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 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 Database à Backup.

You may wish to check your data before printing the year-end receipts. To do this, do the following 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, pick Receipt à All Donors to generate all of the year-end receipts, and select Print to print them. Either accept the option to print another copy for your records, or make a photocopy for your records. (The government requires this!)

Once those 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 on a new diskette or in a new directory.

Next, start the next year with Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year. This will create new data for the next year (say 2008), 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. It will 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. I would recommend answering Yes and deleting the donors, to reduce clutter in your list of donors. 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 given no donations in the last 2 years, you can use Reports à Donor à Old Donors before doing the Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year to help you decide.

You are now ready to enter donations for the new year. You can switch back to do further work on the previous year (e.g. to issue a duplicate 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 2008 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 initially copied from the previous year.) However, you should be aware that once you start the new year, the database 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.