Gift Dates for NXT Online Donation Forms

Patty Driscoll · September 3

We haven't moved to NXT online donation forms yet due to their inability to issue an instant receipt, but I just took this BBU course Shifting from Online Express to Blackbaud Donation Forms and it stated 'If the gift was reviewed through online data review, the gift date will be the date it was reviewed'. This won't work for us for a couple reasons; Finance requires the gift date in RE to be the transaction date in BBMS for reconciliation, and at critical year end tax deadline, when people make a donation on Dec 31 to get a tax receipt for that year, we have to date their gift and receipt for the date they made the transaction, not January 2 or 3rd when we are back in the office reviewing the gift batches. The same would hold true for each month end.

This seems like just another barrier to moving to NXT donation forms. Wondering what others (particularly Canadian users, due to CRA requirements) are doing as a workaround without causing a huge amount of extra work?

Carlene Johnson · September 3

I don't think this is accurate. Here is my understanding of how things currently work:

Gift Date is the date the gift was processed through the form and BBMS. (There are times when time zone may affect this as there is a cut-off time related to the date.) Gifts processed through Direct Debit / EFT will also have a slightly different date.)

Gift Date Added is the date the gift is Approved through web view batch. In the past - Gift Date Added defaulted to the Gift Date which was causing all sorts of issues but has been resolved as you can see here: https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-4262

@Dan Snyder, anything else to add since the idea referenced above was yours?

I'll also mention that many organizations use the GL Post Date to mimic the date in BBMS for reconciliation purposes.

Patty Driscoll · September 3

Thanks Carlene - since I haven't tried it yet, I have no frame of reference and was concerned by the statement in the training. If the training was incorrect though, and in reality it does make the gift date the true date the gift was processed through the form and BBMS, then we should be fine.

JoAnn Strommen · September 3

Do check it out @Patty Driscoll. We've been hesitant to use RE online forms for opposite of you. We need gift date and GL post date to match up to our deposit dates. So we would want the 1/2 date, not 12/31.

My experience with a recurring gift in RE NXT was that it came through with the date it was processed. Haven't used donation form to see if that's still the case. An sure someone who uses them can verify.

Dan Snyder · September 4

@Carlene Johnson is correct. The gift date will be the date the gift was processed by BBMS. The gift date added is now the date the batch is processed.

@JoAnn Strommen I'm curious why both your dates have to match the deposit date and not one for fundraising/stewardship and one for finance? Not a judgment (both my dates are the date the gift was processed), just trying to learn.

JoAnn Strommen · September 4

@Dan Snyder Reality, they shouldn't have to match. But all the reports/receipts office mgr runs are based on "today" gift date. Yes, certainly could be a date range to capture, but…
Finance pulls reports that would show payment date and has to reconcile.

LOL "it's the way it's always been done." Have found change is tough for advancement but tougher for finance. Decided that one wasn't my battle as other's decided not to use RE NXT donation forms.

Dan Snyder · September 4

@JoAnn Strommen Yes, I am fortunate to have a fantastic colleague in finance who largely let's us drive the date. I have offered to use the GL Post Date for their reconciliation, but they said not to worry about it. Probably didn't want to change their process. 🤣

Patty Driscoll · September 4

Thanks all for your feedback. Sounds like we will be ok for gift date if it is actually not changing that to the date reviewed. Now if we could just get BB to issue instant receipts, we could happily move over to the NXT forms 🙄

Jennifer Briganti · September 5

You can insert transaction details in the thank you emails for NXT forms. Is there something in your receipt that cannot be put into the thank you email?

Mary Beauclair · September 5

@Patty Driscoll

one thing I'll add from using the online donation forms is that when using the online data review the gifts go into a batch that is dated with the date the gifts were reviewed and not the gift date. This can cause confusion if you would ever need the batch date to match the gift date. For example, several gifts come in online over the weekend - on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These all have different gift dates. When they go into data review and are reviewed for correct constituent matching on Monday, all the gifts go into one batch that will have Monday's date as the batch date and the default description includes "transactions from Monday's date" which is potentially confusing if you aren't aware. It is possible to modify the batch description manually if you need it to correctly identify the transaction dates of the gifts within it.

Patty Driscoll · September 5

@Jennifer Briganti we are waiting for the ability to have NXT forms issue a CRA compliant receipt instantly without waiting for the gifts to be reviewed and approved (just like Online Express has done for many years). In Canada, the details of a gift can be put in an email body if you want, but that isn't an official receipt for income tax purposes. It has to be a pdf doc.

Patty Driscoll · September 5

@ Mary Beauclair - good to know. We will have to manually change the batch names for sure as our Finance wants a very specific format to the name.

Ange Scott · September 8

You can change the dates before you submit the batch for approval. We use the gift date as the date the donor made the donation, and the GL date is the day the money hits our bank account.

We recently tried out the NXT donation forms for a small appeal. I have to say that I absolutely hate the way the donations get automatically lumped together in a batch. It's very time consuming having to move gifts that have cleared on the same day into a new batch, updating the GL date and references, renaming the batch, & then getting the control report out of DB view. I find NXT very slow loading.

In the time it takes to do 1-2 of these in NXT, I could've done our entire bank statement in DB view :D

Patty Driscoll · September 8

Thanks for the feedback @Ange Scott I think we would use the same approach with gift date and GL date that you note here, but from what I've seen, the gift processing in NXT is as you indicate, extremely clunky and time consuming. I'm looking forward to seeing this fall's PUB's in the hope that they will have fixed it to work more like database view which is super quick and can have defaults set to be almost data entry error free.

Gift Dates for NXT Online Donation Forms

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