Provide a way to link matching gifts to both the matching company and donor, when they come in through a third party
We currently receive bulk donations through third parties like Benevity, Your Cause, Network for Good, etc. We need to record that the donation came in through the third party so our bookkeeper knows how to reconcile eTap with the bank deposit, but doing this makes us lose the connection between the matching gift company and the donor, and requires us to do a lot of manual work to enter these transactions. For instance, one transaction in Benevity requires us to make two transactions in eTap manually. One for the donor and one for the matching gift, and we can't link them through the matching gift relationship because the donation is recorded as coming in through Benevity.
Two thoughts. One, it would be nice if we could link all three parties. Two, it would be even nicer if there was a way to import the reports from the third parties without having to input the transactions manually.
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Seth Miller
- Mar 24 2021
This item is old, but it is still true and even more prevalent as there are even more third parties like Benevity. For both Matching Gifts and single gifts, the inputs provides and the ability to search on those input fields do not meet the desired functionality.
For Matching Gifts, the functionality should be created by linking accounts. I don't need to steward the account of the third party making the — they never provide contact information. I only need to send an acknowledgement to the donor for tax purposes and then thank them if the third party made a donation to match their gift.
Moving this process to the Gift Types screen under Payment Services would better match the workflow of development and accounting departments. Why?
1.) Currently, there are only PayPal and Venmo in the dropdown under Vendor, and there are many more options like ApplePay, PayPal Giving Fund, Benevity and more.
2.) I don't need a new account created for each of those platforms, they aren't a primary donor and I would not want them counted in the metrics I track for new accounts each year. It also adds to the accounts totals that go toward my billing total :-(
3.) I'm not able to search on or display all of the fields show in this section of the gift record. That limitation impacts how my accounting office is able to see and retrieve data necessary for the connection between eTap and the accounting platforms.
Expanding the Payment Services section of the Gift Entry screen would look like:
1.) Converting the drop-down for Vendor to a open Text Entry Field.
2.) Adding a text dependent field for 'Is this a matching gift?' Yes or No with a text entry field if Yes to include the source of the matching donation.
3.) Adding a Deposit Date. The Processing date and the Entry Date don't matter to my bookkeeper they just want to know when it hits the bank account. This field should also be allowed to be added to a query. Currently "Process Date" under EFT is not.
4.) I should see both the Employee or Orginal Donor amount and any matching gift amount in the monthly total query.
5.) I do NOT want to see a combined total of an employee and employer total gift amount. It would be against IRS regulations to acknowledge a donor gift total that includes the amount contributed by a third-party.