Hello,
I know this has been discussed briefly here in the forums, but I am interested in learning how other organizations are recording in-kind donations for event auctions. Our summer fundraising event is coming up and we are trying to accurately record donated items that can be bid on at the event. Last year we entered the auction items into the same campaign/fund as the money bid at the auction, which caused problems for our Finance department.
We are considering setting up a completely separate campaign/fund just for event auction items. Does this work? Any other ideas or methods?
Any tips are greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Jacob Houser, Development Associate, Omaha Performing Arts
Jacob,
We don't do auctions but we do receive in-kind gifts from a variety of sources. We record these all in a separate campaign regardless of the source. I also set up a separate payment method called "in-kind" to keep it separate and not confuse our finance department.
Having in-kind gifts in a separate campaigns makes it super easy to include/exclude when you're reporting on income. It also makes it less likely that you'll "forget" that you had inkind years in the future which could happen if you just use separate funds or include it with other income.Dale
Hi Jacob,
Basically we have a budgeted and un-budgeted fund for individual In-Kind giving and corporate In-Kind giving and one campaign for each.My finance department requested that the revenue be segmented by payment methods (or the "debit" part of the posting report) rather than by funds.Because of this we use multiple, unique but slightly general payment methods to record which department the gift is for and for what.Here are a few examples of payment method names:Devo CateringMarketing AdvertisingProduction Shop SuppliesThough this seems cumbersome and backwards to me it seems to work for finance pretty well. (I just double checked with them and they gave me a thumbs up)Cheers!
Thank you Dale and Ryan for your feedback. This was very helpful!
Jacob