Request for best practices for businesses with more than one location

Milly Whittington 2

Looking for feedback on how you treat records for businesses with different locations.

• For example, we have one retail store with 7 locations, each with their own record in RE.  We have one bank with 15 records.
  • We receive donations from each of those locations and/or fundraisers have gone to each of those locations to request support.
  • In both cases, at least one of those records is for their 'parent company'.
  • We want to send acknowledgements to the contact at the location that gave.
• If you also create separate records, how do you report on the  total giving for that business?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Milly

Daniel Noga 2

Milly Whittington:

Looking for feedback on how you treat records for businesses with different locations.

• For example, we have one retail store with 7 locations, each with their own record in RE.  We have one bank with 15 records.
  • We receive donations from each of those locations and/or fundraisers have gone to each of those locations to request support.
  • In both cases, at least one of those records is for their 'parent company'.
  • We want to send acknowledgements to the contact at the location that gave.
• If you also create separate records, how do you report on the  total giving for that business?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Milly

 

Hi Milly,


We do the same--we add a new, separate record for any branch of a larger business or organization if that branch or someone affiliated with it donates money to us. Sometimes it can be frustrating when you aren't sure which record you need to look in to find something, but in other ways it helps us keep things together. There is a large bank with many Chicago branches, and each one we deal with has its own record. Sometimes the contact person spans two branches, but we still create separate records just to be absolutely certain we accurately record who gave us which donation and when. 


Reporting on total giving for all branches can be done fairly easily, which helps exacerbate any issues that arise from having so many different records for branches of one company. You could do something like add an Attribute to apply to the records of each branch that is related to a larger business for purposes of reporting, then use that Attribute as a criterion in any queries you write to direct such reporting. You could even make it simple, like the name of the company, so it's easy to remember.


 

JoAnn Strommen

Milly,

This topic comes up on the forums frequently.  You may want to do a search to see responses on this topic that are already posted.


here's just a couple, there are more
https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/157/16189?post_id=51629#p51629

https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/157/16189?post_id=51629#p51629

Angie Stumpo

We keep them all separate. We report using attributes like Daniel suggested.