How to create 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 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. ie Anonymous donations.
You may wish to indicate other contacts who are involved with this donation.
- If this donation is in honor or in memory of someone, click the contact icon to choose the In-Honor contact.
- If another contact is supposed to receive a recognition letter when a donation is made in honor of someone, then click the contact icon to choose the Recognition contacts and fill in the Send Recognition note.
- If a contact should receive a soft credit for this donation, then click the contact icon to choose that contact.
- 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.
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.
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 campaign and 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.
Finally, if you assign receipt numbers to donations for government tax reporting, Sumac can automatically assign the receipt numbers for you.
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.
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