Donation receipts print two amounts, and sometimes they are the same one
A charity prints what was given and the part of it a credit may be claimed on. On a plain cash gift those are the same number printed twice, and adding both doubles the claim — which is exactly what a preparer does when a stack of receipts is being totalled quickly.
What the two amounts are
An official donation receipt carries the amount of the gift and the eligible amount — the part a charitable credit may be claimed on. Where the donor received something in return, or the gift was property rather than cash, those are different figures and the difference is the whole reason both are printed.
On an ordinary cash donation they are the same number, printed twice. Nothing was received in return, so the eligible amount is the gift.
Which is why a stack of receipts totals high
We found this on a real receipt in September 2026: a $340 gift that came out of a read as $680. Neither figure was misread. Both columns were correctly identified as money, both were correctly transcribed, and both were added — because on that receipt they were the same $340 described two ways.
Nothing about the resulting number looks wrong. That is what makes this worth knowing. A doubled medical receipt shows up as a suspicious duplicate; a doubled donation is a single line carrying a plausible total, on a schedule where the preparer has no independent sense of what the figure should be.
A person totalling a pile by hand makes the same mistake for the same reason, especially when the two columns are adjacent and headed with wording that does not obviously distinguish them — “Total amount of gift” beside “Eligible amount for tax purposes”.
The rule that works on both kinds
Take the eligible amount, and only the eligible amount. It is correct in both cases: on a cash gift it equals the gift, and on a gift where something was received in return it is the lower figure and the one the credit is actually computed on. A rule of “take the larger” is right on the first and wrong on the second; a rule of “add them” is wrong on both.
Where a receipt carries only one money column, that column is the eligible amount and there is nothing to choose between.
What to check on a pile
- Are the two figures equal? Then it is one gift, and one of them goes in.
- Is the eligible amount lower? Then something was received in return or the gift was in kind. Still take the eligible amount.
- Is the eligible amount higher? That should not happen. Read the headings again — the columns are probably not what they look like.
- Does one receipt cover several gifts? A year-end summary from a charity the client gives to monthly is one document with one eligible total, not twelve.
The other way the same pile doubles
Donors who give monthly usually hold both the individual acknowledgements and the charity’s year-end summary of the same gifts, and hand over both. Every line on that summary is already somewhere in the pile. It is the same failure as the pharmacy printout beside the receipts it duplicates, and the same habit fixes it: decide up front whether the summary replaces that charity’s loose receipts or supplements them, and hold to it for the whole return.
What we do about it
KeyGlance treats the two columns on a donation receipt as a choice of one rather than two independent figures, so a cash gift cannot be counted twice, and it flags a receipt that already appears elsewhere in the return. Every figure stays linked to the spot on the page it was read from. It never files anything with the CRA.
Questions we get asked about this
A donation receipt shows two amounts. Which one goes on the return?
The eligible amount — the figure the receipt says the credit may be claimed on. The other is what was given. On a plain cash gift they are the same number printed twice, and on a gift in kind or where the donor received something in return they differ, with the eligible amount being the lower of the two.
Why do charities print both if they are usually the same?
Because the receipt has to be valid in the case where they are not. A charity issuing receipts for both cash gifts and gala tickets prints the same layout for both, so the cash receipts carry a second column that duplicates the first.
How do I know a receipt is the duplicate case rather than the different case?
Compare the two figures. If they are equal it is one gift described twice and only one of them belongs in the total. If the eligible amount is lower, the donor received something in return or the gift was in kind, and the difference is the point of printing both.