Add is just that - adding a new record such as an appeal, action(emal),attribute, etc. Change is taking an existing record and making a change to it (for example, if you forgot the bank was closed on Veteran's day and started processing gifts - you could use global change with a query of those gifts to change the gift date to the next day) I ...

We use a combination of things: Age (65+) Ever given a gift of stock or IRA, 5 or more consecutive years, last 5 years of giving level clubs of $1K+, Board Members - we also had analytics done at one point and if they had a planed giving score of 800+ they are in there as well.  

We use an asterisk to annotate deceased and it is listed in the key on the annual report. We usually would update the Publish salutation at the time we mark the record deceased so when we pull the data for the book there are fewer edits required. John & Anne* Smith

This depends on your organizations policy for giving clubs. We have annual giving clubs, so we would put them in a giving club that reflects their annual donation. We use attributes to track our giving clubs because in some cases we would use revenue, some cases we would use cash flow and in some cases we would use a combination to determine which ...

I guess I am concerned as to why you would want to book anything in your system that is not a legal gift. If you are not considering 'intentions to give' a legal gift like a pledge and you're using an accrual accounting system, I would not book it at all until the cash is received.In accrual accounting the pledge is the revenue ...

If you are running multiple lists, I would suggest coding the constituent as each list is run and then using that as an exclusion for the next list. But first I would suggest using the MAIL functionality to handle your mailings.

Have you looked at using Constituent Codes and using the Primary Constituent Code? Also, you may want to look at Head of Household processing. I'm wondering if you're running multiple lists and using something like Query as opposed to using a mail process or export  creating one list which could help limit your mailings.

The global write off process has a checkbox that says 'create query of gifts written off'  Check this box when you run the process to write off the gifts. It will prompt you to name the query - name it something like 'write offs to change date to xxxxxx. Then go to the global change process (admin) and use that query to ...

Create a gift query as part of the process and use Global change to change the gift date

We use all expenses (That includes all those 'donated things' GIK's are technically counted as expenses on the financial side) Salaries are definitely included in our expenses. I could list all the ledgers that our expenses go into, but that would make a pretty big post. Expenses include our rent, utillities, phone, depreciation ...