Batch Numbering

Lawrence Rush · December 2016

Another point of confusion with our fiscal year ending in November. Should Batch Numbers follow the fiscal or calendar year. Our finance and development departments disagree. What do you do?

JoAnn Strommen · December 2016

Oh, the funny things that people can disagree on.

What difference does it make to finance? We're integrated with FE and I'm guessing that finance staff members never or hardly ever look at batch number. For me, the batch description is more important if I'm looking for something specific as we are entering gifts for 2016 and 2017 annual campaign all with batch #s for 2016.

(our fiscal yr is cal yr so not a point of disagreement for us)

Jessica Thrift 2 · December 2016

Lawrence Willim:

Another point of confusion with our fiscal year ending in November. Should Batch Numbers follow the fiscal or calendar year. Our finance and development departments disagree. What do you do?

Generally, I prefer to go by the fiscal year since the majority of we do is sorted, filed, & reported on the fiscal year. I think about what will make my life easiest with the auditors. I agree that it is a funny thing to disagree over, though.

Heidi Tabat · December 2016

Lawrence Willim:

Another point of confusion with our fiscal year ending in November. Should Batch Numbers follow the fiscal or calendar year. Our finance and development departments disagree. What do you do?

We have had this same discussion at our organization. We try to look at things from an organziation level so that we stay consistent no matter what area we are working in. Our fiscal starts on July 1st every year. I have found that many people do not understand off the top of their head how to use a fiscal year meaning do you use 2016 or 2017 for the 2016-2017 fiscal year? Some people use 2016 because that is when it starts and some use 2017 because that is when it ends. To avoid this, we use the calendar year for batch numbers as well as naming conventions for other items in the database.

Sunshine Reinken Watson · December 2016

We don't align batch numbers to years. It doesn't really matter, as the batch numbers are just a reference number for us.

Amy Barker 2 · December 2016

Interesting. We just go with whatever batch number comes next automatically. Our finance department absolutely doesn't care!

Joanne Felci 2 · December 2016

We do the same thing as Amy B - whatever the next number is, that is the batch number

My old org used to start with the year then the next random number (it was by calendar year)

I actually preferred that as it was easier to glance that the batch numbers to see when they were from (though you can easily do that by batch date/gift date as well)

Rachel Slager 2 · December 2016

I'm with JoAnn on this: why do they care? It's great to have batch descriptions that are meaningful and batch numbers that help you find things by date or purpose. In my opinion the purpose of batch numbers is more important to the RE user than the FE/other finance user, so if the gift handlers/receipt runners think in calendar years, do it their way.

Heather MacKenzie · January 2017

Lawrence Willim:

Another point of confusion with our fiscal year ending in November. Should Batch Numbers follow the fiscal or calendar year. Our finance and development departments disagree. What do you do?

Interesting conversation. This has NEVER come up at all here that I'm aware of. We just let RE assign the next sequential number in the numerical sequence, and we keep the batch commit control report with the gift(s) it applies to, so it's there for reference, but that's it.

Batch Numbering

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