How To Use Tap Forms to Match Donations to Projects

[Andrew C]

Background: We’re a nonprofit building houses. I am fairly new to tapforms and using databases in general. I use Tap Forms to track progress for each house we build – one record per house, with fields for type, cost, date started etc.

We also need to keep track of donations received towards houses. Some larger donations will cover multiple houses, some a single house house, and some (comparatively) smaller donations must be grouped together for a single house.

Currently, I keep track of donations received on a spreadsheet, and manually group or split them up to allocate to each house (and then manually fill this data into the “donor” field on tapforms).

My Question: If I created a second tapforms database for tracking donations (or a separate set of records), what would be the best way of linking, or allocating donations to houses?

I would need to be able to see, on each house record, which donations were allocated to it, as well as when looking at my list of donations, see which houses were covered. I’d also need to be able to filter donations to see which were still unallocated.

Any suggestions appreciated!

[Brendan]

Hi Andrew,

You would want two forms. Houses and Donations. Your Houses form would link to your Donations form by adding a Link to Form field to your Houses form. I’m thinking maybe a many-to-many relationship because you said a single donation could span multiple houses and a single house can have multiple donations. That’s the definition of many-to-many basically.

With this setup, you could click on any Donation and see which houses it was applied to. And inversely, you can click on any House and see what the donations were.

However, if you had a big donation which should apply to multiple houses, Tap Forms wouldn’t be able to split that single donation up to allocate a certain amount of the donation to different houses. You would just have to create multiple separate donations each with their distinct amounts and link them to the houses. But you could have some other field in your Donations form which would basically tie the smaller donations together, such as a unique Donation ID or something like that.

Hope that gives you an idea of how it could work.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Andrew C]

Brendan – thank you, and apologies for the slow reply. I’m going to try this and see how it works out.

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