Our previous staff had been entering bequests by placing the gift in the record of the Attorney or Financial Institution and soft crediting the Estate. If I run a query on a gift with a fund code of Bequest I get not only the estates but also the financial institutions. There must be a way to not only place the gift on the correct constituent but to add the financial institution and/or the attorney to the record for reference. Any assistance would be appreciated. Cindy

Cindy, as I think you have discovered, this way of recording the bequest is the wrong way round. The hard-credit should go to the donor making the bequest after all it’s their money, their donation. The soft-credit should go to anybody who helped to generate the bequest i.e. the attorney or Financial Institution. If you query how much an attorney has donated to your organisation you would get an incorrect answer because they didn’t actually donate the money that the report would show. Likewise the deceased, question what’s the total bequest donated; answer zero, but your soft-credit means they helped to generate an amount! We create a gift type of Legacy Gift which is placed on the deceased record. We change the primary addressee to a pre-formatted entry of ‘Estate of’ (then the name). We create a relationship to the attorney or other institution and also to the bequest executor (as appropriate). We soft-credit either the executor or the institution that had dealings with the bequest or both. Anybody that is not soft credited but should be recorded as having some form of link to the bequest is added within the Legacy Gift tab. When running reports you have the option to confine the soft credit gifts to either the donor, the soft credit recipients or both. This option is usually on the General 1 tab of the report. The default is to the donor. HTH Alan Alan Kay Systems Administrator St Ann's Hospice [Email Removed]

I create a new organization contact "Estate of (name)" or "(Name) Revocable Trust" as appropriate thru the deceased's original record and then save it as a new constituent linked to that record. Sometimes money comes from a trust for years after the person dies. Individual family members still living can be linked as individual relationships to this estate or trust record and receive soft credits. The attorney, institution or trustee I keep as an individual contact to receive mail and tax acknowledgments. It seems to work for us.