Tracking Endowment Payouts

Kayci Hebard

Hello Community,

I am trying to figure out the best way to track Endowment payouts.  We have several gifts from donors (alive and passed) that were made to Endowments which pay out a certain percentage every year for a restricted or unrestricted purpose.  The original gift in 2012 say, $200,000 was entered into RE and marked with a specific restricted fund but since it is an endowment the principle of $200,000 was never spent.  In 2013 a 4% payout was extracted from the account and can now be spent for the specified purpose.  If I entered the $200,000 in 2012 and the 4% payout in 2013 then in RE the account would state the fund would hold $208,000 or so which isn't necessarily correct. I am at a loss at how to accurately record these types of gifts.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated

JoAnn Strommen

For us, any payouts are recorded in accounting software.  We don't add interest in to gift amounts or try to withdraw amounts. RE is not accounting software. 

Maybe someone else will have a suggestion on how you can track - I don't know that it's possible.

Theresa Brown

Raiser's Edge should just be used for the receipt of the original and any future gifts to the endowment.  Separate endowment accounting software should be used by your accounting department to track the distributions and investment earnings on the endowments.  This can be done within Financial Edge; however, many use other programs from other vendors, such as Endowment Manager, etc.



I really think trying to track these things in Raiser's Edge would be a nightmare. 

Christine Cooke 2

I agree with what the others have said about the payouts.  Raiser's Edge is designed for INCOMING only.  All outgoing funds are recorded in your finance department.  Besides -- RE does not let you record negative numbers/amounts - so how would you record an outgoing anyway?  Sounds like you were trying to adjust the orginal gift.  That does not work for oh so many reasons.



IF you want to keep some sort of record attached to the original gift in RE  -- you could either make a Relationship to the person/org receiving the payout and put on note on the relationship.  OR you could make a Gift Attribute on the orginal gift.  But keep in mind -- the Gift will never reflect the earnings that you are really using to make those payouts.  I could see the value in wanting to know who benefited from that original gift, so my suggestion, if that is the goal, is to figure out the best way to record that info and keep the accounting in the finance department.