A recurring contribution is a donor's ongoing giving commitment. It represents a scheduled gift that repeats on a set cadence, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Run the Current Recurring Donations report (in Reports, under the CoolPay category) for a live list of every active recurring gift that isn't paused or cancelled. The report shows donor, amount, cadence, and status columns, along with dashboard cards for the current count, total scheduled amount, and average gift, and a breakdown by frequency. Use it instead of exporting contributions to Excel and filtering by hand.

Seeing this report requires View permission on recurring contributions. If it's missing from your Reports area, ask an administrator to grant that permission. See Reports by Area for the full list of CoolPay reports.

A recurring contribution includes a "Sponsored Person/Soft Credit" field. Use it to recognize someone other than the donor of record, such as an individual advisor behind a donor-advised fund gift, without changing who the recorded donor is. This field also appears on contributions, pledges, and in-kind gifts. See the CoolPay help collection for related giving guides.

A donor named as the Sponsored Person/Soft Credit on someone else's recurring gift now sees it on their own Recurring Contributions tab too, next to their own recurring gifts. A Credit Type column tells the two apart: Direct for a recurring gift the donor set up themselves, Soft Credit for one where they are only the sponsored person. See Donors and Contributions for the full picture of how soft credit works.

Each contribution generated from a recurring gift shows a read-only Covers Period field on the contribution's detail view, such as "May 2026". This tells you which billing period the charge is for, which is especially useful when a charge is collected later than its usual date (for example, a held payment that finally succeeds a few days into the next month) so it doesn't look like a duplicate gift for the new period.

If a donor's recurring gift is how they're paying off a pledge, link the two. Each payment is then counted toward the pledge, and nobody has to edit every contribution.

From then on, every CoolPay payment on this recurring gift is applied to that pledge until it's paid in full. After that, payments are recorded as ordinary contributions. To stop applying payments, clear the field.

If the donor set up the recurring gift on a donation form with Apply Gifts to Open Pledge turned on, CoolFocus fills this in when the gift is set up, as long as the donor had exactly one open pledge on that fund. See Creating Donation Forms in CoolFocus 5.

The Current Recurring Donations report (Reports area, CoolPay category) lists every recurring gift that is active and has no pause or cancellation date. Its dashboard shows a count of current recurring donations, the total scheduled amount, the average gift, and a chart of gifts by frequency. The data view groups rows by frequency, with a total row per group.

Seeing this report requires View permission on recurring contributions. If a user's user group doesn't grant that permission, the report won't appear in their Reports list at all.

Recurring giving can include financial information. Only staff with the right role should view or manage payment-related details.