Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Dolibarr Beneficiary Records — NCS Charitable Services.

If you work with the NCS charitable services side of NZRT, you’ll want to understand how beneficiary organisations are tracked inside Dolibarr. This episode walks you through the record schema, how records get created, what delivery notes look like, and how to query those records via the API.

Let’s start with the basics. In Dolibarr, beneficiary organisations are stored as Third Parties — the same entity type used for commercial customers. The key difference is that these records are flagged as customer type, not supplier, and importantly, no invoicing ever happens against them.

Here’s how the record fields break down. There are seven main fields to know about. The name field holds the organisation’s name, taken directly from their application email. The client field is set to one, which marks this as a customer or beneficiary type. The supplier field is set to zero, because these organisations are not suppliers. The email field holds the applicant’s email address as the primary contact. The status field is set to one, meaning active, and that’s applied at the time of creation. The organisation type field is left as the Dolibarr default, depending on whether New Zealand organisation types are configured in your instance. And finally, there’s a private note field — this is where you record what services were delivered and when, either manually or via an agent note.

Now, how do these records actually get created? For most NCS workflows, you don’t have to do this by hand. Records are created automatically by the CAS agent when it processes an approved application through the charitable delivery workflow. But if you ever need to create one manually through the Dolibarr user interface, here’s the process. You navigate to Third Parties, then New Third Party. You set the name, the email, and make sure the client flag is set to one. You save the record and note the ID Dolibarr assigns. Then you add a private note documenting the delivery.

Speaking of delivery records — this is an important one. Because NCS charitable delivery is at no cost, you never raise an invoice for these. Instead, the delivery is documented in that private note field. A typical note would say something like: NCS delivery on the 27th of April 2026, listing the services delivered — for example Knowledge Systems and Claude Code AI Agent Setup — noting that delivery was made via automated email from the NZRT sales address, and recording which email address the GitHub zip files were sent to. That’s essentially a plain-language delivery receipt sitting right inside the record.

Now, if you ever need a more formal paper trail — say for charitable registration evidence or reporting purposes — there is an option to create a zero-dollar commercial proposal. You’d set the beneficiary organisation as the third party, add one line per service delivered with a unit price of zero, then validate and close it. This gives you a proper document record without creating any payment obligation. It’s purely for audit and reporting.

Finally, let’s talk about querying beneficiary records. If you’re pulling data via the Dolibarr REST API using the CAS API key, you send a request to the thirdparties endpoint asking for up to one hundred results and filtering by client type one. In plain terms, that means you’re asking Dolibarr to return all third parties that are flagged as customer or beneficiary type. From there you can filter further by organisation name or by keywords in the private note to zero in on NCS-specific records.

So to recap: beneficiaries live in Dolibarr as Third Parties, flagged as client type with no invoicing, delivery is documented in the private note, and the CAS agent handles creation automatically in most cases. When formal records are needed, a zero-dollar proposal is your tool of choice.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.