Current use of charge_date means sheduled reminders don't work.

Created by: artfulrobot

Currently we use charge_date as the receive_date in CiviCRM.

This date is given by GC when we set up a mandate. It's basically the date the money leaves the customer's account.

But it's not confirmed until a day later. It's the confirmed-ness that creates/updates a pending payment to status Completed. This means that when a payment becomes completed the date is always historical - a day ago.

In turn, a scheduled reminder on a Completed payment will not be (likely) triggered as the scheduled reminder code only looks for things that have happened in the last 24 hours.

Question / Proposal

Should we have it so that the Contribution receive_date is updated to the date the payment is confirmed (assuming it is successful)?

This would mean you'd see a contribution's date start off as Pending, say on the 1st, but then when it completed it would be updated to the 2nd.

It would mean you could do scheduled reminders on a Completed payment more reliably.

If we do this, should we keep the recurring contribution's start_date the same? What about memberships, should they use the original date or the confirmed date?

Alternatives

1. We could implement an update when the payment is paid out by GC to your organisation. The problem with the latter is that the date gets further away from the date that a customer (supporter) can see on their bank statement. Especially if GC have cause to pause payouts.

2. You could say: just add a day to your scheduled reminder. But perhaps there could be a delay (weekend/bank hols?) before a payment is considered confirmed? So payment that took, say 4 days to confirm thanks to a bank holiday weekend instead of the usual 1 could be missed out of the scheduled payment.

Be really interested in your views on this!