Real Time Disclosure

Unfortunately, the government can pass legislation to help a company or harm it. The Party in power certainly wouldn't want to hurt a company that provides major donations to it, or whose owners or managers do. Conversely, they could harm a company that makes significant donations to the opposition party. For many years the legislation requires political parties to report the names and addresses of everyone who donates more than $100 in a calendar year (or during an election campaign) to Elections Ontario in the Annual Financial Return (or Campaign Return). More recently (2007?) the government passed legislation requiring this information to be provided within ten business days such donations are received. This is "Real Time Disclosure."

So, for example, a person who donates $25 each month must be reported within 10 days of the fifth donation as having donated $25 recently and $125 total for the year. The next month, report another $25 donation for a total of $150, and so on until the last month of the year when the total donated is $300. Accordingly it is necessary to submit a new file at least every two weeks.

The process is substantially automated with an RTD Donations Report in CRM that extracts all donation records for the year (or campaign period) and an RTD Template spreadsheet that takes this data and accumulates the donations by donor. Elections Ontario issues specification for the format of the file required to be submitted. The format was modified in 2017, which required revisions to both the CRM extract procedure and the RTD Template spreadsheet.

The following instructions assume a working knowledge of Microsoft Excel or compatible spreadsheet application.

Extract Donations

1. Select <Donations - Donation Reports> to open the "Contributions Reports" page.
2. From the list, click on < Contribution Details for RTD Reporting>. This will produce a listing of all Donations and Member Dues so far this year. (Note that the Party treats member dues as donations.)
3. Click on [Export to CSV]. This will create a new file in your Downloads folder, with a name like "Report_20180126-1808" (produced 6:08 PM on January 26, 2018).
4. Open this file. It is the 'raw data' for the RTD Template.

Note: If you are producing a file for the previous year click on <Report Criteria> scroll down to "Set Filters" and look for "Receive Date." Change it to "Previous Year." (Do not click on [Update Report]).

Create RTD File

The RTD Template workbook should be copied from the previous Treasurer.

1. Open the RTD Template.
2. Select the RawData sheet. If this is the first time you are creating an RTD file for the the current year, delete all of the data in this sheet.
3. Copy all of the data from the "Report_20..." file generated above to the RawData sheet in the RTD Template. Scroll to the last record to confirm all rows have been copied.
4. Sort the raw data first by Receive Date, then by Donor Name.
5. Select the RTD sheet. Note it will have over 400 rows, many with mostly zeroes (0). Confirm that the last record in the RawData sheet is included in the RTD sheet. If not, copy the last row enough times to show all donations.
6. Select all the rows with actual donation data and all columns but the last one (Donor Name).
7. Open a new work book (<Ctrl-N>).
8. Paste Values (<Ctrl-H-V-S-V>) and Formats (Ctrl-H-V-S-T>) to the new sheet.
9. Sort the sheet by Aggregate Amount and delete all rows where Aggregate Amount is less than or equal to $100.00.
10. Sort by Acceptance (Deposit) Date. If this is not the first RTD file to be created in the current year, delete all records reported in previous RTD files. (Refer to the print out of the previous RTD file.)
11. Delete the Comment from cell A1.
12. Save this workbook as a CSV file using the naming convention specified by Elections Ontario (currently YYYY_RTD_15_MMDDYYYYhhmm) (as shown in the Comment in the RTD Template file).

Send to Elections Ontario

1. Send the RTD file to Elections Ontario Finance Reporting (efincontributions@elections.on.ca). (If any of the records are more than 10 business days old, provide an explanation.)
2. Print a copy of the email.
3. Format the RTD file for printing on the same page as the email.
   1. Wrap (Alt-H-W) the Header line and adjust the columns widths so the headers fit on two lines.
   2. In the Page Setup dialogue (Alt-P-SP), set the Top margin to 6.3" and the Header to 6.0".
   3. In the Header/Footer tab, set the Header to the File Name.
4. In the Print Preview, confirm that the file will print on the lower half of a single page.
5. Print the file on the bottom half of the email printout.
6. File the page in the donations folder, for reference when producing the next RTD file.