I haven’t found any reference to this in the forums or the guides.
Is there a way to track customer (or public) donations?
I’ve looked at using sales Invoices and customers but that is very clunky and not exactly correct. There is no sale obviously and an invoice for them is not applicable in this case, just the Tax Receipt.
We do have items that are sold but as a non-profit most of our income is donations and we currently track this by customer and amount, keeping an extensive history.
This is exactly what I would do. I could easily generate a Statement showing the history with this Donor (Customer)
Donors are customers/Clients.
Invoice
Dr Donor Account (Under Account Receivable / a custom control account made up of customers)
Cr Income / whatever reserve or restricted or project account for the donor
Issue a Receipt
Dr Cash
Cr Donor Account (Under Account Receivable / a custom control account made up of customers)
You can also explore Custom Reports which can generate a report from Receipts from a particular Payer for example.
I was toying with this - I couldn’t get it to work for me. It had a long string of text that was deal breaker.
However, after you mentioned it again, I revisited that function, renamed ‘Accounts Receivable’ to ‘Donation Received’, don’t tick the optional invoice and it now works without looking ‘wrong’.
If you do this, every sales invoice—for those few times you actually sell something—will debit the Donations received control account. That is not what @Abeiku suggested. He suggested establishing a custom control account for this purpose.
What are you referring to by this statement? There is no “optional invoice” box to tick anywhere in Manager.
Also, be aware that @Abeiku’s method goes back a few months to before you could designate the payer on a receipt to be a customer. Since that capability was added in August 2020, there is a shorter possibility to consider. Define your donors as customers. Then just enter a receipt, skipping the sales invoice. As payer, choose the Customer type and select the donor’s name. Post the receipt to the destination account for the donation. This method does not allow the direct creation of customer statements for donors, because the transaction will not be routed through Accounts receivable. But it leaves open the possibilities for custom reports. You might decide this method does not suit your needs. But, if it does, it is half the work.
I looked at custom reports but couldn’t see what I needed in the options. Also, and maybe I misunderstood this in the guides, but I didn’t think a custom control account could track customer payments.
So my next best option seemed to go ahead and use the Sales Invoice and Reciepts as a way of tracking. It is extra work and if I can cut that step out and still have the customer vs donation breakdowns that would be great. But I still don’t see how to do it.
In the receipt payment, on the first line entry, the third box is an optional, it gives you the option to include the sales invoice as part of the line on that receipt.
Thanks for your input. I’m not at my computer but will look at custom reports again. Maybe I missed something there.
They can if the control account is made up of customers. @Abeiku’s method would be set up like this, under assets:
You could also create an Accounts receivable group and assign both the regular Accounts receivable account and the Donations control account to it. That is what @Abeiku was referring to when he wrote, “… Under Account Receivable….”
You can create customers and when you create receipts for donations select the customer as the payer then use the search function under receipts and payments to search for donations made by that payer.
