When/how do you (or would you) enter gifts through an online 3rd party administrator? When you receive notification of the gift or when you actually receive the funds? For instance, people who make a donation through our online administrator have their credit card charged at the time of the donation (e.g. March 1st), then we don't receive the money until the following month (e.g. April 20). In the past we have done manual donor recognition and then entered the gift when the funds were received, and we were wondering if we should continue this or institute a new procedure/policy.

Ginger, At one place, we use PayPal to handle online donations. We post the gift and send an acknowledgement immediately, for two reasons: PayPal verifies the credit card, so even though we technically have not received it, we know the transaction was good. Second, immediate recognition is part of our policy. I don't know if your 3rd party works the same way, but if it does, it seems to me you are making extra work for yourself in your current procedure. Remember, too, that the donor most likely feels his/her donation is dated the day he/she makes it, not when you actually receive the cash. Hope that helps. Doug

Thanks for your reply. Does this cause any problems with account reconciliation or do you put it in a "holding" type account until the money is actually received?

Good question! The only problem it causes is that, since our volume is very, very low, we only do transfers once a quarter from our PayPal account to our bank account. When I do the transfer, and it hits the bank account, the ED has forgotten about what they were for, so has to bug me for details. So, in the future I'll do a print out from PayPal before I do the transfer, so she can see exactly what it's all about.

In a higher volume situation, I would think the same procedure would work, but with transfers more often. We do not post the money, in our case, into QuickBooks, but once a quarter after the money is received into our bank account. This may not work for you, but it works for us.

Doug

The gift is yours once they use your merchant account to process the gift, regardless of when the money is received in your account. In fact also you need to be sure that they also get credit for the full amount that they charged and not just the amount deposited in your account (important if your merchant account takes out a processing fee per gift.) *** I can spell, I just can't type. Where is spell check? Melissa S. Graves [Email Removed]

We currently process online gifts ourselves but are getting ready to use 3rd party vendor to process our online gifts.

How do you reconcile these gifts with your finance office? Is a gift subtype the right way to record these online gifts so we have a way to determine that these credit card gifts were processed by someone other than us?

Anything else I should be thinking about as we prepare for this transition? Thanks so much.

Debra Holcomb, Golden Gate University Debra Holcomb
Director of Annual Giving
Golden Gate University
536 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
v: (415) 442-7829 e: [Email Removed]

NetSolutions uses a gift attribute to mark it as an online transaction. Using Gift Subtype would work only if you are not using it for something else which may be required on some online transactions (you can only have one gift subtype per gift)

Melissa Melissa S. Graves
Director of Development Services
The Village for Families and Children
mgraves @ villageforchildren.org
www.villageforchildren.org

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