Lesson 8.2 – Monthly Processing Best Practices

Welcome to Lesson 8.2! While entering daily transactions keeps your database up to date, maintaining the overall health and accuracy of your financial data requires consistent periodic processing. FastFund Raising includes several utilities designed to be performed on a monthly basis to help you maintain tight fiscal and accounting controls.

These periodic functions are not part of your day-to-day data entry, but they are critical for ensuring your reports are accurate before presenting them to your board or external funding sources. In this lesson, we will explore the core monthly workflows every organization should implement.

1. Processing Pending Recurring Transactions

Many organizations rely on recurring donations (like monthly giving programs). While FastFund allows you to set these transactions to automatically post, some organizations prefer to review them first by setting them as “Pending”.

As part of your monthly routine, you must review and post these pending items.

• Navigate to Transactions > Recurring Transactions.
• Select the pending transactions scheduled for the current month by checking their corresponding boxes.
• Click the Selected drop-down menu and choose Post Pending Transactions.
• Confirm the post date, and the system will officially record the revenue.

2. Reclassifying In-Kind Donations

As discussed in previous modules, when you record an In-Kind donation, FastFund automatically debits a temporary holding account called the In-Kind Contributions Transfer account.

A crucial monthly best practice is to perform an account analysis on this transfer account. If there is a balance at month-end, your fiscal team must post a journal entry to reclassify those contributions, moving the balance out of the transfer account and into the appropriate In-Kind Expense or Fixed Asset account. This ensures your In-Kind revenue properly matches your In-Kind expenses for the period.

3. Bank Reconciliation

If your FastFund Raising module is integrated with FastFund Accounting, your monthly processing should always include a formal bank reconciliation. This process verifies that the cash gifts, cash receipts, and pledge payments you grouped together into bank deposits perfectly match the physical deposits on your actual bank statements.

4. Implementing a “Soft Close”

Once your monthly accounts have been reconciled and your reports have been generated (but perhaps not yet finalized or audited), it is highly recommended to institute a Soft Close.

A Soft Close acts as a strict internal control. Once applied to a specific date (e.g., the end of the previous month), it completely prevents standard users from entering, editing, or deleting any transactions in that closed period. Only a user with Company Administrator permissions can bypass a Soft Close to make necessary adjustments or post auditor corrections.

To view or set closing dates:

• Navigate to Utilities > Books Closing.
• Select Soft Close from the Close Type drop-down menu and enter the date.