> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.wegive.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Soft Credits Are Never Created Automatically

> WeGive Help Center article: Soft Credits Are Never Created Automatically

## Overview

A soft credit links a donor to a gift they didn't directly make the
payment on — for example, crediting the individual behind a company's
donation, or crediting a household member for another member's gift.
This article covers when soft credits are created, because the answer
surprises a lot of organizations: **it's never automatic.**

## Soft credits require a manual action or an import — always

WeGive does not create soft credit records automatically as a side
effect of any donation or checkout flow. This is true no matter how the
gift arrives — a standard one-time donation, a recurring charge, an
event ticket purchase, or a gift disbursed through a donor advised fund
(DAF) sponsor such as National Christian Foundation, Fidelity
Charitable, Schwab Charitable, or DAFgiving360.

There are only two ways a soft credit is ever created:

1. **A manual dashboard action.** A staff member adds a soft credit to
   an existing payment from the dashboard, specifying the amount, the
   donor to credit, and the transaction.
2. **A CSV or batch import.** Soft credits can be set per row (or as a
   batch-wide default) when importing offline gifts — see [Batch
   Payment Import](/external/support/giving/batch-payment-import). Note
   that soft credits brought in this way are insert-only: an import can
   create a new soft credit, but cannot be used to bulk-update an
   existing one.

## Why this matters for DAF-disbursed gifts specifically

Gifts disbursed from a donor advised fund sponsor don't flow through
WeGive's checkout at all — they're entered as offline gifts (see
[Batch Payment Import](/external/support/giving/batch-payment-import)).
Because of that, there's no automatic step anywhere in the pipeline
that would soft-credit the grant's recommending individual donor. If
your organization wants the individual behind a DAF-routed grant
credited, set that person as the **soft credit** on the row (or as the
batch default) when you import the gift — the same way you would for
any other offline or organization-level gift. It will not happen on
its own.

## Practical implication

If you give (or receive a gift) *as* an organization or DAF sponsor,
don't expect the individual behind that gift to be automatically
soft-credited. Plan to add the soft credit yourself, either one at a
time from the dashboard or as part of your batch import, for every gift
where that attribution matters to your reporting.


This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.