Sensible Donor Management
Donor Management Software
For use with QuickBooks®
Effective Fundraising
A key part of fundraising is valuing and understanding supporters. While growing a contributor base is important, current donors are the financial foundation of the organization. Simple things like reminders for membership expiration and informative newsletter communications help keep donors engaged and committed to the organization.
Volunteers are also a key part of any organization. Not only do they provide no cost labor but they are important contributors, organization advocates, and recruiters for new members.
Donors, volunteers, and prospects are all important constituents of your organization. Accurately tracking contact information for these parties is vital. Some of them may have seasonal addresses which need to be noted when doing mailings. As contact data grows, duplicates are inevitable. Having good tools to find and merge these duplicates is paramount. It also is helpful to track employment and family relationships to further understand your donors.
Soft Donation Accounting
A soft donation refers to a donation given in the name of someone else. The most common example is when an employer gives a matching donation in the name of an employee. Many organizations choose to treat the donation as though it came from both parties – each is given donation credit. Recording both donations and keeping the books in balance presents an accounting challenge.
Setting up the accounts correctly is the key to this quandary. To do this in QuickBooks create a “Donations” account and then two sub-accounts under it called “Soft Donations” and “Corporate Donations.” To record a soft donation (e.g. a deposit), enter one line with the employer's name, the “Corporate Donations” account, and the donation amount. Then enter two more lines using the employee's name. On the first line, use the “Donations” account with a minus donation amount. On the second line, use the “Soft Donations” account with a positive donation amount. The result will be that the two employee entries will cancel each other. However, you can track soft donations by using only the “Soft Donations” account. Or, use the “Soft Donations” and “Corporate Donations” accounts for a combined report.
QuickBooks Donor Management & Fundraising
Smaller organizations often choose QuickBooks as their accounting software, and, while it will account for donations, it does not handle memberships, events, volunteers, and other aspects of donor management. As a result, organizations will choose to add a donor management package. These packages are often expensive and duplicate the accounting functions of QuickBooks.
DonorsFix takes a different approach. Rather than duplicating what is already in QuickBooks, DonorsFix adds key functions and data to make QuickBooks a practical solution for donor management.
Features
Provides reports including mailing labels and merge data
Extends QuickBooks customer information
Supports seasonal addresses with effective date range
Documents relationships (e.g. spouse, employer, etc.)
Manages and tracks volunteers
Tracks pledges and prospects
Provides multiple membership types with expiration calculation
Supports fixed or rolling membership durations
Calculates giving total or duration based membership levels
Tracks annual or one-time events
Supports event donation levels
Finds and merges duplicate donor records
Tracks soft donations
DonorsFix Requirements
U.S. QuickBooks Pro/Premier 2009 or Enterprise 9.0 or later versions. Or, Canadian QuickBooks Pro/Premier 2009 or later versions.
Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7
Additional 10MB free disk space
Microsoft .NET 3.0 (Automatically installed if needed - requires 150MB disk space)
Reports/data entry may be run in QuickBooks multi-user mode. Setup requires single user.
Optional Internet connection.