How are soft credits used for membership payments in webform?

Question

Using Drupal 7.56, CiviCRM 4.7.x and Webform CiviCRM 7.x-4.15. I have a webform that allows a parent (primary user) to pay the membership fees for up to four children (CiviCRM contacts). The total payment (contribution) is recorded against the parent. Apart from the fact that the membership for the children is renewed there is nothing to show that they have paid when looking at their contact record. Is it possible when using the Webform/CiviCRM module to have the membership contributions for the children to be recorded as soft credits? If so how is that achieved?

Later information Unfortunately we have separate membership types for parents and children so it is not possible to use inheritance (as far as I can tell). Parents can have different levels of membership and there are different memberships for first, second, third and subsequent children. Maybe we have complicated our membership structure unnecessarily, however it is what it is at the moment. We create family relationships and when we view any child we can see the associated parent where the payment has been made. So what we have to do at the moment is view the child record, click on one of the parents (hopefully the one who has paid), select the contribution and view it. This will at least show the breakdown of the payment into the constituent parts. The only place where we can see the payment against the child is in a book keeping report. Soft Credits would absolutely solve our issues since we could see who has made the single payment and who it has be on behalf of (i.e. the children) IMHO this would be a useful enhancement to CiviCRM.

Answer 1

Download the latest -dev of webform_civicrm module. We recently merged in some code that should let you do this (explicity add the soft credit).

This is the commit: https://github.com/colemanw/webform_civicrm/commit/bc7e0eee2a39ca0c35e34109d3ff05ee2e26b8d3

Answer 2

Soft Credits may not be the way to go here. The Contribution/monies correctly land with the parent (who pays); You can connect them by relationship: [perhaps you already are] - parent-child relationship -> or in case of a Family type of membership you can also have the membership inherited by the children and then you can clear see a Primary Member (parent) and the children (who inherit); You can then View Primary Member (and his/her payment history) right from the Children's Membership tab;

Answer 3

I believe this would require a custom extension. If you're a coder, my Automatic Soft Credits extension is very close to what you need. Instead of triggering a soft credit on a related contact when a contribution is made, you'd change it so that it triggered when a membership payment of a certain type is made.

Answer 4

Given your 'later information' and since you are using Drupal, you could do this via a Views block exposed on the Contact Summary screen. A bit of effort but you should be able to knit together exactly what you want.