Contribution Reports and disabled Financial Types

Question

What is the expected behaviour for Contribution Reports in regard to disabled Financial Types (for example, a Financial Type that was used some years ago but is not used for current contributions)?

• Should the FT for contributions of a Financial Type that has been disabled show up in the reports?
• Should we be able to run a report with a Financial Type that is disabled as a filter?

I would expect the answers to be yes and yes, but I'm not sure if everyone shares that assumption. At least currently, the functionality seems to be no and no (the contribution shows up but the FT column is blank; the filters only allow active FTs), so I'm wondering if it's a bug or if it's meant that way.

Answer 1

I'll go with "Yes" and "Often". This is a long-standing issue that extends beyond financial types and reports. It's also searches, and almost anything that can be disabled.

An elegant solution might require some thinking through. My suspicion is that we'll need a new database field to distinguish these two use cases. You definitely DO want some disabled option values not to be searchable. I'm not sure if you want to ever not have them appear though.