We have some turnover in the Development department, and someone raised the idea of moving gift entry to the Finance department for all but the most complex gifts. I'm having trouble visualizing how this would work, but as the organization's Controller, I'm intrigued by the idea of having more control over timeliness of transactions. Would anyone be willing to share their structure and how it works? Or how this setup has not worked for their organization? Thanks!
Hi, Bridget. I used to be at Pittsburgh Public in their finance department, and I did the development gift entry. Sadie Treese actually was the one that pioneered the position at PPT, so she'd be a great resource as well. Basically, contributions would come in and get "coded" by the development department as to which Tessitura account and source_no should go with it along with whether it was a pledge payment or new gift. Then the actual entry would be done by me along with preparing the journal entries for the financial software. I prepared reporting for development weekly and reconciled Tessitura to the ledger each week and, since I was the one doing the entry, could usually find any error pretty quickly. I don't think it was necessarily the most efficient process, but I do think that having someone not being bombarded by donors was helpful in that I could concentrate fully on entering the gifts and staying up to date without needing to do the shmoozing that development has to do. There were also times when I would note that something was being recorded as a payment to a pledge in an individual account, but that the funds had actually come in from a foundation or business account, so I could do the adjustment on the fly to note the individual as the creditee, but correctly put the funds in the account from which they came. I'm happy to talk more about it - we did try to streamline a little bit the final year I was there. I believe gift entry still lies in the finance dept there, but I know the position is not full time anymore, so I think it's become a bit of a hassle.