Each donation you receive should be added as a Payment record in your Beacon database. Payment records include a number of standard fields which will usually have data.
Specifically, the Payer field (often renamed "Person" or "Donor") should describe who made the payment.
In the case of an anonymous donation, we don't know who that is! As such, we recommend leaving the Payer field blank for anonymous donations.
Note: Our integrations such as the JustGiving app, Enthuse app, along with CSV import templates such as Facebook Donate are all configured to set the payer as blank for anonymous donations.
We do not recommend having a single "Anonymous" person in your database, with all payments linked to them. It's confusing, skews your data about average donations, and doesn't make it any easier to find the payments.
Many other CRMs force you to link a payment to a contact, hence why you'll often have these 'Anonymous' people from previous systems. Thankfully Beacon lets you store the data in a way more reflecting reality: There is no person named 'Anonymous'!
Finding anonymous donations
When viewing a list of payments, you can use filtering to find the anonymous donations:
