-
Hi, Joseph,
I ran into a similar issue, with the same confusion over how the development staff categorized funding and how the finance team did.
I recommend starting with your grants manager. Ensure that you are on the same page so the dollars aren’t being counted twice. What my department did was lay out a series of questions to determine whether a DAF/family foundation gift should be classified as a grant or individual donation. Questions included:
– Did we write a grant to prompt this gift?
– Did the gift come in response to a giving campaign?
– Has your team historically categorized this funder as an individual or a foundation?
– Who holds the relationship with this funder?
You can determine what questions work for your situation; the main thing is to agree on how to decide if there are yes answers that go both ways. For us, some answers were decisive, but in other cases, majority ruled.
The next step is to work with your finance team to align these categories, so they are accounting for the dollars the same way your team is. You’re in a great position to do this with new staff coming in, since they won’t have established habit patterns. As each donation comes in, the finance lead can verify classification with the dev team. It may feel slow going at first, but it quickly becomes second nature.
Good luck!