Finance wants to take over downloading OLX donations...

It certainly seems like a duplication of effort if Finance first downloads the transaction, then Development staff have to come in afterwards and fix the gifts/tributes - and that's assuming Development staff can get access to the proper information from the gift after the transaction is processed. There is an option to export the selected transactions, which may help if Finance first exports all the gifts to a .csv file for the Development team to verify.

Wow! This is a crazy situation. I think the first place to start is trying to determine what options are available to you. This seems like a bit of a power struggle, or a power grab at least. While I believe you have every right to feel the way you do, I think you need to discuss with your team and supervisors about what you feel is being lost and what is needed to be captured in the data entry. There needed to be some training that happened in regard to the data entry so that some level of data hygiene can be maintained. Do you have a SOP or policy around data entry? If you don't, a good step is creating one so that you have a document to give the folks over in finance so that they do not create potential problems. Having correct training on how to properly enter gifts should have been done before ever allowing anyone to enter the gifts. Fidelity could be a wonderful case study, as to determine when they are the actual donor (DAF) or when they are not (IRA).

What @Vered Siegel stated is key. You always need to have a check and balance like @Danielle Lifshitz mentioned. A separation of duties is always helpful, and right now it seems a little bit muddied.

All of this is incumbent upon you speaking up & your management speaking up for you and your processes. If you don't have a manager that is willing to back you up on your thoughts, then you will be fighting an uphill battle. I'm imagining that if finance understood what the gift entry truly entailed to be done properly and accurately, they would gladly give it back up to you.

I've faced this before in my career and it hasn't always gone the way I'd hoped.

Here are a couple of questions that I think might help you stop this, or at least explain the situation better from their perspective:

• Is there a compliance reason we need to do it this way?
• What problem does this solve? Could there be another solution?

Good luck!

Whoa. Separation of church and state, checks and balances, whatever you would like to call it. This is a bad road to travel. RE, as others have mentioned, is a fundraising database and gifts should be processed by the development/fundraising staff (we don't use a lockbox anymore, but when we had one, development did the gift processing). As an aside, OLX is so quirky with linking constituents, if the Finance team is not well trained in Raiser's this could turn into a nightmare. Our Finance team has extremely limited, view only permissions in RE, and vice versa. Only our CFO and controller have some permissions in RE for reporting. We are very strict about not co-mingling responsibilities and not crossing those boundaries. However, maybe we're unusual, our teams work very well together!