How to enter a new Donation Record
To manually add donations to Sumac, you can either use Add to Contact from the Contact list, or you can use the Donations list.
From the Dashboard
The fastest way to enter donations into Sumac is right from your Dashboard. Show the Recent Donations dashlet to see the most recent donations that have come into your organization, and use the plus icon in that dashlet to enter new ones! When you do, Sumac shows you four options:
- Quick - presents a donation record with only the mandatory fields showing. It lets you enter new gifts fast.
- Standard - presents you with a standard donation record with all the fields you might need to use.
- Batch - this option allows you to enter a large group of donations with ease. It’s ideal for entering a stack of cheques you received in the mail, or a large number of donations you received at a recent event.
- Import - this option lets you import donations from a spreadsheet, which is especially handy if you are importing donations from a third party online donation tool.
From the Contacts list
To add a donation to a Contact from the Contacts list, select the donor and click Add To Contact. Select donation and click OK. Then provide the donation details, which will be explained in more detail below.
From the Donations list
Expand Fundraising in the console and select Donations. Click New. In the Donation window use the person icon to open the Choose a Contact window.
Choose the contact who is making the donation and click OK.
Some donors’ contact records indicate special recognition requirements, but you can always over-ride this for any particular donation. e.g Anonymous donations.
Record financial information here: the payment type, date received, and the total and receiptable amounts.
Often the Total Amount and Receiptable Amount are the same, so when you enter the Total Amount, Sumac automatically puts the same value in Receiptable Amount. But there are some common exceptions.
If you are recording a gift-in-kind donation, set the Total Amount to zero and the Receiptable Amount to the value of the gift for tax receipt or insurance purposes. Also, if you are recording a gift in kind, you should include a note to indicate what exactly was donated.
Alternatively, if the donor received some kind of benefit for the donation, then the Receiptable Amount is reduced by the value of the benefit received. For example a $500 ticket for a gala dinner may have a Receiptable Amount of $300 because the donor received a $200 dinner.
You may wish to indicate other contacts who are involved with this donation. For example, if this is a Tribute donation being made in honor or in memory of someone, click the appropriate option, and fill in the name of the Honoree or Memorialized Individual. If another contact is supposed to receive a recognition letter when a donation is made in honor of someone, you can also capture the Notification Details for who should be notified, and how.
If a contact should receive a soft credit for this donation, you can show additional fields to capture Soft Credit or Influencer details. When you choose a soft credit contact, you can also indicate the portion of the donation that should be soft credited, as well as indicate if the soft credit should be applied to a pledge.
If additional contacts influenced the donor to make this donation, then you can record the influencers.
Under classification, choose donation type. Donation Type lets you specify the basic nature of the donation such as a gift from an Individual, Organization or Foundation.
If you want to connect this donation to other information in the database, you can choose an appropriate Event, Campaign, Fund, or Account. Depending on how your organization has fit Sumac into its accounting systems, the Account field may be mandatory. Sumac can be set up to automatically choose the correct account based on other fields like the Fund or Donation Type.
If a donation is fulfilling a pledge or fund request, then you can link the donation to the appropriate pledge or fund request.
If you create the donation using the pledge list or fund requests list, the connection to the donation is created automatically, so you won’t have to do this manually.
When you click OK to save the donation, it is automatically linked to the donor contact, and can be accessed in both the donations list and the contacts list.
Please refer to the release notes for more details on how to customize the New Donation Entry window. More Customizations for Donation Records