Why the change in how Soft Credit information in exports?

Question

After recording contributions in Civi, I always export those contributions. All soft credit information used to be included with the primary "Hard Contribution" data, but now (perhaps as of 4.7?) you have to specifically export the soft credits, too, but even then the soft credit info still doesn't show up on the hard contribution line of the CSV file, only in a separate line for the soft credit. Any insight into why this is the case?

Answer 1

I believe https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-17286?focusedCommentId=80228&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-80228 will provide you with the answer as to why there are now two lines in the standard contribution export. That said, a couple of things that you can do to get around the issue:

1. Use the "Contribution Detail" report and include the column for "Contribution OR Tribute?" as well as any additional columns you need - when you export to CSV, you can filter/sort on the "Contribution OR Tribute?" column with the understanding that for every soft credit listed in the report, there will be an additional line for the "hard" contribution - depending on what you use the soft credit information for, you may want to save an instance of the report that will list only contributions and another that will list only tributes and then export each separately.
2. If the first option doesn't allow you to display all of the information you need, and if the the number of contributions with soft credits that you deal with is relatively few on each import, after exporting to CSV, CTRL + down arrow in one of the soft credit columns to arrive at the first soft credit in the export, then delete the corresponding contribution line that does NOT contain the soft credit information (from what I can tell, it is typically the line above the one with the soft credit).

Hope this helps!