Changing/Updating old financial types

Question

I am new to the civi community and this is my first posted question. I was wandering if there was a way to change previous financial types. The situation is as follows: We have "X Campaign" we run every year. In the past, they labeled the campaign as "X Campaign 2010", "X Campaign 2011", etc. For the past 3 years there has not been a date tied to it and this is how we would like to do things moving forward. I know I can delete old financial types but that will effect my ability to search for them. I also see that I can rename them but then I would just have 6 "X-Campaigns" and one of the reasons for wanting to do this is trim back all unnecessary financial types that are cluttering things up. Is there a way to merge by batch? Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

Here's another option - for when you have tons and batch update via the GUI is daunting:

Export all contributions that have a financial type you'd like to change; Export contribution ID + Financial Type ID

Make the edit in the CSV that is generated

Re-import!

Answer 2

You can use batch update via profile (a.k.a "update multiple contributions" in newer versions of Civi) to update all of the existing contributions to the financial type that you want to keep - the following instructions assume you have a contribution profile in place.

1. Depending on what version of Civi you are on, you are limited to updating between 50 to 100 contributions at a time - so to keep things organized, I would use find contributions with the financial type filter to the first one that needs be changed (e.g. X Campaign 2010)
2. Select the first page of results, then select "Batch Update Contributions via profile" or "Update multiple contributions" from the actions drop down menu
3. In the financial type field of the first record, select the financial type you wish to keep (e.g. X Campaign), then use the copy down icon to the left of the column header - this will update all of the remaining contributions with the new financial type 4.Scroll to the bottom and click the "Update Contributions" button at the bottom left hand corner of the screen - after a few seconds you should see a message saying that your updates have been saved and a "Done" button - clicking the "Done" button will take you back to the search results.
4. Click the next arrow and select the next page of results and repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have finished updating all of the contributions for the first financial type you searched on, the repeat steps 1 through 5 until you get through all of the financial types you wish to update.
5. Once completed, assuming you don't have any pledges with these financial types or that they are no longer in use elsewhere in the system, the system will allow you to delete them.

Hope this answer helps!