Integrating DonorSnap with Your Accounting System

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DonorSnap is designed to easily provide you with the necessary information to keep your accounting system up to date and in balance with your contribution ledgers.

DonorSnap functions and interacts with your accounting system in the same way that a third party payroll system (ADP, Paychex, etc…) would interact.  Detailed transactions are entered into DonorSnap and then summary information is entered into your Accounting System via a journal entry.

Watch our Accounting Software Integration Video or continue reading for more details.

DonorSnap’s role is to serve as a subsidiary ledger to track all contributions to your organization to a specific donor.  DonorSnap maintains a complete history of donations along with the ability to report on any specific period.  The user does not need the redundancy of trying to maintain two Donor records (one in DonorSnap and one in the Accounting Package).  This redundancy is usually accomplished by  re-entering all Donor information into an accounting package or trying to establish a link between the two packages.  Reentry of information is not a productive use of the organizations time and trying to establish a link either through an API or another process creates more complexity for an organization and really gains no new information other than to make the accounting system a clone of what is already being tracked in DonorSnap.

 

How to Configure Your DonorSnap Database

If an organization is going to use DonorSnap to track their contributions, then two critical pieces of information need to be carefully recorded when donations are entered.  First, care must be had when entering the transaction date.  The transaction date will determine which period a donation will be posted to in your general ledger.  The organization should confer with its accountants as to what rules to apply to the transaction date.  This is the same process the organization’s accountant would go through when posting the transaction into the general ledger.

The second piece of information that needs to be recorded is the Account Code.  Again, the organizations accountant should be consulted so that there is agreement as to how to record donations.  The account codes are set up as a drop down list in DonorSnap so the possibility of entry errors is diminished.

If care was taken with both the transaction date and the account code, then DonorSnap can easily provide your accountant with a summary report for posting of the journal entry.  This report would be run periodically (for most organizations you would run this once per month) and provided to the accountant.  This will serve as a great check and balance system for your organization to ensure that the donations recorded in DonorSnap ties out to the total donations received by the organization.  Attached is a copy of the DonorSnap accounting report.  This can be found in DonorSnap by following the following menu:  Reports > Donation Activity > Donations Received.  Choose this report and in the selection options you would specify:

A sample of this report run for Demo Company and the first two weeks of August is attached.  This is the report that would be given to the accountant.

From there, it’s really a snap to get the information into almost any accounting system.  You’ll see a screenshot attached where I made the appropriate journal to record the donations in the Demo company report.  This is a screen shot of QuickBooks on-line but would be almost identical to any computerized system.  The total time required to make the journal entry is less than a minute. 

 

In Summary

The idea behind DonorSnap is to serve as your organization’s subsidiary ledger for contributions.  In the same way that you don’t set up a vendor for every employee in your accounting system (since you are giving them a check), you don’t need to set up a customer account for each Donor.  When information is carefully recorded, the use of DonorSnap can significantly streamline the organizations accounting operations.