fund raising and donations and annual receipts

[Mike or Penny Novack]

H.S. wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I am just starting to use gnucash and to play around with it and
>learning accounting as I go along. I was wondering if there is a way to
>keep accounts for various fund raising sources.
>
>As an example, consider that there are a number of persons and trusts
>that donate money. I could create an account for each of those sources
>under Income:<person or trust name>. The money coming from these sources
>is then transfered to Assets:Funds account.
>
>If this is okay, what I further would like to do is to generate an
>invoice for the total money donated by each donor for the particular
>year (Jan~Dec), usually the last year. This invoice is supposed to just
>say that $xyz was received form Mr. John Doe (with address and phone
>number) during the year YYYY, along with the receiving entity's name and
>address. This information is supposed to be in triplicate on a single
>letter size paper. The purpose of this invoice is let the donor file it
>with his tax returns (as donations).
>
>Can this be done in Gnucash relatively easily? I won't mind a bit of
>delving into a little programming to format the report. Pointers are
>appreciated. If similar examples already exist on-line, URLs would be neat.
>
>Thanks.
>
>
>  
>
I'm also the treasurer of a 501c3 and there is perhaps a bit more to it 
than that. Which is why we don't try to do it within GnuCash. You 
usually also......
a) Want to notice and send thank special thank you letters for unusually 
large donations.
b) The form of the acknowledgment letter is different if the annual 
total is over $250 (here in the US). Just the invoice not likely enough 
unless your invoices are all going to specify whether any "good" was 
received or not.
c) You need to segregate donations form "qualified" and "non-qualified" 
donors for the purposes of figuring the percentage of  "general public 
support" (schedule A of the 990 or 990-EZ). But while just being big 
($5000 or more) ordinarily makes unqualified, if you can declare the big 
donation "unusual" can be excluded. Probably a 501c3 rules experienced 
accountant will be needed for the every five year filing (to show at 
least 33% was "general public") and you need the data in whatever format 
he or she wants it.

So we use other reports and spreadsheets and then analyze those to 
create the necessary data. There is also a separation of functions here. 
I'm the treasurer/bookkeeper, not the secretary to be sending out thank 
you letters. AFAIK some of the commercial products specializing in "for 
non-profits" are SUPPOSED to do some of this stuff, but I would not 
necessarily assume that they do it all correctly and you can't afford 
mistakes -- the Feds don't like excuses.

A very experienced retired analyst, I thought about doing some coding to 
get the stuff out directly but was told by the person who takes the 
financial statements from Gnucash and uses the data to produce our 
annual statement in the GAAP format recommended for non-profits "don't 
bother" (whoever does this will want to use his or her favorite editor 
-- remember that in general you need to be able to insert "footnotes").

A business (or non-profit) enterprise often has more than one set of 
books in use. The simplest example of that would be the main books and 
the petty cash books. You might also find you are doing separate "fund 
accounting". You can use GnuCash for all of this without a facility for 
doing it all at once (entering data just once).. The deciding factor in 
our case was volume. We don't have a hundred transactions a year 
(individual member donations processed by national and we get a monthly 
feed -- and they can later give us a spreadsheet by donor). Silly to do 
coding to prevent having to enter data more than once. For example, the 
"books" for a restricted fund would likely only have transactions for 
additional donations in that restriction category and an annual (or 
possibly quarterly) adjustment for transfer to general funds to the 
extent that there were expenses that were qualified to use those funds 
according to the terms of the restriction (we don't have a separate bank 
account for each find!).

I rather suspect that there are no a whole lot of us doing "non-profit 
accounting" with GnuCash and our needs are specialized. A separate list?

And lest I forget -- the rules for every jurisdiction/country are going 
to be different.

For the Earth
Michael

-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.