Lesson 6.1 – Overview of Fundraising Transactions

Welcome to Module 6! Now that your constituent database is organized and your campaigns, appeals, and gifts are properly structured, it is time to dive into the core of your daily development operations: entering financial transactions.

FastFund Raising’s financial transaction processing is designed to be intuitive and consistent. The data entry procedures for cash donations, pledges, and in-kind gifts are largely identical, which makes the system easy to learn and use.

In this lesson, we will cover the types of transactions you can process, the strict entry rules FastFund enforces to maintain data integrity, and how the system initially handles incoming funds.

1. Types of Fundraising Transactions

FastFund Raising allows you to record a wide variety of financial activities. You can process the following types of transactions:

• Cash Gifts: Tax-deductible donations, which can include cash, checks, credit cards, and ACH payments.
• Cash Receipts: Non-tax-deductible receipts for goods or services received by constituents (such as merchandise sales or event tickets).
• Pledges: Promises to donate a tax-deductible gift, which are recorded as pledge receivables.
• Pledge Payments: Payments applied to outstanding pledges.
• In-Kind Gifts: Non-cash donations of goods or services.
• Deposits: Grouping your daily receipts to record bank deposits.
• Appeal Expenses: Tracking the costs incurred for specific appeals to generate net revenue reports.

2. Transaction Entry Rules

To help maintain pristine financial records and establish proper internal controls, FastFund Raising builds strict validation rules into all transaction entries. Before the system allows you to save a transaction, it checks against the following rules:

• Transactions Must Balance: The total amount of the gift distribution (even if you split a single check across multiple gifts) must perfectly equal the overall transaction total amount.
• Active Links Only: All transactions must be applied to an active appeal, gift, or open pledge.
• No Zero Amounts: Transactions cannot be posted with a zero amount, with the single exception of In-Kind contributions.
• Accounting Period Controls: You cannot post transactions into a closed accounting period.
• Posting Ranges: Valid posting ranges can be established in your company settings. If you try to post a transaction outside of this normal range, the system will trigger a warning.
• Editing Restrictions: Your ability to edit or delete a transaction is strictly limited if that transaction is already linked to another transaction (e.g., a cash gift that has already been included in a cleared bank deposit).

3. The Undeposited Funds Process

A crucial concept to understand before we begin data entry in the upcoming lessons is how FastFund handles incoming cash.

When you enter a cash gift, a regular cash receipt, or a pledge payment, the funds do not immediately hit your live bank account in the system. Instead, all donation receipts are automatically posted to a holding account called Undeposited Funds.

This holding account allows you to group multiple individual donations together over the course of the day or week. When you are ready to go to the bank, you use the bank deposit process to total all the receipts, print a deposit summary, and move the lump sum from the Undeposited Funds account into your actual cash account. This ensures that the deposit amount in FastFund perfectly matches the deposit amount on your actual bank statement, making monthly bank reconciliations much easier.