Revenue Categories // Tracking Grant Revenue

Danielle Marino

I'm new to Altru and am responsible for a lot of database cleanup at my new org. I'm consolidating designations and am curious how others utilize the revenue category field.. Can this be used to track grants or sponsorships?

Chris Nungesser

Hi @Danielle Marino!

Happy New Year! I think you could definitely track grants and sponsorships using the Revenue Category field.

The way I use Revenue Category is to track things that might overlap with a Designation. For example, if the revenue was brought in by a Peer-to-Peer campaign. We also have third party fundraising teams. I'll use Revenue Category to track when the revenue is tied to a team. Those teams might fund different designations. And the revenue could be spread across various constituent records. However, using the Revenue Category, if I wanted to pull Revenue for Peer-to-Peer or for those third party teams, I can pull a revenue report based on Revenue Category. So it's really handy that way.

One thing to think about is making sure you don't have competing categories in your field. For example, if you are thinking of tracking Grants and Sponsorships, you'd just want to make sure that you don't have a situation where a Grant could be paying for a Sponsorship. That's probably not a great example, but, hopefully, you get what I'm trying to convey.

For whatever it's worth, I don't track Grants or Sponsorships with Revenue Category. I use the Fundraising Hierarchy/Designations to track that. I have an Initiative for Grants. And then my level 3 tier designations are the different “buckets” that a grant could fund (i.e. - our various funds, projects, and programs). I have our Hierarchy that way because that structure aligns us closely with my finance/accounting team's setup in their records.

Chris ?

Danielle Marino

Thank you so much, Chris! I totally understand about them needing to be mutually exclusive. I'm planning to redo the entire hierarchy and wasn't sure the best way to represent grants/sponsorships without having like 50 designations.

Wishing you a happy & healthy new year!
Danielle