Hi,

Recently, after a budget meeting with our foundation and government relations team, our finance office decided to change all of our funds/account numbers in their system (MIP). The new plan was to have buckets for operating support: one for individual giving, one for membership, one for foundations, and one for corporate  memberships for example. Myself and the donor services/operations team were fully against this, as it affects donor intent and would ultimately make us completely rewrite our procedures for tracking gifts-- no longer using RE Funds to align with finance account numbers.. A few members of the finance team were also against this, as it seemed to them the reason this was to be done was to help our f&g team track their goals better. Another issue the F&G team is having that other departments outside of development (research, education, etc) are banking on the "fundraising goals" in their budgets. F&G doesnt want them to have those fundraising goals as all fundraising is centralized through Development. The alternative that the F&G team suggested we do in RE was to change where we track gifts to the proposal tab, so that the funds in the gift tab would be the "buckets" and the proposals have the detailed info on the donor's designation. The first problem I see is that not every gift from our members and low end donors have proposals-- and that would be too much work to maintain.

 So-- I am not sure that even makes much sense-- but I am stuck trying to find a happy medium for everyone. I am the operations manager, and I am against the fund "buckets" for operating. I understand that F&G wants to have less interference from other departments, and want to track their goals better.. but this just seems extreme and only beneficial to one small unit in Development. One person said that this change would help consolidate Development Revenue to one place and help us achieve accountability and transparency-- that would also help our gift officers see where the revenue is needed most and where they should focus their time fundraising for.

 Does anyone currently have a process like this? Does anyone have any alternative I can suggest? HELP!!!!!!!

I'm not sure If I am understanding correctly, but I'll take a stab.

individual giving, one for membership, one for foundations, and one for corporate  memberships

Funds both for Finance & Development in a business Standard way should be what the money is to be used for(restricted for). Usually there is no mixing of Membership, Retail & Donation monies. I would definitelty get your auditors involved before you do a major overhaul that affects both finance and Development. It actually sounds like easy reporting should be able to show your Fund Raising Goals - it shouldn't be a restructure unless you have retail and donation money mixed.

Your example sounds to me like it should be setup like this- this is an oversimplification:

General Ledger: Donations with Sub-accounts for restrictions. Audit restrictions are generally Endowments (permanently restricted); Special named funds (temporarily restricted) & Unrestricted. Memberships would typically have a separate fund and ledger that the monies would go into - just like retail would.

Individual, Foundation & Corporate are actually what should be easily reported on using Constituency Codes. There shouldn't be a separate fund for each of these things because they are not what an auditor would describe as a different fund.

It sounds to me like you need consulting on how to report on what is already in your system as opposed to overhauling (unless you have set your system up incredibly different than industry standard)

Another note. Goals can be put in Camapigns, funds, appeals, etc. so you can report against those - a thought might be to use an appeal indicating whether it is ind, fdtn or corp. You can also use Key Indicator as the breakdown between Individual  versus Org gifts if you decide not to go that way.