When doing an event and charges have to be deducted from cost to determine the actual donation where do you put these costs and actual donation and how do you pull it into one letter/receipt?  I would love to hear how you send out your letters and your verbage used.  You may also contact me: goodman@lacollege.edu  Thank you in advance.

 

Hi Belinda, The costs are tracked as benefits in the Raiser's Edge. When you enter the gift, if in batch go to gift on the menu bar at the top then choose benefits, if in a gift record there is a benefit button next to the Letter Code field. You can set this benefits up in configuration and they can subtract the benefit or value from the gift amount. You can then pull this benefit field into your donor acknowledgment letters. I see a lot of people phrase them like "Thank you for your gift of 500. The tax deductible donation of your gift is 450."

Hi there,

We also use the events module to capture the expenses and revenue for the donor. However we handle the gift receipts for our events, through the gift tab. In our gift receipts, we capture fields of the gift amount, and the "receipt amount".  The receipt amount field is where we enter the deductible portion of the gift, or the contribution after the cost was covered.  As a standard we include the cost of the ticket in the letter, so that we only have to worry about the two fields: the total amount and the tax deductible portion.  We use the letter section, which brings us nicely into word, and it's great.  Works well for us.

 Liz

 

 

Also remember that the IRS says nothing about "cost" in their language.  On a receipt must be the Fair Market Value of any benefits received which may or may not equal the costs.  If you hold an event and the food, flowers, music, location, etc. are all donated to you so you have no costs - the donor still received benefits which have a value on the open market.  You must put a description and the fair market value of these benefits on the receipt (see IRS publication 1771).