Entering New Donations

There are three ways to enter donations in this program:

This section describes only the first method.

To enter a new donation, first select the donor for the donation. Then press F2, click on the New button to the right of the Donations area on the main window, or select File à New à Donation from the menu. There are five fields to fill in: Date, Amount, Category, Cheque No / Paid By and Description. The Receipt # field, which is displayed, is not editable. (You can make the Description field disappear, if you don't want to use it, by choosing an option in Maintenance à Main Menu Options.)

Date: entered in the short date format set in the Windows Control Panel's Regional and Language Options (usually either MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY). This defaults to today's date (or December 31 of last year if you are still entering last year's entries) for the first entry you make after starting the program. Subsequently, it defaults to the date you used with the previous donation you entered. If you like the default date, just press Tab to move right on to entering the Amount. Only dates in the current fiscal year are allowed, unless "Allow January" is checked under Maintenance à Main Window Options.

You can type donation dates in directly, or you can click on the down arrow to the right of the date, which pops up a calendar that you can use. Details on how to use the calendar are in Using the Popup Calendar to Enter Dates.

Note: You can only enter donations dated within the current year that you are working on, that is indicated in the title bar of the program (e.g. "DONATION 1997 data for Your Organization Name"). To start entering donations for a new year, please see Year-End Procedures.

Amount (also called Total Amount if the Eligible Amount field is also displayed): may be any amount over $0. You can't enter the dollar sign, and you don't have to enter commas or any decimals if it is a round number. I.e. for fifty dollars, just enter "50". For one thousand dollars, just enter "1000".

If you wish to be able to enter amounts of $0, you can check the "Allow $0.00" checkbox on the Maintenance à Main Window Options window. If you do this, entering $0 is still only allowed if you also enter a Description for this donation. You might want to enter $0 for Gifts In Kind for which you are not providing a valuation, or for cheques that you have entered, and then come back NSF from the bank. (More commonly, however, you would handle that case by just deleting the donation.)

In the case where the Eligible Amount field is also displayed, please see the details on that field (below) in order to understand the difference between the two fields.

Category: This defaults to whatever has been set in the Maintenance à Main Window Options window, or to "General" if you haven't changed it there. If that is correct you are done. As with the Donor categories, you can enter the first letter of a Category and it will be automatically selected. Press that same letter again if you want a 2nd or further category that starts with the same letter.  (For instance, if you have both General and Garden as categories, pressing G once will select Garden, and pressing G a 2nd time will select General.) Alternatively, click on the small down arrow button at the right of the field and select the category from the scrolling list that appears. The categories are displayed in alphabetical order.

Cheque No / Paid By: This optional field allows you to specify how the donation was paid. For a cheque, enter the cheque number. You can also enter any text that you want to enter, but by using the drop-down button (or just typing the first letters in one of the entries on the drop-down list), you can choose from several pre-specified standard entries: Cash, VISA, MasterCard, Money Order, Credit Card (for ones other than VISA and M/C), Debit Card, Gift in Kind, PAC (Pre-Authorized Chequing), PAR (Pre-Authorized Remittance - a specific program of the United Church of Canada), Non-Receiptable or Pre-Receipted. Both Non-Receiptable and Pre-Receipted are special "magic" entries that will prevent this donation from ever being included in a charitable receipt. Use them for types of income that are not eligible to be part of a charitable receipt, or for "flow-through" money that came to you from this donor but which has already received a receipt from a 3rd party source, such as an Internet charitable donation service or the United Way. (You can also prevent all donations from a given donor from being receipted, regardless of what you set in the Cheque # / Paid By field for the donations, by setting the Donor's Category 1 or Category 2 value to "Non-Receiptable".)

It is up to you whether the Cheque No / Paid By field is printed on the charitable receipts. You get it if the "Also Cheque No" radio button in the section for Details Section Includes on the Maintenance à Receipt Options window is selected. If it is printed on the receipt, it is spelled correctly as "Check" for U.S. users and "Cheque" for Canadian ones. In most other places in the program it is always spelled "Cheque".

Receipt #: This is a non-editable field. It will be automatically filled-in with the receipt number after a receipt has been issued for this donation. Note that if the issued receipt number is (say) 2007-0012, you will just see "12" here. If one receipt has been issued covering several donations from the same donor, the same number will appear in the Receipt column for each of those donations.

Description: This optional field allows you to enter up to 50 characters of description for this donation. That could be used for the description of Gifts In Kind (if you are choosing to enter them) or for annotations such as "In loving memory of my friend, Jim Smith" that you might want to print on a custom receipt. You can also use it to record anything else you wish to record.

The Description prints on a couple of the Donation reports that have room for it (Reports à Donation à Current Donor and Reports à Donation à Details, One Page Per Donor. It also optionally prints on the receipts, if you select the "Also Description" radio button in the Details Section Includes section of the Maintenance à Receipt Options window.

You can control whether the Description field is displayed in the Donations area of the main window with an option on the Maintenance à Main Window Options window.

An example of this is a fundraising dinner. Suppose the donors buy tickets costing $100 for a fundraising dinner, and the actual cost of providing the dinner to your organization is $40. That means that only $60 of the donor's donation is eligible to be included on a charitable receipt. The way you enter this is to enter $100 for the Amount, and $60 for the Eligible Amount. The Eligible Amount is what the donor can claim on their taxes.

If a donation does not involve an "advantage", e.g. the donor has not received anything back in exchange for their donation, do not enter the Eligible Amount field - only enter the Total Amount.

Note: As of late 2006, there are new Canada Revenue Agency regulations with regard to this situation, which they call "split receipting". They require the separate display of the following fields on a receipt:

- the total cash amount of the donation received by the charity

- the value of the advantage (what the donor received), and

- the eligible amount of gift for tax purposes.

All receipts for Canada or Quebec show all three of these lines, but only if an Eligible Amount has been entered.

You can control whether the Eligible Amount field is displayed in the Donations area of the main window with an option on the Maintenance à Main Window Options window.

Note for users in the U.S.A. and other countries: I am only aware that this "split receipting" concept applies in Canada, so at this point I do not recommend using the Eligible Amount field for the U.SA. or other countries.. Non-Canadian receipts always use the Eligible Amount, if it is entered, and otherwise use the regular Amount (or Total Amount) field.

Just as for the donors, when you are done you press Enter or F10, or click the Save button, or select File à Save Changes. If you decide you did not want to enter a new donation after all, press ESC, or click the Cancel button, or select File à Cancel Changes. (Note that you can't do anything else in the program until you choose one of those two options to finish or cancel entering the new donation.)

You will see that two totals are always displayed at the bottom of the donations area. The one on the left, titled "Total", is the total of the donations for this donor this year. The one on the right, titled "Total for MM/DD/YYYY", is the total of the donations for this donor that were made on the date of the currently highlighted donation. (This can help you confirm that you have entered all of the required lines for a donation that is split up over several categories.)

If you want to double-check the total donations you made on one day (with the same entry Date), you can use Reports à Donation à One Date Details.