Recurring Monthly doanations

Hi Kristin,

I handle monthly donations in a similar fashion, and I do think using pledges is the best method.  If a donor signs up for a monthly donation of $15, I will manually change their membership level to reflect the amount they have pledged for a year ($180 = "Principal" member).  I take off the expiration date for these donors so that their membership level stays constant.

You can manually alter membership levels by clicking the history tab.

I have a related question re: monthly contributions.  How do you handle tax receipting for your monthly donors?  Do you select tax receipt acknowledgement for each monthly contribution and send them with a letter once a month?  I am hoping that it is possible to issue a tax receipt twice a year (end of tax year and end of fiscal year) without just manually changing the amount of the actual receipt.

Thank you!

Dana

Hi Kristin,

I handle monthly donations in a similar fashion, and I do think using pledges is the best method.  If a donor signs up for a monthly donation of $15, I will manually change their membership level to reflect the amount they have pledged for a year ($180 = "Principal" member).  I take off the expiration date for these donors so that their membership level stays constant.

You can manually alter membership levels by clicking the history tab.

I have a related question re: monthly contributions.  How do you handle tax receipting for your monthly donors?  Do you select tax receipt acknowledgement for each monthly contribution and send them with a letter once a month?  I am hoping that it is possible to issue a tax receipt twice a year (end of tax year and end of fiscal year) without just manually changing the amount of the actual receipt.

Thank you!

Dana

Hey Dana, I take it that you are in Victoria, BC, right? Which would mean you need to have tax receipt numbers issued in order in accordance with CRA as opposed to what they do in the USA. I handle the mothly tax receipting here at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra for the monthly donors. It was quite a long process to figure out how to receipt our donors without making it the most manual process ever. We have to receipt them twice a year as you suggested above. Our end of fiscal is June 30th and the end of the tax year as well. We combine whatever the donor gave in the first six months of the year on to one receipt sent in July and the second receipt is a combination of whatever the donor gave in the last six months of the year on one receipt usually sent in January. How we do it is that in January, Feb, March, April, May we use a 'Dummy Pledge Receipt' Acknowledgement type that does NOT pull a tax receipt number from the back end when you run the Print Ack Report, but still registers within their contribution when we pull the pledge billing utility. We also use the dummy receipt type for July, Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov. This means that in the month's of June and December we have set up another receipt type called "Consolidated Pledge Receipt" that actually pulls a tax receipt number from the back end when we pull Print Ack Report. You just have to remember to use this ack type when pulling your monthly pledge billing in the month's of June and December. This process allows us not to have 12 tax receipt numbers assigned for every month of the year to every donor, which would be a crazy amount of work! We then set-up a back end report here that pulls all of this information out into excel. This leaves you with one line per month (which could be six lines per patron). Using some excel formulas we pull the six lines into one line per patron so you can see exactly what month they gave and how much they gave. I can hopefully ask my Tessitura Guru here at the ESO if they might share this with you? Anyways, I would be happy to help if you need more info and I hope this made some sense. Thanks, Erin Mulcair