Including discount codes in membership imports

Question

We offer a discounted membership to graduates of affiliated training programmes - to minimise the processing work, the course administrator fills out a template spreadsheet and sends it to us, and deposits the fees in bulk. We tidy the file, save it as csv then run a contacts import followed by a member import.

Although we initially used a separate membership type with a lower fee, the problem of having to manually change membership type after one year led us to switch to applying standard individual memberships and creating a discount code.

However, I can't find discount code anywhere in the field matching for either membership or contributions imports. How can I apply the discount so that contribution records do not show the full price?

Answer 1

I am not sure why you need to import a discount code. A discount code is needed for online transactions so that civi knows to charge a reduced price yet still create a membership. Here the transaction has already taken place offline.

Import the contributions for the actual amount paid, with a contributions source of, say, Student (or student discounted price if you think you might forget the student price was discounted). Then import the memberships. There is no link between contributions and memberships when they are both imported, so the membership "won't care" how much money was paid for it.