Duplicate Organizations

Angel Weaver

In our database, we have multiple organizations that have donated under their main company via check but then they will donate again in the future and the name on the check has changed but we know that it is the same company. This gets confusing for our development team on trying to find the right contacts, total giving, and where to put actions.

We enter gifts based on the name we receive on the check, this causes issues with duplicated organizations since some companies have one “Parent” and then other 3 other separate organizations owned by one person. These other organization are usually named the same thing but with “LLC” or something like that on it.

When asking our finance department about merging organizations that we know to be the same just under different names, they expressed concern about having to have the name on the check to match who we give credit to for their tax purposes.

My question is, does anyone have anything similar going on at your organization? What polices do you have in place on how gifts are entered with duplicate organizations?

Faith Murray

@Angel Weaver, we've had this only rarely. One insurance company in particular comes to mind that changed hands a couple of times. For us, the actual legal name of the company had indeed changed, so tax receipting to the old name was not a concern. We simply added the old names to the “Aliases” tab so it would appear in lookups.

If a company does indeed have subsidiaries that file their own taxes, as some franchises do, then yes, you would need to issue the receipt to the name on the check. In this instance, I would advise connecting all of them to one master business record through the Relationships tab, possibly soft-crediting the subsidiary gifts to the parent org (if you use soft credits - we don't), and using your solicit codes and “Annotate” alerts judiciously to make sure the orgs aren't being repeat-solicited and to alert your data-entry operators.

If the names all belong to one business that has multiple “DBA” (doing business as) names, then the org only files one set of taxes, and you should be safe to merge them. Their DBA filings should be a matter of public record in the state of their incorporation.