Year End Procedures

This page lists the processes that you will likely want to do at each year end. Some of them are optional, but the switch to the new year via Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year menu option is absolutely required, because if you do not do that, you cannot enter donations for the new year. Also, although there is a suggested order of activities in the paragraphs below, you can use your own judgment about what order to do most of them in.

Once you have received and entered all of the donations for the year, and left enough time to make sure none of the cheques you deposited were NSF, make a backup of your data with Backup/Restore à Backup Database.

You may wish to check your data before printing the year-end receipts. To do this, you might want to use these two reports: Reports à Donors à Addresses and Reports à Donation à All Donations à Sort by Name. You can either print these out on the printer, or just view them on the screen. Check that addresses are correct, and that the donation details look correct. Check that you have not entered any donations twice by accident.

Next, use Receipt à All Donors to generate all of the year-end receipts, and click Print to print them. (Users in the U.S.A. who wish to send receipts only to donors who have donated more than $250 or some other fixed amount may prefer to use the Receipt à Filtered Donors menu option so that they can do so.) Either accept the option to print another copy for your records, or make a photocopy for your records. (For Canadian charities, the CRA requires that you keep copies, although arguably the copy in the database should be sufficient.) Another option is to use the Email/Print button to email receipts to those donors who have email addresses, and print the rest.

Once the receipts are printed off, print mailing labels for them with Reports à Receipt à Mailing Labels. When prompted for the date, enter the date you created the receipts, which is probably the default of today's date. Mail out the receipts to the donors.

Next, make another backup of your data in a different place, or with a different filename, from the backup you made before creating all of the receipts.

Next, start the next year with the Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year menu option. This will create new data for the next year (say 2012), by copying over all of the donors and categories from this year. Note that this is still stored in the one database file, DONATION4.DB, and backups back up all years of data. This process will ask you to confirm that you want to create the new year's data by copying over donors and categories from this year. If you answer No to the prompt, it will not start the new year.

If you answer Yes, it will then ask whether you want to skip copying donors and categories that have no donations in the last 2 years. In effect, this gives you an option to delete donors that have no donations. Many users probably answer Yes to delete those old donors, to reduce clutter in their lists of donors, but do use your own judgment about this! Please note that answering Yes does not delete any data from prior years. It merely reduces the list of donors copied in to the new year.

If you want to see who those donors are that have not given any donations in the last 2 years, to help you decide, you can use Reports à Donor à Old Donors before doing the Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year.

You are now ready to enter donations for the new year. You can always switch back to do further work on the previous year (for instance to issue a duplicate or corrected receipt) by using Maintenance à Change Year à Previous Year again. You can always tell which year you are working on because it is shown in the title bar of the main window, e.g. "DONATION 2011 data for ...". You can switch back and forth between the two years as often as you wish.

You can in fact do the Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year before the year end if you wish to get a head start on the next year, for instance to do some hand deletion of inactive donors, to update the annual pledges, etc. (The pledge amounts are optionally copied from the previous year.) However, you should be aware that once you start the new year, the donor records for each of the two years are in effect completely separate. Thus, for instance, if you enter an address change for a donor in one year, you will also have to make the same change (if it is needed) in the other year. If you add a new donor in one year, it will not appear in the other year, so you will have to use the option Database à Copy Missing Donors if you want it to be in both years.

You may also want to delete old data in the database before or after the year-end, using Database à Delete Old Data.