Donations come in to the Development Office (D.O.) and we enter them in our database, then forward the actual checks and credit card numbers to the Business Office (B.O.) to deposit/process.  D.O. needs them first because we are the ones who know what campaigns and funds the gifts are for, etc.  We converted from Giftmaker a year ago, and used to print the "Donation Received Report" which would accompany the checks.  When we converted, I didn't figure out exactly how I wanted to work the process with RE, so once I entered the gifts into RE, I entered them again into Excel and then printed the Excel sheet and sent that to the bookkeeper.  Now I'm ready to do the data entry only once, but I can't figure out the best way to use RE for this purpose.  After a long time with Blackbaud Support, they recommended the Cash Receipts Journal in Financial Reports.  But I'm having a couple of problems with this:

• When a donation comes in from a matching gift company or DAF, B.O. needs to know the soft credit, but I can't figure out how to get that to show on the report.
• This only works for checks.  How do I get credit card numbers to B.O.?  Blackbaud told me that none of the reports will include full credit card numbers, so I'll have to get them from a query.  That works okay for me.  However, if this was really a necessary thing, I'm sure RE would include a way to achieve it.  So it must be that my process is non-traditional.  What are the best practices out there for sharing this information between B.O. and D.O.?

Thanks!

Hi Allison,

It looks like our processes are fairly similar.  We use the validation report when sending deposits to finance, I've found this is as complete as possible for our needs.  I'm curious why your business office needs the soft credit information?  The legal donor is the one from whose account the money is given, and that's who gets the receipt.  The validation report doesn't include the credit card number, but it does include the validation number.  But our finance dept doesn't need the cc number.  I'm guessing that your business office actually does the credit card processing?  There may be a canned report that includes cc number; or, if you or someone in your dept knows Crystal, you can create a report that includes all the data the your B.O. needs.

Leslie

Hello Allison,

Depending on what software your Business Office is using, it would be simplier to process the gifts once within the Development Office and then create a secondary export data stream that can be subsequently imported into your Business Office's software.  We are implementing such a process at Durham Rescue Mission later this month for each gift which arrives:

• Donor and gift records are updated along with an image access locator in Raiser's Edge. 
  
• Fund records are updated within their accounting system which is Shelby Software; this eliminates creating manual reports by Gift Processing (D.O. in your case) that are then subsequently manually posted by their accounting person. 
  
• Accounting then has access to all processed gifts (including their checks) through the AuditorArchive

If you'd like to talk with Durham Rescue Mission, please let me know.

Thank you,

Jim Cowen - 847-27-9645 Mobile

Blachbaud@aqubanc.com