So, the little nonprofit that I do work for on the side is taking over a smaller nonprofit. That smaller one uses FileMaker Pro as a database. My big question is, how much past giving history should be imported in? What would be the best way to import it in, without messing up reporting on the end side? Should we import the gifts in as Gift Type Other, and make sure all reporting is only done on Gift Type Cash from now on? Is there another way to capture giving history? What would you recommend? My first thought was to do Gift Type Other for the prior gifts and change all of the reports to only reflect cash.... Thoughts? Thank you! Amy

I recently assimilated 2 other non profits with ours. I imported all the gifts as cash gifts with an appeal of conversion (payment type of other). This allowed me to pull them out of our financial reports should it be needed (we would never include their historical conversions in audit), but still allowed me to run comparisons. Now, I did this at the start of a fiscal year (part of my planning strategy) so it was also possible for everyone to 'know' that we didn't have those 2 affiliates in prior years.

They each have their own Funds & Campaigns - all of the converted records went into their standard unrestricted fund (because they didn't distinguish restrictions in their previous database) They also had never used pledges or had planned giving etc. so gift type was not an issue. I converted 5 years of historical data for each

Our process was a bit complicated because the 2 organizations had overlapping constituents between themselves and our organization so some creative finding of the existing constituent ID in order to import their gifts was fun. (I didn't want to import a new constituent into RE if they were already there) If you're not gifted in using Access you can get a mail house to help you process this sort of thing as well.

As a general rule, I would always keep as much giving history as possible. 

I imported past giving history from a branch organization.  As Laural suggested, you can identify them by an appeal.  For us, we identify them by fund. I also used the reference field for notes.  Their sponsorship fund has a different ID than other sponsorship funds.  Has been no problems with reports.

You may want to consider the GL status when you import.  Check with your finance office but I would use "posted" or "do not post" as you are not going to want the gifts to post.