Ask ten Ganpati mandals for their donation receipt format and you will get ten answers — a carbon book from the stationery shop, a rubber stamp on a slip of paper, or nothing at all beyond a name in a register. That inconsistency is exactly what makes the accounts impossible to defend six months later, when someone at the meeting asks why the register total does not match the bank.
A receipt is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the single piece of evidence that a specific person gave a specific amount for a specific festival. Get it right and your accounts reconcile themselves.
What every festival receipt should carry
Whether you print it or issue it digitally, a defensible contribution receipt has the same fields. Missing any one of them turns the receipt into an IOU.
- A unique receipt number, issued in an unbroken sequence
- The name of your society, mandal or trust (and registration number, if you have one)
- The festival and the year — “Ganesh Chaturthi 2026”, not just “Ganpati”
- The date the money was actually received
- Who paid: the flat or unit number for members, the name for outside donors
- The amount, in figures — and the mode: cash, UPI, bank transfer
- Who collected it, so a query has a name attached to it
Numbering: the part everybody gets wrong
Receipt numbers must run in one unbroken sequence per festival. The moment two volunteers carry two separate receipt books, you have two number ones, and no way to prove how many receipts were actually issued. A gap in the sequence is worse — it is the first thing an auditor circles.
The fix is to have one source issuing the numbers. In Kosh, the receipt number is generated by the system the instant a collection is recorded, in sequence, for that festival. Ten volunteers collecting in ten wings still produce one clean series, because none of them are choosing the number.
Corrections, not erasures
Mistakes happen — a wrong amount, the wrong flat. The instinct is to tear out the page. Do not. A missing receipt number is indistinguishable from a hidden one. Record the correction as its own entry so the trail reads: issued, corrected, why. Your accounts should be able to explain every number, including the wrong ones.
Paper, digital, or both
Paper receipts are fine — until the book gets wet at the mandap, or the treasurer travels with it. A digital receipt is issued the moment you record the collection, carries the same fields, and cannot be lost. Kosh generates a numbered, branded receipt on the spot; you can show it on the phone, print it, or save it as a PDF for anyone who wants a hard copy.
The point is not the medium. It is that the receipt exists at the moment the money changes hands, not at midnight when someone tries to remember the day.