I have been in an ongoing back and forth with our Finance department over reporting on contribution date vs. post date. In Fundraising we typically do all of our reporting on contribution date. But Finance wants a monthly report based on postdate. With our adjustments this creates a lot of discrepancies between reporting. Does anyone have any recommendations for reporting or how to bridge this gap? Particularly if you have a report in Analytics? I was having trouble finding a way of reporting on postdate in Analytics.
I am in a similar situation Jessica! All our reporting is based on contribution date at present but I need to find a way to report on post date (or restriction date - I'm not too sure how the two relate?) If I find anything out I'll let you know and please do keep me posted if you find a solution. Thank you.
We us the GL Summary report to get the info. out of Tessitura and then do some fun Excel work to get things into buckets our finance team is used to seeing. This has worked really well for us. What it doesn't give us, however, is the people tied to those transactions. The Transactions By Posting report is helpful for that part when we need to break things down for Dev team members. We pay pretty close attention to contribution date & posting dates, so our reporting is pretty close either way, but things like adjustments that cross months and designated/restricted grants were really proving problematic for us. Using these two reports have helped us place nicely in the sandbox. We don't have Analytics, so I can't speak to that side of things, but I know that we're working on getting both GL Summary info and Transaction By Posting info. data sources into Tableau, which is what we use as our analytics platform. Hope that helps!
You can run the fund activity report with a posting start and end date and no transaction or contribution date ranges filled in.
We generally do our departmental reporting based on contribution date, but we only edit this date during gift entry under specific circumstances and we would only be backdating things, otherwise we leave it the same as the transaction date. Our finance department posts all batches to the batch date, so our post dates match our transaction dates. When it comes time to reconcile the monthly statements we receive from finance, our reports based on contribution date mostly match those statements. When they don't match, I run a fund activity report where the contribution date range is the month of the statement I'm reviewing but the transaction date range is between the first day of the next month and today. That way I can see any adjustments or backdated gifts that cross months and account for the discrepancies.