Hi All,
We will be sending letters to our donors with a list of their 2017 donations for tax purposes. Because some donors write checks as well as give through a Donor Advised Fund (DAF), the summary letters are ending up being very complicated as we are not allowed to provide tax receipts for DAFs. Instead of a simple merged list of donations in a letter, we are having to research each donation to see if it was made through a DAF and make sure to remove the DAF gifts. Does anyone else have an easier method such as a Tax Statement that would allow us to list every donation in the calendar year, including those made through a DAF?
Thanks for your help!
Miki
The Tech Museum of Innovation
Good morning Miki,
Oh man, Donor Advised Funds; always a treat at tax letter time!
Some members of our consortium use an Annual Giving Summary report, and I've actually just sent the code along to Tessitura for them to list in their shared reports repository for anyone interested in making use of it.
That said, a lot of the work with regard to DAFs comes down to how the data got entered in the first place.
If the contributions get entered on a record for the DAF, then obviously it simplifies your year-end reporting quite a bit because then you're just soft crediting the individual donor but the gift information lives with the DAF and doesn't pull on the individual's letter.
If the contributions are entered to the individual with a soft credit to the DAF, then it absolutely gets more complex with regard to tracking down what gifts an individual should actually get tax notice for.
What method are you all using currently (or is it maybe a third, hybrid method)?
Thank you,
Brian
Miki,
We use a custom field in the gift record to denote a DAF/IRA gift and when it come tax letter time I have a sql query that pulls all donations, except DAF/IRA. The query breaks the gifts into Annual Fund, Endowment, Special/Sponsorship and Events. It's by no means a perfect solution as it take work to get the summaries ready, but it excludes DAF gifts. If you didn't want to exclude them, but wanted to recognize them, you could still use a custom field and to denote them on the letter.
Melissa
Hi Melissa, did you create your own custom field or did you have to ask Tessitura to create it? Where does this custom field live?
We created it ourselves. It's an entry in T_KEYWORD and TR_GOOESOFT_DROPDOWN because we made ours a dropdown so we could pick from a list where the gift came from (Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.). The field is on the Custom Data tab in Contributions.
The set up in T_KEYWORD looks like this:
Description: GCF Dropdown (it's named for our local DAF group, which is our largest contributor)
Data Type: String
Edit Mask: Alphanumeric
Detail Tbl: vs_contribution_with_initiator
Detail Col: !.custom_8 (thought you can make this any column number 1-10)
Ref Tbl: tr_gooesoft_dropdown
Ref Idcol: id
Ref Where: the Code # from TR_GOOESOFT_DROPDOWN once we create all the entries.
ref sort: id
Category: Contribution
Use for list: Contribution
Multiple Value: blank
Custom ID: 8 (which coincides with the customer field we used)
All other columns were left blank