Auction Items

Angel Weaver

Just curious how other organizations are entering auction items for events. We currently aren't tracking who donated and who bought the item at an event in our system. Our finance team enters the lump sum amount made from the auction in their books in FE but as far as who purchased the item we do not enter as a gift since the got an item in return. How does your organization do it?

Christine Cooke

@Angel Weaver
Items donated are entered as Gifts-in-Kind and the description of item is in reference. The $ amount is zero unless the Fair Market Value can be determined by a receipt from the donor.

All auctions purchases are recorded, even going so far as to track live and silent in different funds. The purchase amount is entered in the Gift Amount field and the amount over FMV is entered in Receipt Amount if you want to get down to the nitty gritty details. Reference field is used for description of auction item purchased.

The reason for entering this info in RE? So that when you are looking to see if a person has any giving history you can see a pattern of whether they give to annual fund and event participation or never to annual fund but always event participation… without that info entered you have an incomplete history of your donor tendencies and history.

Jana Fross

@Angel Weaver

I would echo @Christine Cooke as our recording is the same. In addition, we use the Package field to track whether items were part of the Oral/Silent/Drawing items, and the Gift Notes field to record the item narrative that will be published in the program and/or online. This allows us to export the gifts with all necessary data to advertise the items.