looking for a better mehtod than spliting gifts for All Donations

Tambri Torresan · May 2017

We are starting to implement a "recovery fund" where 7% of each donation (donations only - not tickets/registrations for events nor sponsorships) go to a recovery fund and the remaining 93% to the designated fund/cause (ie. dialysis or pediatrics). Is there a simple automated way to do this? or will every donation need to be split? (I'm leary to split all donations as that can become messy from a reporting perspective). I'm wondering if there is a best practice or if anyone else does something like this and how they handle it? Thanks

JoAnn Strommen · May 2017

Is this an internal practice or published to donors? Is it something that needs to be tracked in RE or is it more of an accounting function? If it's internal and can be done as part of accounting, I'd just enter entire gift to the fund designated. Yes, split gifts can be messy. If it has to be tracked in RE for reporting, you'd probably want to go split gift amount as separate gifts for each would be a pain. In the batch set up for defaults you can set the 93 and 7% breakout for each gift entered so somewhat automated.

Haven't ever needed to do it but just some questions/thoughts.

Tambri Torresan · May 2017

This is part of a new internal practice we are beginning to implement (though we will have a disclaimer to donors) and only an accounting function.

In fact in RE from a reporting/query/exporting standpoint, I don't even want to know how much goes to the undesignated "recovery fund" - I would rather see the entire donation displayed in the designated fund. We also use FE and post all gifts from RE over. I had thought this process would be better handled to have a transfer done in FE from the designated accounts to the "recovery fund" (on a monthly or quarterly basis) but our accountant does not want to see the money ever hit the designated fund accounts - as we don't want to transfer between designated to undesignated, and thus I am left thinking the only option is to split all donations as they are entered. Which is going to impact my RE reporting in a tricky way.

Tom Klimchak · May 2017

I know I'm in the minority here, but we kinda LIKE splitting gifts in RE. Yes, there are few gift reports where things show up a little silly, but for the most part I find splitting gifts a bit easier than having a bunch of single gifts for the same thing.

We have event tickets where the ticket price is split across THREE differrent accounts (cost, donation and sponsorship) and we generally are able to handle things just fine as long as we remember to include all three accounts in our filtering and to use Fund Split Amount.

Yes, I know, it ads some complexity into the system (especially if you have to do it for EVERY gift) but has also given us some interesting flexibility when it comes to analyzing gifts and where it all goes.

JoAnn Strommen · May 2017

Too bad, it could be easily handled by FE/accounting. But yes, could be a questoinable practice to have money move from a designated fund to an undesignated fund.

As Tom, said split gifts can be reported on. Just have to remember all the extras. IMO, where split gifts get really messy to deal with is for pledges, especially multi year. Function does seem to work better for cash gifts.

Tambri Torresan · May 2017

Tom Klimchak...

I suppose it can add greater insight. It's reassuring to know that other people do use the split gift function more often than not. Right now I am certainly reluctant to make such a huge change to our gift entry process when I don't know the full impact it may have. It's good to know that it works out this way for others. We also use different gift subtypes to separate gifts between donations, tickets, sponsorship - this gift splitting will just hit gifts that are a "donation" to a designated fund to reallocate 7% to an undesignated recovery cost fund. I suppose splitting gifts to another fund is just another dynamic to the process. But the more detail the more detailed reporting.

Aaron Rothberg · May 2017

I don't have much to offer on how to make the splits happen automagically at gift entry, but the one piece of advice I'll offer is that if you choose to split gifts, only do it across one record type. That is to say, split across either only Campaigns or only Appeals or only Funds (in your case, only Funds). If you split gifts across more than one record type you will have a difficult time getting accurate data in Export or Crystal. If, for example, you only split across Funds you can reliably use Fund Split Amount in your Queries and Exports. If, however, you split across both Appeals and Funds and you want to report on both Appeal data and Fund data in the same Export or the same Query, there's no split amount object that can split your gifts correctly so that you don't double count money. Having said that you can still write one report for each; one report for Appeals using Appeal Split Amount and one report for Funds using Fund Split Amount, that works, but it can be confusing. Raiser's Edge Reports are a bit more reliable if you do choose to split gifts across two record types.

Jane Kenny · June 2017

Tambri Torresan:
We are starting to implement a "recovery fund" where 7% of each donation (donations only - not tickets/registrations for events nor sponsorships) go to a recovery fund and the remaining 93% to the designated fund/cause (ie. dialysis or pediatrics). Is there a simple automated way to do this? or will every donation need to be split? (I'm leary to split all donations as that can become messy from a reporting perspective). I'm wondering if there is a best practice or if anyone else does something like this and how they handle it? Thanks

We split our gifts. It gets a little tricky when you start using NXT as the analyze reports bring in the full gift when you want to look at detail. It would be great if they offered a way to see the split gifts instead. I think you could use a default that calculates the split. See gifts - load defaults. You can create a default that you use every time. Just know for reporting to always use split funds not gift to avoid duplications.

Karen Stuhlfeier · June 2017

For things like this we wouldn't woryy about each gift being split on the donor's record. We would put it in the fund the donor intended and transfer 7% of the total to the other fund. It would be more of a finance issue. That seems like a lot of work to do individually if there are going to be a lot of gifts.

Jen Claudy · June 2017

Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to test this again right now, but to my recollection, you can choose any of the 3 Split Amounts no matter where the split is or if there is a split at all.

A $350 gift that is split between 2 Campaigns and 2 Appeals would look like this on the Gift Record Split Tab:

Cpgn1 Fund1 Appeal1 $200

Cpgn2 Fund1 Appeal1 $100

Cpgn1 Fund1 Appeal2 $50

In a Gift Query, it will appear like this:

  GiftAmt CpgnSplitAmt FundSplitAmt AppealSplitAmt

Cpgn1 Fund1 Appeal1 $200 $200 $200     $200

Cpgn2 Fund1 Appeal1 $100 $100 $100     $100

Cpgn1 Fund1 Appeal2 $50 $50 $50 $50

A $400 gift that is not split will appear as:

  GiftAmt CpgnSplitAmt FundSplitAmt AppealSplitAmt

Cpgn1 Fund1 Appeal1 $400 $400 $400     $400

I'm not sure how these work in canned reports, though, so I would advise entering a test Gift Record and running all of your normal reports to be sure you can adjust them as needed.

looking for a better mehtod than spliting gifts for All Donations

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