Nonprofit News by Soft Trac

Suppose someone makes a donation to your organization through a service such as “Groundspring” or “Network for Good”. The service processes the donation, extracts a fee, then sends you a check for what is left.

Some people have asked what the proper way to record that gift in Sage FR 50 is, since the amount you receive is different than what the donor gave. It’s proper to enter the amount that the donor sent to the processing organization BEFORE that organization took out its fee in Sage FR 50. If your accounting department relies on you for fundraising transaction information, you will need to alert them to the discrepancy that will exist between what is exported from Sage FR 50 and the check that they will receive.

You can think of it this way–if your office received a credit card donation over the phone, you would enter the entire donation amount in FR 50. Your accounting department would, in all likelihood, incur a fee when the credit card was processed. So, in reality, there is always a discrepancy between what the Development Department takes in and what your organization eventually receives for a donation that has been made via credit card (unless, of course, you’ve found a way to magically avoid all fees). When you receive the donation from an outside processor, you just see it up front.

Sage Payment Solutions does offer a donate now feature that would allow you to add a donate button to your website and process credit card and bankdraft transactions using Sage FR 50. It’s a slick set up. If you use Sage FR 50 and are interested in this feature, contact Soft Trac at 207.221.0340 for more information.

Under Reports>Vendor Activity there is a neat report capability that some of you may already know about. But for some of you Sage MIP users, who have not heard of it, read on.

If you select the canned report under Reports>Vendor Activity called you will see that it looks like a Check Register with the expense coding and the related invoices associated with the payment. The Filter Tab has the settings all set up but please feel free to make customizations. Also feel free to add in the Content Tab a page break by Program or Dept or both or maybe put Program in the body of the report! Have fun getting the report to look the way you want it to, or better yet, the way the auditor would like to see it.

I called my report “Check Register with Expense Coding” – not very original, I know.