Prepaid Contribution

Cathleen Mai · July 2018

When you receive a cash gift with a time restriction, lets say 15000$ cash to be released over the next 5 years - $3000 each year. How would you record the release, so that

the $3000 shows up in the release year in reports. I was thinking to adjust the original gift, that was booked into Fund "Prepaid Contributions" and split it between "Released Asset"

and "Prepaid Contribution" Fund, but this would leave the original gift date intact (I cannot have 2 different dates for one gift) and therefore will not show the gift in the year it was released.

James Andrews · July 2018

Cathleen Mai:

When you receive a cash gift with a time restriction, lets say 15000$ cash to be released over the next 5 years - $3000 each year. How would you record the release, so that

the $3000 shows up in the release year in reports. I was thinking to adjust the original gift, that was booked into Fund "Prepaid Contributions" and split it between "Released Asset"

and "Prepaid Contribution" Fund, but this would leave the original gift date intact (I cannot have 2 different dates for one gift) and therefore will not show the gift in the year it was released.

I think this is basically what you're saying, but we have a fund that points to a deferred income line in our GL, and each year we do a gift adjustment to move things out to their actual funds. We're integrated between RE and FE so this automatically generates the journal entry and everything.

Cathleen Mai · July 2018

Thank You, James. I guess my question is mainly how to record the release, so that

the $3000 shows up in the release year in reports. With an adjustment the gift date is still the year of the original gift.

Aaron Rothberg · July 2018

Hi Cathleen-

I think whatever you choose is going to be non-intuitive since this seems more like an accounting function than a fundraising function. I can't think of a way in Raiser's Edge to track the spending/disbursement of funds. I worked for a college that provided scholarships and we could easily track in Raiser's Edge how much money was donated into that fund, but there's no intuitive way to track the fund balance as scholarship money is disbursed to students and to me that sounds similar to what you're trying to do.

If your preference is to record each $3000 payment within whatever year the funds should be expended, to me that sounds like a pledge with pledge payments. Of course, this doesn't make much sense since you've already received the full $15,000, but it sounds like it's more important to you to track the installments than to report the full gift amount in the year the check was received. You wouldn't be tracking money that was spent, per se, but more so you'd be tracking money that was available to spend.

Cathleen Mai · July 2018

Thank You. That's helpful.

James Andrews · July 2018

Cathleen Mai:

Thank You, James. I guess my question is mainly how to record the release, so that

the $3000 shows up in the release year in reports. With an adjustment the gift date is still the year of the original gift.

Ah I gotcha. We converted to yearly campaigns in FY17, so our reporting for this kind of thing is based off the campaign year, not the gift date.

Elizabeth Johnson · July 2018

We have done some pretzel making in the past to deal with this type of situation. Going forth we have decided to suggest to the donors that they set up a donor advised fund to avoid cash gifts with time restrictions. As far as I know, we have not yet done so, so I can't say how well it will be received. Food for thought

Cathleen Mai · July 2018

Thank you, Elizabeth.

Prepaid Contribution

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