Non-Profit Donations

Pablo Francesca rshgeneral at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 28 00:41:41 EDT 2010


What account type is your Donations account? If it is an asset type, I'm not following your organizing method. If its an income type, it seems like your saying you have income accounts for donors and income accounts by donation type.  That seems even odder. Another possibility is that you have income sub accounts under each income donor account.  Is that what you are doing?

This would certainly allow for accurate donor reporting, but then it would seem to break reporting by donation type.  If this what you're doing, then I guess you would have export all the data an manipulate it in a spreadsheet.  I was trying to avoid that.

In my case I have a top level account Donations with a sub account for each donor.  I then have income or designated fund accounts for the various targets of giving.  I can then run a report on each donors account that lists all his giving with memos/account names to designate where his donations went.   Or I can run a report of all donors import to a spread sheet add carriage returns etc so I can bulk print.   My understanding is that the unstable version is better equipped to use Customer accounts to support this type of reporting, but I haven't tried it yet.  From an accounting viewpoint a donor is treated like customer.  The donor provides income, he receives a share of services for his donation,  ie he pays for part of the expenses and shares in the gratification of whatever works the NPO performs.  Yes there are special rules but change the name or titles on the reports they still look up data and accumulate it etc.  So far I have just
 ran a test case, and I still needed to tweak the reports in a spread sheet, but the data was all there.  I needed to Delete a column and add a total, but it still beat the method my predecessor was doing it.  For our donors we list each individual donation and the total.  We find this gives them more confidence, or lets them  cross check with their records.  Sometimes it results in making an additional donation to make up for one that they inadvertently missed.  We send out a midyear report as well as the year-end report.
Hubert

Pablo Francesca wrote:
> 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.
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