That sounds like a great feature!

Jenn - how would you typically use this? Do you need to download it - or would an onscreen report do?

Let me clarify: you made a search withing contact database with criteria "Latest Donation Date" "This Year" and then exported found records to Excel. In the Excel file you are looking into "Total donated" column and see "total amount the donor made over the life of their donations". Is it correct? If yes, this unfortunately "by design" behavior. The reason here is you're using contact export feature - and it gives you a list of contacts that match your search criteria. There are a number of predefined columns in this export. Basically, contacts export is not intended to be used as donations report. We have a dedicated Donations report inside Donations tab and also Export of donations. You can export donations into Excel and then group records using contact name/email. This is a workaround, for sure.
As far as I can see, we are talking about dedicated report that shows total donations within a period of time grouped by contact - which is not possible now (except Excel workaround I mentioned above).

I'm also confused on this.

How does one generate a report for donors in Fiscal Year 2011?

My report is using "Latest Donation Date" "This Year" and the export is showing the total amount the donor made over the life of their donations.

If I add "Earliest Donation Date" "This Year" OR "1 January 2011" I get only get the donors who ONLY made donations this fiscal year.

What would make the most sense to me is:

"Donation Date" ">=" "1 January 2011"

"Donation Date" "<=" "31 December 2011"

This would then show ALL the donors for 2011 and the donation SUM they donated DURING the fiscal year 2011.

It wasn't a report, but an export.

All the records were exported, without a YEAR column, just a date that is formatted in a way that's not easy to read (14 Dec 2009). In a separate wish I suggested that every export come with a YEAR, MONTH and possibly WEEK and DAY expressed as numbers, making them easy to filter and create Pivots in Excel.

I'm not sure I understand how grouping of donation would help to resolve this particular problem. When you mentioned "a donation from 2009 was counted in this year" what do you mean by "counted"? Did you use any specific report? If it was donation report, how could a record from 2009 get into 2011 if date range did not include 2009?

We ran into some confusion because a donation from 2009 was counted as this years (as it was the last donation that particular person made). Had the donations been grouped by year, it would have been more clear when it was made.

OK, I see.

Can you comment why is this needed/important?

And I would appreciate comments from other users.

I meant grouping (and therefore separating) donations by year in the Donations and Contacts/Donations views.

Do you mean produce a donations report with totals by year instead of current by month?