Payroll Deductions - Hard credits and donor information

Coleen Barry:

Alan Cole:

Coleen Barry:

We have been recording payroll deductions under the employer and soft crediting the donor. We are looking to switch to hard credit the donor, but are coming up against an issue and wonder how others have handled it. When we get a check in from a corporation for payroll deductions, it sometimes has donor names attached. Sometimes not. Sometimes we can look them up through an online portal, such as for example through YourCause, but we've noticed that depending on the company, it can take some time before we can access that information. Other times we've had to contact a company (whether through phone call or email) to get information, but it can still take some time to actually get the donor info.


If you're organization receives a check from a corporation that are payroll deductions and your organization hard credits the donor rather than the corporation, how do you handle not having the donor information when you receive the check?

Colleen, lack of donor information can be a vexing issue. After reading "Fundraising in the Raiser's Edge" by Bill Conners I was able to convince the organization I worked for at the time to hard credit donors rather than third parties for gifts. This included Donor Advised Funds as well. My biggest challenge at the time was not identifying the donors, though that did come up periodically, but rather historical donor reporting which accounted for the switch. This we handled using filtering queries to generate the reports. However, once our querying system was set up and fine-tuned, things went pretty well.
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To account for unknown original donors, we created a record for Un-Named Donor. We considered using our “Anonymous Donor” record, but ultimately decided that we wanted a separate record to identify these particular gifts for adjustment if the donor’s identity became known in the future. If/when the donor was identified, we adjusted the original gift (in the Unknown Donor record) to $0.00 and added a new gift to the newly identified donor’s record using the same gift information and postdate from the original gift. The adjustment report would be worded to account for the creation of a replacement gift so finance wouldn't get confused in our EOM reconciliations.
The final thing I would do is establish a relationship between the donor record and third-party record to help identify the real donors in the future. While this wasn’t exactly a streamlined process, it wasn’t a really pervasive issue and allowed us to record things in a timely fashion and still be able to review and update these items as needed.


Hope this helps...Alan

 

Thank you! Question - is your Raiser's Edge integrated with Financial Edge? Our plan is to integrate eventually, but Accounting thinks if we adjust gifts after integration it will cause an issue.

I have never worked with Financial Edge, but I cannot imagine why adjustments would cause an issue. It is designed to be an integrated financial system, and adjustments are the GAAP approved method of notating edits. Perhaps the entry of a new gift to replace the adjusted gift may require consideration in your process design (especially for gifts back-dated outside the reconciliation window) but I would be surprised at any issues which couldn't be easily remedied . Of course, if Blackbaud would ever introduce a way to merge/move single gifts at a time, vs. all gifts from one record to another that would be ideal. But that is another conversation...and one that has been posted on their suggestion board. Best of luck!