"Does Donor Management replace or integrate with my accounting software?"
The short answer to this common question is "no" - because Donor Management isn't accounting software, it's a Relationship Management System. The most important thing that Donor Management is looking to track is your relationship with your donor - not simply dollars and cents.
Donor Management doesn't reflect dollars in/dollars out.
Have you ever noticed that you don't often see uneven amounts in Donor Management? A $50 donation is a $50 donation, whether or not the donor chose to cover the credit card processing fee.
That's because from the donor's perspective, they gave you $50. They don't care that $1.50 went to credit card fees - they want to be acknowledged as having given $50.
In contrast to the accounting software that you might be familiar with, our system only tracks money that has been made, not how it's spent.
If your accountant is looking for a detailed disbursement report for all of your credit card transactions, and your organization uses Network for Good's Donor Advised Fund to process donations, we recommend having them create an account using your EIN on this page.
If you've already set up this account, you can add your accountant under "My Account info," and then selecting "Edit Admin Contacts."
Once they have been added as a contact, they can then pull reports to their heart's content under "Donations".
We recommend pulling a report for a whole calendar month at a time, since that's what will be reflected in one disbursement check. For example, all the donations made between April 1st and April 30th will be included in the disbursement on May 15th.
Here are some important things to note about the resulting report to reconcile your financial books:
Alternatively, if your organization uses Bonterra Payments to process donations, your account can instead review our guide on reporting with Bonterra Payments with Donor Management here.
You can pull cash/check reports too!
If it saves you time ND duplication of effort, you can also easily pull a report that will reflect your cash and check donations from Donor Management. The report can be exported to Excel, and handed over to your accountant to upload into their software.
You'll first want to click "Giving" in the left-hand navigation, and then click "Create Filter."
Then, you'll want to create a filter using the below conditions:
First, choose "Date Added greater than {Date last report was pulled}" - but please note, this condition will need to change every time you pull this report.
Then, you'll want to choose choose "Add Grouping." A "grouping" allows you to do more complex logical statements, and displays as a dotted line around your grouped conditions.
Within the group, we're saying this condition has been met if the Payment Method equals either Cash or Check. We do this by toggling the "All" drop down to say "Any" (as in, if any of these conditions are met, this larger condition is true.)
Make sure the final Any/All dropdown is set to "All" - that way we'll look only at recent donations who match your selected payment types.