Lesson 10.5 – Year-End Donor Receipts

Welcome to Lesson 10.5! To comply with IRS Publication 1771 regarding charitable contributions, nonprofit organizations must provide substantiation to taxpayers who make tax-deductible donations. FastFund Raising streamlines this annual task by allowing you to easily generate cumulative, year-end receipts for your constituents.

In this lesson, we will explore the types of year-end receipts available, how to define your reporting parameters, and how the system tracks these acknowledgments.

1. Types of Receipts and Templates

FastFund allows you to send out two distinct types of Year-End Donor Receipts: one to acknowledge cash gifts and pledge payments, and another to acknowledge in-kind contributions.

Before generating these receipts, you must set up your receipt templates. The default Year-End Donor Receipt template is formatted as a two-page document: the first page features a personalized letter to the donor, and the second page provides a detailed, line-by-line list of their donations. Depending on your FastFund license, you can set up up to five different templates (single-user version) or up to ten different templates (multi-user version).

2. Generating Cumulative Receipts

To begin the process, navigate to Reports on the Main Menu, and under the Donors section, select Cumulative Donor Receipts.

The Date Range field will automatically default to the current calendar year dates. Crucial Rule: Year-end donor receipts should always be generated for the calendar year. Even if your organization operates on a different fiscal year (e.g., July to June), donors must report their tax-deductible contributions to the IRS on a strict calendar-year basis.

3. Filtering Your Donor List

You do not have to generate receipts for your entire database at once; FastFund provides several filters to target specific groups of donors:

• Minimum Thresholds: If your organization’s policy is to only send year-end receipts to donors who gave over a certain threshold, you can enter that value in the Minimum Amount or Minimum Deductible fields.
• Mailing Verification: If you plan to physically mail the receipts, check the Has Selected Address box. This ensures your list only includes donors who have a preferred mailing address on file.
• Exclude Acknowledged: Once you send a year-end receipt to a donor, FastFund automatically creates an Action Code on their profile titled “Acknowledgment Sent”. If you run your year-end receipts in batches over several weeks, you can check the Exclude Acknowledged box to ensure you do not accidentally send duplicate receipts to donors who have already been processed.

Once your parameters are set, click GENERATE RECEIPTS to view the list of donors who meet your criteria.

4. Printing and the Audit Trail

From the generated list, select the receipts you want to process and use the Selected drop-down menu to choose Print Selected with Mail Merge.

Because generating bulk tax receipts requires significant processing power, FastFund creates these files offline. The system will generate PDF copies of the receipts alongside a comma-delimited (.csv) Mail Merge file containing the donors’ contact information for printing envelopes or labels. These files are bundled into a zipped folder and emailed directly to the user who initiated the request.

Once the receipts are processed, the donors included in the batch will automatically have the “Acknowledgment Sent” action code added to their data record to maintain your audit trail.