Contributions (and fees) from third party service providers . . .

Kenley Sturdivant-Wilson 2

I would love some insight from the community on how you are entering contributions from third party service providers like Bidr, Run Sign Up, etc.?


We use Bidr for some of our events. When the Bidr payment is received, service fees are "noted" but not included in the payment.

If your organization uses outside providers,

- How are you ensuring donors receive full credit for their gifts especially when fees have been taken out of their original contribution?

- How are you accounting for the difference in the payment amount from the third party vs. the actual contributions? Are you?

- What is your reconciliation process with your Finance departments?


​Thanks so much for your feedback.

JoAnn Strommen

I  can see your desire to record full gift amount.

"- How are you ensuring donors receive full credit for their gifts especially when fees have been taken out of their original contribution?"

There are some times, actually most,  when we don't know the original gift amount. All we record then is received amount.

"- How are you accounting for the difference in the payment amount from the third party vs. the actual contributions? Are you?"

Not accounting for it at this point.

"- What is your reconciliation process with your Finance departments?"

As we are entering amount received, it's pretty straightforward. In any case where we do enter full gift amount, any fees are handled by finance as the cost of doing business just like fees on credit card gifts we process ourselves. 


If you have large # from one processor, you could try to contact them and ask fee rate sothat you could record full amount.

Ryan Hyde

We're pretty much in step with what JoAnn says. We basically never know the full amount from these kinds of things, so we stick with the received amount. If we know the full amount, we will enter the received amount anyway (makes reconcilliation easier) and we will add a note in the reference field indicating the full amount so that when we generate our weekly mail we can spot that (anything in the reference field is colored red in our TY letters) and make the adjustment on the fly. But that's pretty rare. 


Also, you may be wondering about tax consideration about the discrepancy. Typically the discrepancy is so low that the IRS guidelines give you leeway to just ignore it. Who care about a $1.03 charge on a $30 gift anyway? 

Denise Marino

Kenley Sturdivant-Wilson:

I would love some insight from the community on how you are entering contributions from third party service providers like Bidr, Run Sign Up, etc.?


We use Bidr for some of our events. When the Bidr payment is received, service fees are "noted" but not included in the payment.

If your organization uses outside providers,

- How are you ensuring donors receive full credit for their gifts especially when fees have been taken out of their original contribution?

- How are you accounting for the difference in the payment amount from the third party vs. the actual contributions? Are you?

- What is your reconciliation process with your Finance departments?


​Thanks so much for your feedback.

Our current third party shows us both the actual gift amount and the serice fee, so Development enters the full gift amount and Finance has a separate expense line for these fees.

 

Christine Cooke 2

Kenley Sturdivant-Wilson:

I would love some insight from the community on how you are entering contributions from third party service providers like Bidr, Run Sign Up, etc.?


We use Bidr for some of our events. When the Bidr payment is received, service fees are "noted" but not included in the payment.

If your organization uses outside providers,

- How are you ensuring donors receive full credit for their gifts especially when fees have been taken out of their original contribution?

- How are you accounting for the difference in the payment amount from the third party vs. the actual contributions? Are you?

- What is your reconciliation process with your Finance departments?


​Thanks so much for your feedback.

 

Our policy  has been to credit the donor with the full amount.  The fees are the cost of doing business in these technological/modern times.  Just like, I don't believe, anyone deducts the credit card fees from a donor's gift, why is it any different from the other third party vendors?


We reconcile with the business office based on the full amount of the gift and business office handles all of the fees as a separate line item.  The only two exceptions I have run across recently are two businesses that deduct from the distribution -- and then we have to include the math for the deduction spread out over the distribution for however many donors are included in that distribution (I am speaking of Benevity and United Way).  Though if you receive your distributions electronically from Benevity they will do away with the processing fees, yay.

Susan Chomsky

 

We enter the gift under the third party record and soft credit the donor with the full amount. I note the thrid party name and event in the reference field so it shows on the gift tab of the soft credited record.

Laura Abada

Hi Kenley,

​We just started a new process for this in July after much debate. For 3rd party donations we are now recording the actual amount received in the "Gift Amount " field and the total amount donated (gift plus fees that were taken out by the processer) in the "Receipt" field. This is assuming that we can know what the gift total is prior to the fees being taken out. We reconcile with our Finance department and run reports using the Gift Amount and we thank the donor using the Receipt amount. We record the gift under the third party and soft credit the actual donor.



Kenley Sturdivant-Wilson:

I would love some insight from the community on how you are entering contributions from third party service providers like Bidr, Run Sign Up, etc.?


We use Bidr for some of our events. When the Bidr payment is received, service fees are "noted" but not included in the payment.

If your organization uses outside providers,

- How are you ensuring donors receive full credit for their gifts especially when fees have been taken out of their original contribution?

- How are you accounting for the difference in the payment amount from the third party vs. the actual contributions? Are you?

- What is your reconciliation process with your Finance departments?


​Thanks so much for your feedback.