If you are seeing pending donations in Charitable that you believe should be paid, etc. (and you are using Stripe as your payment gateway) here are some suggestions to try for troubleshooting:
Why Are Pending Donations Being Created?
Pending donations usually means that a donation was created when Charitable donation form was filled out and sent the request to Stripe, but the message never got to Stripe or Stripe never got the message/webhook back to Charitable.
Troubleshooting
First thing is to (1) make sure your connection to Stripe is active and likely needs to be on live mode – check gateway settings in Charitable settings then (2) view any pending Donation and look at the “donation log” to see if there are any errors or logs that might hold any clues.
One thing to do also is to check Stripe to see if the donations/payments are getting there and check the webhooks in Stripe (make sure the URL is what your website URL). (Stripe can also tell you if there’s a communication problem with the webhook – and if you see an issue or error you can ask their support for more information).
If Stripe has the donation and the webhook is active and well, then one assumes something is happening on the website side. So turning on your debug logs:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-easily-enable-wordpress-debug-mode-to-fix-site-errors
By turning on WP_DEBUG_LOG to true, do a test donation and see if any logs are present in your log file that might hold a clue. Also making sure to check with your host to make sure if there’s any reason why a webhook from Stripe might not be coming through.
Another suggestion would be determine when this started happening (was this always the case? did this recently happen – and if so what happened maybe around that time? was something updated?).
Finally, you can put your gateway settings in Stripe in “test mode”, reconnect to Stripe via test mode, and do a test donation. This would help confirm if webhooks are working properly or if the issue is specific to live mode.
After trying the above, if you still are experiencing issues or if you have questions feel free to reach out to our support team.
