Input the full grant award or just what was paid?

Madelaine Heaven

I am entering about ten years' worth of grants our organization has received (Raiser's Edge is still quite new to us, so still getting things set up) and have run into something I don't know how to deal with.

About half the grants were reimbursement-based and have an award amount that is much higher than what ended up being paid out-- for example, in 2017 we were awarded a $9,500 grant but only ended up receiving $4,198 of that.

How would you input this into the system? Just the amount received? The award number?

I thought of doing a pledge for the $9,500 amount and then paying it with the $4,198, but that will forever show that the constituent “owes” us the rest of the grant, which is not the case.

Dariel Dixon

@Madelaine Heaven What does your organization do in this case from an accounting side might be worth considering. Simply put, there's two ways of entering these gifts:

• Enter the amount that you received. If you do this, you won't be able to see the history of how much your organization was expecting.
• Enter the full amount and write-off the remaining balance. The benefit of this method is that you will show that you were expecting more, and wrote off the rest when it found out that the balance would not arrive.

I'd suggest entering the full amount and doing the write-offs. Showing that there was an unpaid balance should be somewhat important, but it might not be due to the reimbursement nature of these grants. If the grant amounts are simply placeholders initially, (ie. the $9,500 was the maximum that you could be awarded) then entering the gift amount might make more sense.

JoAnn Strommen

@Madelaine Heaven @Dariel Dixon has a solid suggestion.

A write-off and an adjustment to the paid amount will reflect differently when running various reports. How RE handles write-offs has always seemed odd to me. Our org would do a gift adjustment to the amount received instead of a write-off.

Put in a test gift done each way and have finance run reports to see what works best for you.

Christine Robertson

@JoAnn Strommen and @Dariel Dixon - totally agree. Finance will likely want to have a say in how this shows up and it could be a write off or an adjustment depending.