New Tax Law Making Donor want to attribute check given in 2017 to be for yearend 2018

Like Joanne said it is a gift in 2017 and receipted to donor as such.  The rest is internal for your org. For our annual campaign each year is a fund, where Joanne describes an appeal. For our capital campaign, donors are frequently paying off pledges early, which is only slightly  different. Gift entered when they pay it. We actually had one donor pay off what was to be his 5 year pledge the first year. Just had to make annual campaign records way ahead for the special multi-year multi-fund ask he responded to.


As long as you query by gifts to the fund/appeal regardless of date you will pull the 'early' donors. It may take some slight adjustments to how you pull your queries and exports, don't only look at calendar year.

At my last org, we use Attributes to track Solicit Codes (or Mail Codes as we called them, to cut down on some confusion).  When we would encounter a situation like this, we would put a temporary Mail Code on the record so that it would be excluded from solicitation mailing (but still receive other pieces, like newsletters) for whatever length of time was needed...as indicated in the Attribute Comment.  There weren't many of these, so when pulling a mailing list, it was part of the process to read over all of the comments for the "Special Instructions" Mail Code and include/exclude accordingly.  This would also assist in making sure that the constituent ended up back on the lists after a timeframe that may be longer than the actual criteria.  So if someone paid off a 5 year pledge in year one, they'd be excluded from solicitations for 5 years, and then included even if the criteria for an appeal was for donors who have given in the past 3 years or who have given every year for the past 5 years.


For receipt purposes, the gift counts in the year of the postmark...or when the funds leave the control of the donor.