition is automatic.
Gifts saved before custodian credit keep their saved attribution. The editor shows This distribution was saved before custodian credit and keeps its saved financial owner. Ordinary edits that leave the giving source and parties unchanged preserve the saved financial owner, and the IRA/QCD acknowledgment still goes to the IRA owner.
When the editor offers it, Credit the custodian for this gift adopts custodian credit for that gift: turning it on makes the custodian required, moves the financial credit to the custodian, and gives the IRA owner soft credit while keeping coverage on their recurring gifts. Changing the IRA owner selection in the legacy editor adopts custodian credit as well; selecting the already recorded owner keeps the saved attribution. There is no blanket migration: attribution changes only when someone adopts it explicitly.
Adoption is a financial-owner change and is blocked when the payment has a recorded refund, is linked to an accounting or CRM integration such as QuickBooks, or still needs reconciliation. Gratona shows the reason instead of the control.
The custodian picker offers your existing giving institutions, matching ordinary organizations (Gratona asks you to confirm before converting one to a giving institution), a starter directory, and an Add institution option for a new record. Selecting a directory entry is not a connection to the custodian. New giving institutions have no donor portal access; converting an organization that already has portal credentials preserves its existing account controls. The quick-add drawer creates the institution from a name; add contact details and custom fields on the profile afterward, or use the full form in the Add Donor flow. Supplied contact details must be valid. For the complete picture, see Manage DAF sponsors, IRA custodians, and institution locations. Reuse a matching existing institution or directory entry when it represents the same custodian. This reuse does not merge historical duplicates or automatically match a constituent in another CRM.
Historical QCD custodian activity
Open the selected giving institution's profile and look for Historical QCD custodian activity in Overview, or Sponsorships on the legacy profile. This panel lists distributions saved before custodian credit. Each entry shows the IRA owner, amount, status, date, designation and distribution reference; select the IRA owner to review their transactions, and use the page controls when there are more entries.
The financial donor retains the credit recorded on these earlier distributions. New QCD gifts recorded with custodian credit do not appear in this panel: they show in the institution's regular transaction history. An empty historical panel does not mean a new QCD is missing.
An Activity unavailable message indicates a loading failure; use Retry instead of treating it as an empty history. If the panel is absent, check that you opened the institution record and ask support about the availability of DAF/QCD giving in your workspace.
Institution location
When an IRA custodian is selected, the form shows Location (optional). Choose one of the custodian's active locations or leave Not recorded; the default location is marked (default) in the list. The selected location applies to the whole received payment, including every split allocation.
The saved gift keeps the location name and address recorded when it was saved. Later edits to the custodian's locations, default changes, and archiving do not rewrite a saved gift, archived locations cannot be selected for new gifts, and existing gifts are never auto-filled with a location. For adding and editing offices, see Manage DAF sponsors, IRA custodians, and institution locations.
The IRA/QCD and soft-credit receipt variants can include the recorded office name and address; values are blank when the gift has no usable saved location.
Gift date and sponsorship choice
Record the actual gift date and, for checks, Deposit date separately when known. Leaving an existing gift date unchanged preserves the saved date. If the owner has one active sponsored recipient, Gratona can suggest that recipient. Review the suggestion; with multiple recipients, choose the intended recipient or split the received payment. To cover commitment periods, select the explicit sponsorship coverage option and review the confirmation. A recipient suggestion alone does not apply coverage or change the recurring schedule.
Tax treatment
Gratona records every IRA/QCD gift as non tax deductible. The Non tax deductible checkbox is checked and locked on the form, for single gifts and split allocations alike. The amount is excluded from tax-deductible totals and stays in Total recorded giving and reconciliation views.
On the donor's Tax Summary, the gift appears under Excluded from tax-deductible total with its own IRA qualified charitable distributions subtotal.
Gratona does not determine the donor's tax treatment and does not certify QCD eligibility.
Acknowledgments
IRA/QCD gifts use a dedicated IRA / QCD receipt variant. A newly created IRA / QCD variant starts with a disabled acknowledgment starter for an IRA distribution, and the parent Donor Payment Receipt template in the applicable email set must also exist and be enabled; enabling only the variant is insufficient when the parent receipt is disabled. Review and enable these in Automated email before relying on email acknowledgments. If a required variant is missing or disabled, that acknowledgment is not sent, and the standard receipt is never used as a fallback. An email address, recipient email preferences, suppression, and per-gift opt-outs also affect delivery, so check the confirmation acknowledgment plan. To skip the acknowledgment for one gift, check Don't send the IRA distribution acknowledgment to the owner.
When the required acknowledgment variant is available and can render, an owner without an email address can use Print acknowledgment from the confirmation preview. Printing is manual and does not send email.
An unchanged copy of the Standard Donation body is blocked for IRA / QCD previews, printing, sending and admin tests. Review the source-specific wording and rendered acknowledgment before enabling the variant.
Edit an existing gift
To reclassify an existing gift, open it from the Donations Table and choose to edit it. Use Giving source to change the source explicitly where permitted, and review the changed financial owner, source, and recognition before you save. Older gifts remain Direct until someone intentionally changes them, and the Giving source control is available when editing them. Ownership changes can be locked by integration mappings, recorded refunds, or reconciliation requirements. Do not delete or duplicate the gift to work around a lock.
Send the gift to another CRM through Zapier
New Donations and Updated Donation expose Giving Source, Grant or Distribution Reference and separate IRA owner fields. On gifts recorded with custodian credit, Donor ID and Donor Name identify the custodian institution, and the IRA owner fields and soft-credit line items identify the recognized person. Older gifts reflect the attribution saved with them. Verify a live sample in your own Zap before mapping, because field behavior can depend on the integration version your workspace uses. Keep Gift Date and Deposit Date separate and match edits by Donation ID. See New Donations for the full mapping guidance.