Guide

Donations API

The Donations API lets your own tools record and look up gifts: enter a donation the moment it happens in an external system, search a donor's giving history, or pull gifts by date range for a dashboard. It shares everything with the Constituents API and the Volunteerism API — the same API keys, the same base URL, the same error shape, and the same field vocabulary your donation webhooks already speak.

Authentication

Use the same key you use for the other APIs (Subscription Settings → API Keys, team admins only), sent as a bearer token on every request:

Authorization: Bearer argenta_sk_...

The base URL is https://app.argentasoftware.com/api/v1. All requests and responses are JSON.

Endpoints

Method & path	What it does
`POST /donations`	Record a donation for a constituent. `FkConstituent` and `DonationAmount` are required; everything else is optional.
`GET /donations/{id}`	Fetch one donation.
`GET /donations?constituentId=...`	A constituent's giving history, newest first.
`GET /donations?search=...&startDate=...&endDate=...&minAmount=...&maxAmount=...`	Search by donor name or email, filtered by date range and amount range. Paged, max page size 100.

Donations are create-only through the API — by design. There is no update and no delete endpoint for a donation. These are money records: once a gift is recorded, corrections, refunds, and deletions happen inside Argenta where the full modification history and general-ledger connections live. If your integration needs to fix a mis-entered gift, fix it in Argenta.

Record a donation

A donation always belongs to an existing constituent. Create or find the constituent first (the Constituents API upsert is built for exactly this), then:

curl -X POST "https://app.argentasoftware.com/api/v1/donations" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer argenta_sk_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "FkConstituent": 424037,
    "DonationAmount": 250.00,
    "DateOfDonation": "2026-07-24",
    "FkCampaign": 4505,
    "DesignatedPurpose": "General Fund",
    "DonationDescription": "Monthly partner gift via HubSpot"
  }'

You get 201 with {"created": true, "donation": {...}}. Argenta treats the entry exactly like a hand-entered gift: the donor record is found or created for that constituent, the donor's giving level recalculates, the gift appears in the Donations grid and the donor's history immediately, and your donation.created webhook fires. The date defaults to today if you leave it off.

Running an event outside Argenta? This is the route for money you collected elsewhere — the cash and checks taken at a tournament, a gala, a phone bank. Put those gifts on a campaign with FkCampaign and they count toward that campaign's total alongside everything raised on your Argenta donation form, so the campaign reports what it actually raised. If you sold something rather than received a gift (tickets, sponsorships, tee packages), record it as a campaign sale instead.

Donation fields

Field	Type	Notes
`FkConstituent`	int	Required. The constituent who gave. Must exist in your account.
`DonationAmount`	decimal	Required. Positive, up to 10,000,000. Immutable once recorded.
`DateOfDonation`	date	Defaults to today.
`DonationDescription`	string	Free-text note about the gift.
`DesignatedPurpose`	string	What the donor designated the gift for.
`CheckNumber`	string	For check gifts.
`FkDonationType`, `FkCategory`, `FkPaymentMethod`	int	Ids from your account's lookup lists, fetched from GET /lookups; `null` for the default. Unknown ids are rejected.
`FkCampaign`	int	The campaign this gift belongs to, so it counts toward that campaign's total. Get the id from GET /lookups/campaigns. Leave it off, or send `null` or `1`, for no campaign. A campaign from another account, or one that is locked or view-only, is rejected.
`IsAnonymous`, `IsTribute`, `IsThankYouSent`	bool	Flags, all default false. Tribute gifts can carry `TributeName` and `TributeNote`.
`Employer`, `Occupation`, `EmployerLocation`	string	For political teams recording contribution compliance details. 50 characters max — over-length is rejected, never truncated.

Everything else a donation carries in Argenta — general-ledger posting, funds and accounts, event attribution, recurring schedules, receipts, refunds — is managed in-app and is not writable through the API. Unknown fields are rejected with 400 unknown_field rather than ignored, so a typo can never silently drop data.

On the way back out, a single donation carries FkCampaign as an id, so you can confirm what a create actually attributed instead of taking the 201 on trust. The search and history lists carry CampaignTitle as text, so you can reconcile a campaign without a second call for every row.

Errors

Same shape as the other APIs: an HTTP status plus a JSON body with a machine code and a human message.

Status	Code	When
400	`missing_field` / `invalid_field` / `unknown_field`	The body failed validation. Nothing was written — a bad field never leaves a blank donation behind.
401	`unauthorized`	Missing, malformed, revoked, or unknown key.
403	`insufficient_scope`	A read-only key tried to record a donation.
403	`record_protected`	The constituent, or the campaign you named, is locked or view-only.
404	`not_found`	No donation with that id in your account.
413	`payload_too_large`	Body over 64 KB.
429	`rate_limited`	Slow down and retry with backoff.

Rate limits
Two limits apply, not one. Per key it is 15 requests a second and 600 a minute. There is also a per-IP limit of 40 a second and 1200 a minute, checked before we even read your key, so several keys calling from the same server share that budget. Either limit returns a 429 with a Retry-After header saying how many seconds to wait. The AI writing assistant is metered on its own separate from these: 10 requests a minute and 100 an hour for each person, and 1,000 an hour across the whole system. It also refuses text longer than 10,000 characters before any limit is counted.

The same per-key limits as the rest of /api/v1. Batch entry is fine — pace large imports and honor 429 responses with a backoff and they will sail through.

Pair this API with the donation webhooks (donation.created, donation.refunded, donation.receipted, and friends) to keep an external system in sync in both directions — see Webhooks.