Donation Receipt Template That Meets the IRS Rules

Four rules, one of which is the whole game

Publication 1771 is short. These four rules are what a small nonprofit needs from it.

The $250 acknowledgment. Any single gift of $250 or more needs a written acknowledgment carrying the elements in the answer above. The goods-and-services slot takes one of three sentences: no goods or services were provided; a description and good-faith value of what was provided; or the benefits were entirely intangible religious ones. The burden here sits on the donor, not on you. No penalty attaches to you for skipping the letter. Your donor just loses the deduction, and then you lose the donor.

The deadline. "Contemporaneous" means the donor has the letter by the day they file, or by the return's due date with extensions, whichever comes first. This is why the Durdens' corrected letter failed: it existed, it said the right words, and it arrived years too late. Some donors file the week filing season opens. A February batch is one some of them can no longer use.

The disclosure you owe. When someone pays more than $75 and gets something back (the gala ticket with the dinner attached), you must give them a written statement that only the amount above the dinner's value is deductible, with your good-faith estimate of that value. Unlike the $250 letter, this one carries a penalty for the organization: $10 per missing disclosure, up to $5,000 per event or mailing. The mug-and-tote-bag exception exists, with dollar thresholds the IRS adjusts each year, so check the current figures before deciding your thank-you gift is ignorable.

Never value property. Describe the donated laptop. Do not appraise it. The value is the donor's problem on their own return, and above $5,000 it is generally their appraiser's problem. A receipt that assigns a number to a box of office chairs does the donor no favor and can cost them the deduction. Volunteer hours get a thank-you, never a dollar figure, because time is not deductible at all.

Worth adding even though the IRS does not ask for them: your EIN, because every donor's tax software asks for it in March, and a line noting your 501(c)(3) status. Gifts under $250 technically need only a bank record or a note from you with name, date, and amount, but the same letter covers both cases, so send it to everyone.

The donation receipt template

Paste this into your letterhead document. The double-brace placeholders are named after columns, because in the batch section below this same file merges straight from your donor export.

[ORGANIZATION LETTERHEAD: name, street address, city, phone, email]

{{Receipt Date}}

{{Donor Name}}
{{Donor Street}}
{{Donor City, State ZIP}}

Dear {{Donor Salutation}},

Thank you for your generous support of {{Organization Name}}. This letter
acknowledges the following contribution:

    Amount:        {{Gift Amount}}
    Date received: {{Gift Date}}

{{Goods Statement}}

{{Organization Name}} is a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3)
of the Internal Revenue Code. Our EIN is {{EIN}}. Please keep this letter
with your tax records.

With gratitude,



{{Signer Name}}
{{Signer Title}}
{{Organization Name}}
{{Signer Phone}} | {{Signer Email}}

{{Goods Statement}} takes exactly one of these three sentences:

No goods or services were provided in exchange for this contribution.

In exchange for this contribution, you received {{Benefit Description}}, with
an estimated fair market value of {{Benefit Value}}. Only the amount of your
contribution that exceeds this value is deductible as a charitable
contribution.

You received only intangible religious benefits in exchange for this
contribution.

For property, swap the amount line for a description and no dollar figure:

    Description:   {{Gift Description}}
    Date received: {{Gift Date}}

Do not soften the first sentence into "your gift is fully tax deductible." You will be tempted to, because it sounds warmer. It also asserts something about the donor's tax return that you cannot know. The required sentence states a fact about your own organization, which you can. The dry version is the one the rule asks for.

A filled-in sample

LARCHBROOK COMMUNITY PANTRY
612 Weaver Mill Road, Dayton, OH 45402
(937) 555-0164 | office@larchbrook.example.org

January 12, 2027

Nora Feldstead
2214 Cottonwood Lane
Dayton, OH 45419

Dear Ms. Feldstead,

Thank you for your generous support of Larchbrook Community Pantry. This
letter acknowledges the following contribution:

    Amount:        $500.00
    Date received: June 9, 2026

No goods or services were provided in exchange for this contribution.

Larchbrook Community Pantry is a tax-exempt organization under Section
501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Our EIN is 31-0000000. Please keep
this letter with your tax records.

With gratitude,



Tomás Herrera
Executive Director
Larchbrook Community Pantry
(937) 555-0164 | t.herrera@larchbrook.example.org

Add a paragraph about what the gift funded if you have something specific to say. Donors read those, and nothing in the rules forbids warmth. The rules only own the factual core.

The year-end letter

One letter can cover a donor's whole year, and for most organizations it should. A monthly donor gets one page listing twelve dated gifts instead of twelve envelopes, and everyone has their paperwork before filing season. Swap the single-gift block for a list:

This letter acknowledges the following contributions received during
{{Tax Year}}:

{{Gift Lines}}

    Total:         {{Year Total}}

The trap in the year-end letter is the blanket statement. If gift number four came with a gala dinner, the "no goods or services" line is now false for the whole page. Give the gala gift its own line with its own disclosure, or receipt it separately at the event and footnote the annual letter. I have seen the blanket version go out from organizations that absolutely knew better. It happens in the last week of January, at volume, when nobody is reading page 173 of the output.

From donor spreadsheet to signed PDFs

Under a dozen receipts a year, keep the filled letter in a shared folder and change four fields each time. Done. Past that, you are merging a spreadsheet into letters, and the spreadsheet is where the work is. One row per donor: name, address, salutation, the gift lines, the year total, and a goods-statement column filled per donor. That last column is the audit trail. Sort the sheet by it before you run anything and the forty gala buyers surface in one block, a five-minute check against the blanket-statement mistake above.

Word mail merge. For a flat one-gift-per-donor list, this works with software you already own:

1. Put the letter in Word and drop a merge field where each placeholder sits, via Mailings > Insert Merge Field.
2. Connect the donor export through Mailings > Select Recipients > Use an Existing List.
3. Preview a few records, then run Finish & Merge.

A donor with nine gifts is nine rows until you collapse the gifts into one column, and Word outputs one long document rather than files, so one PDF per donor takes the macro in how to split a mail merge into separate PDF files. Budget an evening the first time.

Google Docs plus Autocrat. If the donor list is already a Google Sheet, Autocrat merges a tagged Docs template into one PDF per row and emails each out, free. If your letterhead rebuilds cleanly in Docs and your volume is a few hundred, use Autocrat and stop reading this section. The catch is that the tagged template is a rebuild of the letter you already have, and long runs can die partway on an Apps Script quota, leaving you to work out which donors already got theirs. Autocrat's quota behavior and the rest of the routes out of Sheets are in the Google Sheets mail merge guide.

SheetRender. This is our product. Instead of rebuilding your letter as a tagged template, you hand over one you have already sent, as a PDF or a screenshot, and the AI reconstructs it with fields wired to your columns: {{Gift Amount}} to the amount column, {{Goods Statement}} to the statement column. It reads an uploaded CSV or .xlsx, or the Google Sheet itself, and one run turns each row into its own PDF, named from a column so the file is feldstead-nora.pdf, handed back as a zip or emailed to the address in its row.

On paid plans a schedule can rerun the job on rows added since the last run. A monthly-donor program that adds thirty rows a month can have its thirty receipts go out on the first without anyone logging in, and the year-end letter shrinks to a summary of receipts that already exist. Unattended also means nobody eyeballs the output, the same failure the year-end section is about, so schedule the monthly run and still spot-check one letter a month.

The reconstruction is a first draft. It can miss a letterhead detail or wire a column to the wrong field, so your first run is a proofread and not a send, the same way Autocrat's rebuild is. Nine gifts in nine rows is still yours to collapse in the sheet. Output is PDF only, nothing is written back to the sheet, and generated files expire, after 30 days on the free plan. And building the template sends your column headers plus a few rows of data, donor names and gift amounts included, to Anthropic, whose model reconstructs the layout. If donor data leaving your systems is a no, that settles it: take the Autocrat route and the merge never leaves your Google account.

Free is 50 documents a month, two active templates, a "Made with SheetRender" footer on every page, and no schedules. That makes it a way to test the mapping against a slice of your export, and not a way to send receipts; the footer does not belong on a donor's tax record. When I last checked, clean pages, 1,500 documents, and one schedule were $19 a month; the pricing page has current numbers.

Quick answers

Is a donation receipt required by law? The only duty Publication 1771 puts on you is the over-$75 quid pro quo disclosure. The $250 acknowledgment is the donor's requirement, but only you can write it, so functionally it is yours too.

Can I email donation receipts? Yes. Publication 1771 accepts electronic acknowledgments including email. A PDF attached to an email is the standard form. Content and timing are what count.

What about donated goods? Describe the items, state whether anything was given in exchange, and never write a value. Above $5,000 the donor generally needs a qualified appraisal on their side.

When should year-end receipts go out? Before your earliest filer files. January 31 is the custom; it is not the law. The law is the earlier of the donor's filing date or the return's due date, so a March letter fails for anyone who filed in February.

The Durdens had the checks and a church willing to vouch for every dollar, and they still lost, because substantiation is a wording test and nobody read the wording in time. Write the letter once, with the sentence that decides the test, and stop retyping it. Keep the goods statement in a column where you can audit it, and let the letters follow the sheet. The receipt run should be the most boring thing your organization does in January.