Spouses: One record or separate records? What's your org's policy?

Hello, 


I'm very curious what the policy is for different organizations.  I can see pros and cons to both.  When a gift comes from a person who is married, the gift is really coming from the household. (In my opinion.  I'm sure there are arguments against this thinking, like, for example, couples who keep separate accounts.).  Obviously, if the spouse of the person who sent the gift has their own record, then a soft credit would be applied to that record. 


I'm in the process of learning RE (been using it since last December) with the intent of putting together a policies and procedures manual.  I just recently imported a spreadsheet from an event (which I had to break into multiple spreadsheets according to RE import rules).  The spreadsheet had very little info on it -  just the name of the donor, their email address, the amount of the gift, the date of the gift, and the name of the team leader who will receive a soft credit for the gift.  (My org's directors, who work very closely with a fundraising consultant, don't want to use the solicitor field unless an individual has been officially designated a solicitor and assigned constituents.  So, they want the team leaders of this event to be given a soft credit even though they actively pursued donations.  This is different from the advice given to me by Blackbaud, but it makes sense enough for our org and the way we raise funds.) 


After uploading these spreadsheets, I went back to research (using query) which of the constituents had spouses so that the spouses could receive a soft credit.  (There are over 400 constituents on this spreadsheet - about half had records before importing.)  What I noticed is that several of the donations made were under the constituent's name, but the email address clearly belonged to the spouse.  There were some where the donation was made under both spouses' names - so, who gets the credit and who gets the soft credit?  I've been waffling on whether it makes more sense to keep one record or separate records.  (Ex: If one spouse is a board member and the other is not, then you'd want to keep separate records so you can apply the correct constituent codes.) If one record, then I don't have to go back through a huge spreadsheet to check for spouses and apply soft credit (if those spouse weren't made evident when the donation was made).  Like I said, waffling.  I was dead-set on separate records until going through the spreadsheet to see which spouses needed a soft credit or even a record of their own. (I'm not the one who started this database, BTW.  She left the org.  I'm her replacement and the one who will make sense of her choices and create policies since there are none and data was entered kind of haphazardly.)   


What's your organization's policy?  Any advice is greatly appreciated.  Sara