Best practices for payroll deductions?

Jacob Williamson:
One of my ongoing challenges is how to handle the large multi-person checks from local employers that are made up of a mixture of donations through employee payroll deductions and matching gifts. I would appreciate any advice on how best to process these. Currently we've been using Soft Credits to credit the donor's account and assigning an appeal specific to payroll deductions, but using the corporate entity as the donor--other posters have pointed out that this is not the best way to attribute the gift for tax reasons (it's not the corporate donor's money). The best way to handle this seems to be to create a Gift Subtype to handle this sort of transaction, but I've recently started using that field to track how the gift relates to the donor's membership status (membership renewal, new membership, etc). May not be the best use of the field, but it solved a lot of problems for tracking. The big obvious answers are creating new Funds, Campaigns, Appeals to accommodate this type of gift, which I could certainly do, but that doesn't quite solve my problems in terms of reporting and crediting and such, and we use the "Fund" code so heavily for all our reports and accounting processes that I'm reluctant to mess with that field too much. It feels like the magic bullet would be something like a new Gift Type or Payment Type, which of course only Blackbaud can do it and might be overkill regardless. That, or undoing the work I've done with Gift Subtype, which I'm reluctant to do if it only solves this problem. If anybody has a solution that works well for them, I'd appreciate it

Those bundled gifts in one check can be frustrating. Especially when sometimes donor is the org writing the check and others not. 

Have you considered the "Gift Code" field?  Text is set by user - you can set it as a table for consistent entry which helps a lot for reporting.  It's on Misc tab of every gift, can be put in batch for batch entry, can be queried on and exported.  We use it for some internal tracking of gifts and I find it works really well.

Just a thought...