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Development and Accounting Data Entry Alignment

Daniel Meyers

Hi,

I am working on improving alignment and data entry procedures for our fundraising and accounting processes. My goal is to streamline record keeping, limit double entry, and improve reporting alignment between two separate systems: Blackbaud eTapestry as our development CRM, and Quickbooks as our accounting software.

Can anyone share best practices (or what your organization does) to align development and finance? Currently, I see three options for us:

Donations are entered into the eTapestry, acknowledgment letters are created, and development/fundraising reports are pulled from eTapestry. Separately, donations (and other revenue) are recorded into Quickbooks, which is used to generate finance reports for the board, as well as for tax and audit purposes. (This is our current procedure.)
Donations are entered into the eTapestry, acknowledgment letters are created, etc. Then, a report is pulled from eTapestry and that information is used to record revenue in Quickbooks.
Donations are entered into Quickbooks; a report is pulled from Quickbooks and used to record donations into eTapestry...

To summarize:

Donations --> eTapestry; Donations --> Quickbooks
Donations --> eTapestry --> eTapestry report --> Quickbooks
Donations --> Quickbooks --> Quickbooks report --> eTapestry

eTapestry is where our most detailed records on donations will be kept. I can see the virtue of entering gifts separately into each system, reviewing the primary documentation twice. But I can also see how double entry could lead to more errors and inconsistency between systems.

Any advice is appreciated!

------------------------------

Daniel Meyers
Development Director
Lakes Area Music Festival
Brainerd, MN

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Comments

Moira Udinski

@Daniel Meyers HI Daniel. We do #2. Enter all donations into eTapestry, create a batch report and then it's entered into Quickbooks.

Are you talking duplicate journal entries? We really have not ever run into duplicate journal entries for the donations. Duplicate accounts, yes, but I run a duplicate report periodically to make sure we don't have duplicate accounts. Most of the time though, if a duplicate account is out there, it is caught pretty quickly. We do run a monthly donation report from etap for our finance director to reconcile against Quickbooks so that we catch any discrepancy early.

Betsy Rubenstein

@Daniel Meyers we use your first scenario. Most of our revenue transactions coming into QB are credit card or ACH, so we match to invoices created in QB for pledges/sponsorships/etc. or assign allocations based on information provided to Finance from Development. We had one person handling the Development side (eTap) and one handling Finance (QB) previously, but now one person holds both roles due to staff turnover. As long as you reconcile on a regular basis, and can draw clear lines between allocations/categories in QB and campaigns in eTap, it really does more easily expose errors and inconsistency.