Non-Profit Donations

[Pablo Francesca]

Based on my understanding of your reporting, I'm not sure how I can easily generate a donation report for each donor.  To be sure, an Income Report will list all my donor's contributions, but this is every donation.  I was thinking specifically of the need to fairly easily generate a donor report for he donor's tax purposes.  
I thought about running an account report, and this would suffice if I only wanted to list my donations by donor. 

In the situation for this church, some donors will donate with no restrictions or expectations.  Some donations will be quid pro quo.  Suppose Bob the Donor makes a one time contribution of 100 and then later enrolls in a seminar for 200.  This seems like it requires a Bob income account under General Donations and a Bob income account under Seminar X. There doesn't seem to be any way to pull all of Bob's donations in one report without doing it manually.



--- On Tue, 4/27/10, Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8 at verizon.net> wrote:

From: Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: Non-Profit Donations
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 6:35 PM

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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