Gift Batch Entry vs. Single Gift Entry

Great thread, and it sounds like most of what I'd add has already been said above. The instances where I personally enter gifts individually on the constituent record:

Pledges — there are a lot of pieces to think through, and I find it easier to see everything in the context of the gift screen rather than a long row in batch. Typically I need to add the pledge, link it to the opportunity, mark the opportunity as funded, attach the pledge agreement, and sometimes add an action to the record. Working from the constituent record lets me bounce back and forth between tabs to get all of that done in one pass. Pledges also don't hit the bank the way cash gifts do, so they're reconciled differently.

Stock gifts — I'm typically entering the gift and then immediately selling the stock, so again, a lot of detail that's easier to manage on the gift screen than in a batch row. These get reconciled differently than cash anyway, since the stock gift never matches the check being deposited. I handle these as individual gifts for that reason.

Planned gifts — the available fields change depending on the vehicle, so there's a lot of detail and a lot of fields, and these are typically one-offs anyway. There are usually also updates needed on the constituent record when a planned gift is added, so I find it easier to do everything soup to nuts from the constituent record. Planned gifts also aren't posted to FE at any organization I've worked with, so there's no GL tie-out to worry about there either.

For me, having these gift types go in without a batch number, even in shops integrated with FE, has never caused a problem.

It will be interesting to see how I feel once all the functionality is available in webview batch!

Great follow up queston Dariel :)

Our office is not large enough to have a second person proof all the batches. During the onboarding of new gift entry staff, I will personally approve all batches until they gain sufficient experience and consistently produce work with minimal errors. I have a thorough checklist before commiting batches and most issues are identified through the audit queries I have established, and gifts are reviewed weekly and monthly before reports are generated to catch any past mistakes.

Currently, we utilize database view (dbv) dashboards primarily comprised of solicitor queries (should be familiar to those who use dbv dashboards—though I will not expand on this as they will soon be phased out). We also employ gift entry sheets to assist new staff in ensuring they are reviewing all necessary details and asking the right questions.

In the past, we worked with consultants who recommended that we always use these sheets and have someone review each batch. While the first suggestion was manageable, the second was not feasible given our current resources.

Our acknowledgment process has also served as a valuable checkpoint to identify errors. As humans, mistakes can happen even with diligent effort, which is why we have established these safeguards to help maintain accuracy.

Gift batch is not required at our organization, and in many cases is not preferable to gifts being imported as separate entities, especially because of the limits to editing after-the-fact. I know in other Orgs, halting the ability to go back and fix a gift is important, but our team is small enough that there's only one gift processor (me).

However, I've chosen to start entering checks with gift batch because then I can easily identify all checks that were in a single bank deposit, but otherwise unrelated. The templates in webview are helpful too.

I am in a small team where I am the only one entering gifts. Most of our gifts these days come in via online credit card payments. If there are enough of these I will import them but otherwise I always use batch - similar to what @Rachel Cavalier said, if I use a batch template I can see all the fields that need to be completed, we also use quite a few gift attributes so it makes it much quicker. However we've never had any rule against single gift entry - I don't think it would make any difference to our accounts department, they don't have a system that connects to Raiser's Edge so we've never had to post gifts, we just upload daily gift reports for them to check. Oh, and I'm still doing all gift processing in database view, I haven't tried the web view gift batch yet.

We only use batch entry for gifts because we can pull the needed control report for audit trail of all gifts associated with that batch number. We also export by the batch number and import into our financial system which creates an invoice number using the batch number for reference back to the batch. Recording and invoicing by batch also helps us record the payments in our financial system to be applied to the corresponding invoice. Since we have several sources of payments, this helps us and our auditors tie the payment to the batch of donations.

We always enter in batches. Batches are checked before any gifts are committed as our excellence check; if a gift was entered not in a batch it would turn into the wild west! Also, as others have mentioned I rely on my pre-created batch templates for both imports and standard batch entry and utilize different gift attributes for different batches that might be missed if gifts were entered as single entries.

We also track by Batch number as our finance team does not use FE, and we use the batch commitment reports for their reconciliation (so glad that these are now available in NXT gift batches!). If a day's worth of checks is deposited, all those gifts will be recorded in one batch in RE. If there are any issues with a gift, we can identify which batch that gift was in. At the end of each month I query on all gifts for that month - including the batch numbers - and send finance that list so that they can ensure total reconciliation between Raiser's Edge and finance. Batch numbers also offer one more query-able field.

It is a great question @Jeff Lallo, and one that I have thought a lot about. More and more organizations are pushing to only send payments via ACH, which means there are a number of gifts that now show up as individual deposits at the bank (Benevity, DAFgiving360, Fidelity Charitable, and many others). Therefore, is it really necessary for us to create a batch for the single gift, or just add the gift as a single entry? I lean towards single-entry, but when I arrived at this org, the person training me was adamant that every gift be entered through Batch for auditing purposes.

Here's a curveball though—gifts imported via Power Automate workflows. 😉

A couple of years ago, we created workflows to import Employee Payroll Deductions directly into RE-NXT. No Batch Numbers. No Control Reports.🤯 We built a custom report to ensure the gifts imported match F&A. We automated other gift entry processes as well. Again, no control reports, just custom reports to ensure we match F&A.

Web view now has the APIs to import to a Batch, and since we started using a lockbox for gift processing, those gifts are imported to a batch and then reviewed for proper constituent linking, CFA codes, etc. before committing.