I am new to the Non-profit sector and need some assistances on how to report items given for Auctions and fundraising events. Can anyone give me some insight on how you handle us that might be beneficial to us?

There has been lots of discussion in the past to this topic so you might want to scan the donations topics. What we do is all donations (in-kind, volunteer time or items, or cash) are recorded in RE and posted over to FE (we are integrated). In our case, our board does not want non-material items (or items that are not really budgetable such as an auction item donation) on our general ledger, so we post to fund set up specificallly for non-material in-kind donations. Material items, that were replacements for items in our budget, so into our regular fund(s). The value of the inkind items are not noted in the thank you letter to the donor, as it is their responsibility to determine the value for their tax deductibility purposes. However we need to have a value of the inkind contributions for grant matching purposes. The value is either obvious, determined by the donor for items such as they always charge X amount for an hour of service, or we have a standard of some kind for the type of item (such as mileage is the same rate we would pay a person if we in fact were to pay them). These procedures have allowed us to manage all donors and donations in RE, report on the total (if estimated) value of support we are getting and from whom, and yet keep those items that are not material (per our standard operating procedures) out of the official financial reports. Hope this helps, Romy Fitschen