Non-Profit Donations

[Mike or Penny Novack]

This bears repeating.

Basic double entry bookkeeping allows for ONE hierarchy. But our 
accounting needs might require being able to report based upon more than 
one. Donations to a non-profit is a perfect example. Now it isn't 
difficult to use GnuCash to handle this for us, that's not the precise 
problem, because obviously GnuCash could be used for multiple "books" 
designed for different organizational purposes.

What people are really asking here is for a way to do this without 
having to enter the transaction multiple times (once for every set of 
books). I mean "logical books" here because (with multiple entry lines) 
the "regular books" and a "donations books" could both be within the 
same set of books just like if a business has "petty cash" that can be 
done either within the main books or separate.

A LARGE system would probably use separate books and "feeds" so that a 
donation transaction would be entered just once in the "donations 
system" resulting in an entry in the "donations books" and the "main 
books" (aka "general ledger"). That's the sort of system I used to work 
in, transactions entered into subsystems that fed general ledger.

Let's take a typical non-profit example where we need to be able to 
report both totals for donors and totals for the fund receiving the 
donations. If Gnucash allows splits on both sides of the transaction you 
could do this with a single split transaction. Or could be separate 
transactions into separate books. The latter is a size or organization 
issue. Once above a small size not unlikely that the person handling 
donations isn't the same person as the organization's treasurer and no 
reason for that person to have access to any more than the donations 
books. In our case while we do handle a few direct donations to the 
chapter most of our donations are reported to us from national form 
which we get a share of "membership" in our geographic area and any 
donations earmarked to our chapter that came with those. In other words, 
once a month we get from national a check indicated how much of that was 
"membership" and how much "extra donations" and also a list by person.

Now we don't do the donor accounting (since we can get national to 
supply that) but suppose this was being done within one organization and 
using two sets of books (simplifies the reports as can include all 
accounts -- within one set of books may need to exclude the accounts of 
the other logical books. Have a "donations books" which depending on the 
report you plan to use might be just the asset (undeposited donations*) 
and the income "donations". The secretary enters into this set of books, 
sends out the acknowledgment letters, and periodicly deposits the checks 
and notifies the treasurer of the deposit and the totals for the various 
funds. The treasurer then enters this in the main set of books. Of 
course this COULD be the same person. Separate entries for each donation 
and then one transaction in the both sets of books for each deposit of a 
batch of checks. With a little thought you should be able to see how you 
could do this within one set of books.

Michael


* That might have more than one sub account -- say "membership", 
unrestricted donations", "capital fund donations", etc. Might also have 
a "deposited" account.