Vehicle donation - best practices

Krista Berg

Hello!

We receive a high number of vehicle donations at our organization. They are donated via the org CARS, which then sends us a check with donor and vehicle details (and they take care of the tax receipt for the donor). To capture this, we hard credit CARS and soft credit the individual donor. We also enter a gift in kind on the individual (which is where we record all of the vehicle information) but do not receipt them for that.

This feels like an unnecessary extra step but I am wondering if there are any best practices that exist out there for this type of scenario? I am considering proposing we remove the step of adding the gift in kind on the individual and just record the vehicle information in the Gift Reference field on the gift on the CARS record.

If anyone can share how they handle this it would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Krista

Austen Brown

@Krista Berg - At a past org, we entered HC on the CARS record with a SC to the donor's record. All information on the vehicle was entered under the cash gift record, in the reference field. I recommend stopping the additional entry of the GIK as your org did not receive the actual GIK and you could potentially be double-counting if entering the GIK with an amount.

Vered Siegel

@Krista Berg Cosigning Austen's recommendation. With CARS, you're not actually getting a donation of a car - you're facilitating the donation of the car to that org, and the company is liquidating it, giving the donor their tax write off, and giving you some money. You only need to enter it once - on the CARS record, soft credit to the individual who donated the car. Be sure to put a note about the car details in the gift notes area.

Note for future people looking at this response, my answer would be different if you contracted with a company that liquidated used cars and the donor were literally donating the car itself to you! If you receive a gift of a car and then do your own liquidation, you enter the GIK of the car, not the cash. Order of operations matters in this case.