Gifts in Kind/Bags of stock

Terry Davey:
Good morning to all my fellow Raisers Edge users. My charity are going to start using Gifts in Kind, and unfortunately it happens to be one of the few parts of RE i have yet to properly use. What we are hoping to use it for (besides gifts in kind) is also to log the number of bags of stock that our donors leave at our charity shops. Where i am stumbling is how best to enter this onto RE. Logic states to create a new gift, give it a subtype of GIK, put in the estimated value of the item(s) fill in the Fund, Package, Appeal, Campaign and Canvasser as usual in the Reference put what the item(s) is/are and save and close the gift. OR to do the same as the above but leave the value as

I am not in the UK and since you do not have a signature with your charity name I can't really get the context to understand what "bags of stock" is.

Whether or not to put the estimate value as the amount you know or $0 in the US is constantly under debate. In my opinion, I think it is always best to put the gift amount as the estimate value. In some cases it does depend on whether or not your financial office is going to "book" the GIK in the General Ledger. Smaller GIKs that get used up quickly or are "immaterial" to the overall revenue stream are often not booked. In my opinion however that should have nothing to do with whether or not you record a value - that only has a bearing on whether or not you "post" the gift.