Director
Forum Replies Created
-
Our finance department and advancement departments use the same categorizing so the reports line up.
I think this raises a bigger issue about why Finance/Quickbooks is tracking by these categories when the donor tracking system/Salesforce is designed for this type of breakdown. You don’t need to duplicate. The advancement department needs to understand source of funding for fundraising purposes, but the value on your financial reports is in knowing if funds are unrestricted, temporary restricted, or permanently restricted. Keep the financial reporting simple.
As a school, our financial reports used to break down by category of donor: alumni, parents, foundations, etc. But donors fit into multiple categories, so any breakdown on the financial reports is never entirely accurate. Donor advised funds are becoming more prevalent, and for the most part mimic an individual donor activity, but at some point could mimic an established foundation. Let the advancement area break down their financials by multiple categories, but from a finance perspective, track unrestricted, restricted, etc. But to the extent you do duplicate the advancement system categorization in your financial system, have the advancement dept. categorize the item and the finance dept. should match it.
-
We also have invested our reserves in a short term investment pool that is 70% a low-duration bond fund and 30% in an S&P 500 index fund.
We use a local community foundation for our investing.
-
I work both at a private TK-12 school and am on the board of a social service agency focused on providing food to low income people that is mostly staffed by volunteers.
From the school perspective, we were did not experience a drop in tuition revenue because we pivoted to online and pivoted back to in-person quickly. When students were not on campus, expense levels dropped significantly, (e.g., we normally subsidize bus transportation, so when the bus stopped, the subsidy stopped). We also received a PPP loan. As a result, we did not dip into reserves.
From the social agency perspective, we lost all of our volunteers immediately, so had to begin paying people to provide services. We experienced a big increase in donations which helped tremendously. We also received two small PPP loans (because the staff is so small) and did not have to dip into reserves. Donations have dropped since the pandemic, but we’ve been able to sustain reserves.
