Fund Splitting vs Financial Reporting – Looking for Practical Approaches

Ryan Kamstra

Hi all,

My organization is currently being encouraged to implement fund splitting, and I’m hoping to learn from others who have gone through this.

From a fundraising perspective, I understand the appeal—splitting a single gift across multiple funds more accurately reflects donor intent. However, we’re running into a familiar challenge on the finance/reporting side.

In practice, fund splitting seems to introduce reporting complications, particularly:

• Reports and lists pulling the full gift amount instead of the split portion
• Totals appearing inflated or duplicated when reporting by fund
• Increased reliance on manual adjustments or workarounds to reconcile numbers

This is actually the second time I’ve encountered this exact issue at an organization using Raiser’s Edge for both fundraising and financial reporting. In the previous case, the ultimate solution was to move financial reporting outside of Raiser’s Edge entirely to get reliable numbers.

Before heading down that same path again, I wanted to ask the community:

• How are you handling fund splitting without breaking financial reporting?
• Are you relying on Database View reporting, external tools, or specific query/report configurations?
• Has anyone found a more sustainable, in-platform approach that avoids duplicate or overstated totals?

I’ve already reached out to our client executive, but they weren’t able to speak to the technical side of this, so I’m hoping to hear from folks with hands-on experience.

Appreciate any insights or lessons learned.

Alex Wong

gift split does not have financial reporting issue. gift soft credit does.

A single gift amount can only be distributed in that same amount to multiple fund. unlike soft credit, where more than the total amount of the gift can be soft credited.

Any standard report on RE NXT or dashboard that report by fund will account for fund split amount, not using full gift amount.

The only issue I see if you simply run a gift query and export split information but sum by gift amount. That would inflat the total b/c not all of the gift amount is for the fund and multiple fund split will result in multiple rows of the same gift amount.

Carlene Johnson

@Maya Rosman - it is your time to shine!

Maya Rosman

We use split gifts and I actually prefer it. However, if you're talking about how webview surfaces that in it's baked-in settings, then yes, you're going to need to adjust how you report, but it's really not too difficult! As Alex said, using standard reports should still be fine - especially if you are reporting by fund. They should be calculating correctly based on the amount you allocated to each fund for each gift.

I will admit that I never rely on the lists and dashboards in webview for our metrics or financial reports, as they do not count the way we would (we use either standard report that can use fund balance to not double count pledges and pledge payments made within the same fiscal year - all the built dashboards s in webview want to show you either committed or recieved revenue, and we need the correct mix of both for our numbers). Honestly, lists are not meant to be used for complex reporting - they are meant to be tools for fundraisers to quickly look at a group of records/see top-level information. I would not depend on lists for financial reporting. You can see that a gift in a list was split, but you're correct - a gift list will not show you how much was allocated per fund.

If we need really specific numbers per fund, I almost always use query for this (I learned RE in a system where because of an integration, it was impossible to get the info we needed from standard reports, so I usually default to query). When pulling this information from query by Fund, you need to always pull Fund Split Amount (under the Fund node) instead of the Gift Amount for your totals. This will break out the correct amount per fund. Gift Amount will always show the total amount for the gift, even if you've selected Fund ID (or description) as part of your output. Standard reports should also report correctly by fund if you've set them up to output by fund.

The only place this becomes a problem (and it's something I know I and several others are really pushing for them to solve) is if a pledge is split between funds. RE does not break down the pledge balance by fund amount, so if you need to know what amount remains unpaid on a split fund pledge, you have to calculate that manually. Depending on your split pledge volume, this is either manageable, or awful. If you're in the awful category, I suggest pushing for a process when split gifts are the norm, UNLESS it's a pledge and then you create two pledges - one for each fund. The pledge payments also calculate by the % in the pledge, an doesn't take into account how much the donor has paid towards each fund (so the pledge is 50/50 between two funds, if they pay off the total amount for Fund A in installment 1, RE will still try to split out installment two 50/50 between funds and you have to fix it). Again, this is the only reason I'd suggest not entering split pledges, but I have my fingers crossed that Blackbaud will actually fix this issue in the future.

I really like using split gifts because it makes it easier to communication to donors about past gifts (THEY remember writing you one check and that is harder to "see" if you've split the gift), it gives you an accurate count of total number of gifts for the year as well as gifts per donor and average gift amount (total gifts number is very inflated if you're entering all splits as separate gifts, and average gift amount is skewed). It's also generally how RE assumes you will behave (it's how the system was set up to work), and really with the exception of split fund pledges, it works beautifully.