Hi everyone,
We are getting ready to set-up our funds for next fiscal year and are thinking of REALLY simplifying things. Our funds would be the source of the money (individual, foundation, corporate, government) and the campaigns would be the program (gen op, production support, events, education, etc). Our thinking behind this is that it would easily allow us to pull reports either way - if we want to know how much money education programs have raised, we pull by campaign. If we want to know how much government support we had, we pull by fund.
Then we'd used designations for any more detailed information regarding the purpose of the gift (i.e. the specific play or program).
My questions are:
1) How do others do this?
2) What risks do we take completely restructuring this way as far as comparing contributed income to past years? Have others dealt with this?
Thank you so much for your thoughts!Best,
Sara
Hi Sara,
The biggest risk with that setup (in my opinion) is that designations are tied only to the campaign and you run a risk of data entry errors causing your reporting to be wildly skewed. There are 2 vectors for this.
1) The user chooses the wrong designation by accident during contribution entry.
2) The user does not have the same understanding of which designation to use that the folks looking at the reporting do. In other words, the data entry user may spend a week or more putting things in the wrong designation and no one catches it until there are a large number of contributions with the wrong designation. At which point you have to go back and figure out what it should have been and find a way to correct them all. (I've had to do this a few times).
Having said that, if you feel confident in the data entry folks and in your communication internally about what is expected, I don't think this is a bad way to go. I wouldn't use designation reporting for anything related to finance. But if all you are doing is tracking your progress towards your Development goals, I like this method. I don't think finance should ever use designations to categorize the money. For that, I'd create more funds with distinct GLs.