Summarizing annual donations to charity

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>Thinking about summarizing data for tax preparation - in particular,
>deductible donations to charity.
>
>I can create an annual report for that expense account, with details and
>totals by month and year.
>
>What I'd really prefer would be annual totals by Description...
>- Charity A - $$$
>- Charity B - $$$
>etc.
>
>Any suggestions for how to handle this?
>
>Thanks,
>Jim
>  
>
I'm not quite sure why you are having a problem with this if you have 
any understanding of how to set up a chart of accounts (with parents and 
children) and how to set report options so that you have the display set 
to deep enough nesting levels to show the tree. So I will describe both 
(yes, I do account for charitable donations, both deductible and not, in 
the way you seem to want). You might not require the level of detail I 
will describe.

a) The chart of accounts first ---- You create under "expenses" a 
placeholder account "donations" and as children of that parent two 
placeholder accounts, "deductible" and "non-deductible". Under the 
former you have accounts for each tax qualified charity to which you 
donate. Under the other the non-deductible categories (I have PACS, 
"good received" for the non-deductible portion of donations if any, 
"miscellaneous" for other situations like when you don't know, informal 
charity collections like when the hat is passed for somebody in trouble, 
beggars, etc). In the deductible part you might or might not want sub 
categories (health, social welfare, religious, arts & letters, 
environmental, etc.) which is what I do to keep charities grouped by kind.

    Entering is pretty straightforward except when you have to split a 
donation (say the organizations tells you "all but X dollars is deductible".

b) Reports next ------ You can run the Income Statement for the period 
in question limiting (account selection) to just the "donations" part of 
the tree. Remember that you will probably have to increase the level of 
nesting shown and you will have to choose what sort of subtotaling you 
want to see. I can't choose that for you so experiment till you like the 
result. You can also run a "transaction report" for the time interval 
(you say year) which will show you, for each charity, how much in each 
month. I wouldn't use that because almost all on our list get ONE annual 
donation (planned giving according to donations budget) except for the 
fact that we don't bother keeping personal books and OUR donation 
accounting is a separate set of "books" just for that purpose**.

c) Year to year comparison I wouldn't try WITHIN gnucash. I'd export, 
get that output into something you can edit, flatten the nesting, and 
then bring in the previous period side by side. Unless you were 
extremely consistent year to year what charities trying to do this by a 
special report within gnucash likely to be a nightmare (what to line up 
with what for comparison purposes is a human decision).

   Or you could just print out and look at the various reports.

Michael D Novack

** Bear in mind that I am fairly familiar with double entry bookkeeping 
and understand "subsidiary books". So for us the "donations" books are a 
funny kind of books with no assets and zero equity. Just "income" for 
the total donations made (that's like income received from our personal 
books if we had those where there would be a corresponding expense 
account "donations". In other words, the donations details would be HERE 
(in this subsidiary book) rather than in the main books. Very much like 
a "petty cash" set of books.     In  our case three forms of "income" 
(child accounts), "check", "cash", and "kind" (physical goods donated).

   Then the expense side is very much like I described before. When 
producing the reports no need to select accounts (all accounts in this 
subsidiary set of books are relevant) and in the transaction report the 
income side acts as a journal of our donations (well three remembering 
the three kinds, but almost all out donations are by check so that's the 
one that matters --- donations in cash mainly just what handed to street 
beggars, etc. and in kind donations very  rare.

   I put the printouts of this report along with the checks (and letters 
from the organizations) into a tax folder for that year. If ever 
audited, I'll have the data ready to hand.

PS: If you do donations by credit card you'd have another category. I 
don't because we never do that.