January's Stuff You Need to Know Forum Contest

David Springer · January 2017

Hey RE Community!

For January's Stuff You Need to Know resources, we're focusing on Receipting and Annual Statements! We've shared our picks, and now we want to hear from you! What are some tips and tricks you use to make your receipting and annual statements run more smoothly? Tips are great, but screen shots or links to resources are even better!

The post with the most likes at the end of the month wins January's forum contest. Feel free to post whenever you'd like, but the sooner you post, the longer it will have to get likes!

What do you say? What helps you be a Raiser's Edge Annual Receipts/Statements master?

Susan Chomsky · January 2017

David Springer:

Hey RE Community!

For January's Stuff You Need to Know resources, we're focusing on Receipting and Annual Statements! We've shared our picks, and now we want to hear from you! What are some tips and tricks you use to make your receipting and annual statements run more smoothly? Tips are great, but screen shots or links to resources are even better!

The post with the most likes at the end of the month wins January's forum contest. Feel free to post whenever you'd like, but the sooner you post, the longer it will have to get likes!

What do you say? What helps you be a Raiser's Edge Annual Receipts/Statements master?

Including the gift amount and the receipt amount on the statements means that the benefits need to be entered properly on the record. In previewing the Year-End Statments I noticed that several gifts did not have the correct receipt amount. My entry team was including it on the acknowledgement letters but not the gift record. I created a "How to Add Gift Benefits in Batch" doc. and will hopefully have perfect data next year. Happy to share it here . . .

Judith Raub · January 2017

We have not figured out how to do Annual Receipts with benefits so we do not use RE since we do benefits and use split gifts; none of the reports are adequate for reflecting tax regulation receipts. We currently manually do them outside of RE so sorry no helpful tips from me.

Sunshine Reinken Watson · January 2017

We don't send reports unless it is requested because our acknowledgement letters serve as receipts. I send the "Annual Statement Report" under Reports-Financial Reports. I change the name of the "Receipt Amount" column to "Tax Deductible" and add a footer with the tax blurb (no goods or services, etc.).

Melissa S Graves · January 2017

Sunshine Watson:

We don't send reports unless it is requested because our acknowledgement letters serve as receipts. I send the "Annual Statement Report" under Reports-Financial Reports. I change the name of the "Receipt Amount" column to "Tax Deductible" and add a footer with the tax blurb (no goods or services, etc.).

for your constituents who are paying monthly installments (assuming you have some) do they get monthly letters as well?

Sunshine Reinken Watson · January 2017

Melissa Graves:

Sunshine Watson:

We don't send reports unless it is requested because our acknowledgement letters serve as receipts. I send the "Annual Statement Report" under Reports-Financial Reports. I change the name of the "Receipt Amount" column to "Tax Deductible" and add a footer with the tax blurb (no goods or services, etc.).

for your constituents who are paying monthly installments (assuming you have some) do they get monthly letters as well?

We don't have very many, so they receive letters as well. That's a good point. We are looking to add a sustainer program, so annual statements may be in my future

ShawnAlis Cusato · January 2017

Susan Chomsky:

Including the gift amount and the receipt amount on the statements means that the benefits need to be entered properly on the record. In previewing the Year-End Statments I noticed that several gifts did not have the correct receipt amount. My entry team was including it on the acknowledgement letters but not the gift record. I created a "How to Add Gift Benefits in Batch" doc. and will hopefully have perfect data next year. Happy to share it here . . .

Your documentation was helpful, but I have a question. If the benefits are added to the gift in batch, why must they be added to the gift after the batch is committed? Or did I misunderstand something?

Judith Raub · January 2017

Thank you to everyone who has responded to my post. Thank you for sharing your tips and suggestions as we struggle through this process. Our University has LOTS of benefits (Athletics, PBS TV Station, Theatre, Any Fundraising event for any Department, etc) that need to be on the receipt and we also have several split gifts so we can not get either report to work for us. We can run each of the two reports to get the different information we need to be in one receipt. We have been in RE for a little over a year and I am not trained or have knowledge how to do a custom report; so that is why we currently do our receipts manually.

Thanks again.

Megan Kern 2 · January 2017

Query and export! We send year end statements to $250+ donors by the foundation they gave to.

I tried sharing a picture of what is included in my export but am doing something wrong. Basically, total recipt amount, addressee, salutation, address and sort key are included and we use the gift criteria to further narrow down what we are looking at.

Susan Chomsky · January 2017

ShawnAlis Cusato:

Susan Chomsky:

Including the gift amount and the receipt amount on the statements means that the benefits need to be entered properly on the record. In previewing the Year-End Statments I noticed that several gifts did not have the correct receipt amount. My entry team was including it on the acknowledgement letters but not the gift record. I created a "How to Add Gift Benefits in Batch" doc. and will hopefully have perfect data next year. Happy to share it here . . .

Your documentation was helpful, but I have a question. If the benefits are added to the gift in batch, why must they be added to the gift after the batch is committed? Or did I misunderstand something?

If added in batch then it's done. If not added in batch and needing to update the gift record . . . this is how to add the benefit.

Sharla Donohue · January 2017

David Springer:

Hey RE Community!

For January's Stuff You Need to Know resources, we're focusing on Receipting and Annual Statements! We've shared our picks, and now we want to hear from you! What are some tips and tricks you use to make your receipting and annual statements run more smoothly? Tips are great, but screen shots or links to resources are even better!

The post with the most likes at the end of the month wins January's forum contest. Feel free to post whenever you'd like, but the sooner you post, the longer it will have to get likes!

What do you say? What helps you be a Raiser's Edge Annual Receipts/Statements master?

We send out annual statements to all sustaining donors and all donors with total giving of $250+. Consequently, we have to use a mailhouse to print them for us because we send out over 16,000. We do send acknowledgement letters to all donors as well, but our CEO and Development VP feel that the annual statement is an important stewardship tool.

I have also created a custom Crystal Report that we can use to generate one-off annual statements. We used Crystal so we could personalize it a little more, adding our logo to the header, etc. It looks a little cleaner than the canned version.

January's Stuff You Need to Know Forum Contest

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