Adding Budget for Goals

Erica Esson 2 · June 2015

I need some help on how to track our monthly budget/forecast goals in raiser’s edge so that we can pull reports very easily.

John Heizer · June 2015

RE is probably not a good tool for this. You can run reports on historical giving and Cash Flow reports for anticipated pledge payments and recurring gifts, but RE is a fundraising tool, not a financial tool.

JoAnn Strommen · June 2015

While you can set goals for funds/campaign, campaigners etc. I'm not aware of RE having an option for monthly goals.

You could certainly report on cash received for the month using Cash Receipts Journal. I do run these for year to date at the end of month for our branches. If you want to include pledges you'd need a different one. That kind of reporting is more accounting than fund raising.

Jenny Norton · June 2015

If you create campaign goals or appeal goals, you can run reports monthly to see how you are doing. We have campaign goals for the year and each month I run the report to show how we're doing so far. It's under Reports, then Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals Reports and I created the Campaign Performance Analysis report. We look at cash only and all records and I use the specific range to get the the dates I want (example 7/1/2014 to 5/31/2015 is the last report I ran). Filters I selected only the Campaigns I want to compare. Gift Types I left out the pledges, recurring gift, planned gift and other. Hope this helps. Jenny

Erica Esson 2 · June 2015

I do agree that this type of reporting is more accounting than fund raising but our ED would like to have this type of report on dashboard to track monthly budget/forecast. I thought about creating a campaign for each monthly budget but that may become problematic.

JoAnn Strommen · June 2015

I don't think a monthly campaign is the best option. As you said over time it may become problematic. As Jenny also said, you can create reports of giving for the month.

Are your goals the same for each month (1/12 of annual) or are they based on when asks are made and vary from month to month?

I do currently run a monthly report with data exported out of RE showing status YTD. I take info to form in excel with the annual goals for each breakout. RE couldn't pull the data in format that CEO desired so I just pull the data and send it to him monthly. Pulling the data for each month isn't that difficult. It's the monthly goals/% that aren't easily done in RE. Don't know if you could create a Crystal report for the info.

Jen Claudy · June 2015

We don't use RE Reports (and my boss creates his own dashboards, working around limitations as best he can), however, you can add attributes to both Funds and Campaigns. So you could put 12 attributes on each (I would recommend using "01 Jan", "02 Feb", etc. so they can be sorted in order...or "01 Jul", "02 Aug" to keep in FY order) with the monthly goal in the attribute Description (set to Currency). Then at least the data is stored in RE, can be exported (from Export or from Query), and possibly can be used in a custom/Crystal report. Plus, reporting is being developed in RE:NXT right now, so it's possible that if you move to NXT, this kind of report might be available there.

Whatever you end up doing, I highly recommend saving the data within RE somehow. Either on a Cpgn, Fund, or Appeal record, or on a dummy Constituent record. I try to keep everything within the database so that no one ever has to remember where to find that data externally. Even general appeal letters get pdfs (of the merge template) filed in RE on a dummy record so that anyone can see what the letter said that was mailed on 6/29/2015 to the constituents with that appeal tag on their record. (Hoping for the day Appeal records have a Media Tab of their own!)

Erica Esson 2 · June 2015

Thanks for all your helpful feedbacks!

Adding Budget for Goals

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