Logging Gift Fees in RE

Joanne Lusher

Hi, this is probably a stupid questions... but...

We are finally just getting organised in putting all our gifts into RE....

We have a payroll giving system set up, through CAF whereby they take a fee for each transaction and we also use Blackbaud Merchant Services where they take a fee per transaction too.

So, I wonder how do you record these fees on RE? Do you log the gift amount, so the amount the constituent gave, such as £10, or do you log it after CAF have taken their fee off so for example £9.30? 

Is there a way, that I'm missing, to automatically set RE to take these fees off certain types of gifts?

Any advice on how your organisation deals with this, I would be grateful.  Many thanks

Melissa Eschweiler

Hi

We do not record banking fees in the gift records.

We record fees in Financial Edge, the accounting software.

The donor's gift is not lessened by the fees.  The fees are a cost of doing business.  The gift is a credit to your revenue.  The fees are a debit to your expenses.

This is something you may want to consult with your accountant on.

Depending on the size of the gifts, you could afftect their tax receipt letters by reducing gift amounts to subtract fees.

Hope that helps.

JoAnn Strommen

Joanne, not a stupid question.  Issue of fees appears on posts every few months. 



Like Melissa posted, fees are considered cost of doing business and handled by accounting.  Full gift amount,if known, is entered in RE for us.

Joanne Lusher

Melissa Eschweiler:

Hi

We do not record banking fees in the gift records.

We record fees in Financial Edge, the accounting software.

The donor's gift is not lessened by the fees.  The fees are a cost of doing business.  The gift is a credit to your revenue.  The fees are a debit to your expenses.

This is something you may want to consult with your accountant on.

Depending on the size of the gifts, you could afftect their tax receipt letters by reducing gift amounts to subtract fees.

Hope that helps.

Hi Melissa

Thanks so much for this, this makes me feel a lot better. Our fees are certainly taken out and accounted for within our finance team but I just wondered whether this should be reflected on RE too. You are certainly right though, I need to think about the whole gift and record what the constituent intended to give us.  I was just getting a bit bogged down in thinking about all this.

Thanks again!

Jo

Joanne Lusher

JoAnn Strommen:

Joanne, not a stupid question.  Issue of fees appears on posts every few months. 



Like Melissa posted, fees are considered cost of doing business and handled by accounting.  Full gift amount,if known, is entered in RE for us.

Hi JoAnn

Thanks so much for your help.  I feel a lot better about this now, it's good to know I was on the right track after all.

Kind regards



Jo

 

Charleigh Parker

We sync with Financial Edge, so we have to put the amount actually received into RE.  We get around this by entering the gift on whoever cut the check (Google, Benevity, etc.) and soft-crediting the individual donor(s) with the full amount of their original gift.

Dorothy Skobba

Melissa Eschweiler:

Hi

We do not record banking fees in the gift records.

We record fees in Financial Edge, the accounting software.

The donor's gift is not lessened by the fees.  The fees are a cost of doing business.  The gift is a credit to your revenue.  The fees are a debit to your expenses.

This is something you may want to consult with your accountant on.

Depending on the size of the gifts, you could afftect their tax receipt letters by reducing gift amounts to subtract fees.

Hope that helps.

I have another question regarding this topic.  Is there any way to reconcile in one report the donations minus the fees so that the final total will match what you are depositing into the bank?

Jen Claudy

We enter the total amount as the Gift Amount ($100.00), and then we record CC Amt Rec'd ($97.14) and CC Fees ($2.86) as Gift Attributes.  All of our reporting is done on the Gift Amount, which for Development, should be the full amount.  But the Attributes let us retain the fee data and use it when reconciling with our Finance Dept (we do not use FE) as well as with the BBMS Disbursement Reports.


There isn't a way that I am aware of to have RE do this for you automatically.  I have an Excel spreadsheet with formulas on some cells, so I can type in the donated amount and get the fee & received amounts, or type in the received amount and get the other two.