How a South Indian temple trust digitised donations and cut receipt time from 3 days to 3 minutes

Sri Lakshmi Devasthanam is a 90-year-old temple trust in Thanjavur that manages daily puja donations, festival-specific campaigns (Pongal, Navratri, Thai Poosam), and an anna daanam (free meals) programme serving 600 people daily.

The trust had been using pre-printed receipt books with carbon copies for decades. Two volunteers spent 8-10 hours every week hand-writing receipts, and the temple office maintained a physical ledger for all donations. During major festivals, when donation volumes spiked 5x, the backlog meant donors waited up to 3 days for their 80G receipt.

When the Income Tax Department mandated Form 10BD filing, the trust realised they had no digital records at all. Their CA spent nearly three weeks manually entering an entire year of handwritten entries into a spreadsheet to file the first 10BD statement. The trust secretary knew this was unsustainable.

The trust adopted Donateazy in June 2024 and set up three donation channels: a UPI QR code displayed at the temple entrance, an online donation page for devotees who could not visit in person, and a counter-entry system for cash and cheque donations received at the office.

Key features used: automatic 80G receipt generation (sent instantly via email and WhatsApp), donor directory with PAN collection at first donation, campaign management for festival-specific drives, and the 10BD export tool for year-end compliance. The trust also used the public NGO profile to reach devotees living in Chennai, Bengaluru, and abroad.

Within 6 months, the trust had digitised all active donor records (4,200+ donors), eliminated the receipt backlog entirely, and reduced 10BD filing time from 3 weeks to under 2 hours. Festival campaign collections increased by 28% as online donations from out-of-town devotees supplemented in-person giving. The two volunteers previously dedicated to receipt writing were reassigned to the anna daanam programme.