Non-Profit Donations

[Jean-David Beyer]

Pablo Francesca wrote:
> Since non-profits happen to be the topic de jour, I thought I might
> be able to pick some brains.
> 
> How does one even handle donations in gc?
> 
> The first problem I encounter (besides having to deal with invoices
> and customer terminology, which doesn't make sense for my
> organization) is how to handle a donation.  Using customer payment
> doesn't seem to work if you don't have any valid post-to accounts.

Even if you are embezzling all the donations, you you would need a valid 
post-to account; e.g., EmbezzledFunds.

For my local Quaker Meeting, I have two such accounts (there are 
slightly more that are seldom used):

Current Assets->Checking Account->Capital
Current Assets->Checking Account->Operating

These are because most donors want the money to go in the operating 
budget that can be used for anything, but some specifically want it to 
go into the Capital account that cannot be used for anything except 
capital expenses.

I also have one account for each regular donor:

[Income]->Gifts Received->Anonyous Cash
[Income]->Gifts Received->Private->Donor1
[Income]->Gifts Received->Private->Donor2
etc.

The donors are one level down (from Private) so that a report can be 
generated with the total donations without identifying the donors whose 
contributions are almost always private.
> 
> Okay, that seems to imply we need to do some manual account entries.
> So I credit an income account called Donations and debit a bank
> account called Checking.

Seems to be what I do. In one instance, I debited:

Current Assets:Checking Account:OperatingAssets

and I credited:

Gifts Received:PRIVATE:Donor1
> 
> So a donor wants to know to know how much they have donated for the
> year? Hmm, lets try a customer report, will that work?  Nope, in fact
> it crashes my gc repeatedly (2.2.9 on XP) after I select a customer.
> While I didn't expect it to work, the crash was a surprise.

That is probably a bug of some kind. Since I do not run GnuCash on 
Windows, I cannot help with that.
> 
> So I'm guessing that any customer reporting done for fund-accounting
> that does not use the A/R design of gc need to be customized. Is this
> true?

No. I just run an Income Report that starts out like this (numbers fudged)

Income Statement TTM For Period Covering 2009-04-01 to 2010-03-31
                	               		
Revenues 	   	   	
Gifts Received	   	   $0.00	
    	ANONYMOUS	  $92.00	
    	PRIVATE	       $3,564.93	
    	Total PRIVATE  $3,656.93	
Total Gifts Received	   	   	3,656.93

You can make GnuCash list each donor under PRIVATE by telling it to go 
one level deeper.
> 
>> From my extremely limited experience with non-profit accounting,
>> this inability to handle donations and donation reporting seems to
>> be the biggest hurdle in getting started.


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