For any Church or Charity you need to attract income. This is done in a number of ways, from private philanthropy through to individual small public donations. For any income, the need is to reduce administration, improve visibility and accuracy.

Systems like Xero and infoodle keep the manual handling low and efficiency high. Let’s take a look at how this can best be done.

Step 1: Online forms and payment gateways

Good CRMs like infoodle have online forms to make everything a lot easier when it comes to collecting names, address, gift aid approval (if applicable), privacy data (giving permission to contact again) etc. Payment gateway integrations can be built into these forms so you can collect one off or recurring donations. Being able to adding cash or ask the donor to setup their own regular bank transfer should be included in this mix too.

Step 2: Acknowledgement

A customised automated acknowledgement by email at donation time is best and is created as part of the form.

Step 3: Accounting

You have to account for the funds and of course xero is the way to go here. Xero will import your transactions from the payment provider to process. But this is one payment – which often has gateway fees deducted already for one or (hopefully) many donors. Just reconcile this for now, even if its a suspense account code waiting for the rest of the picture to form.

Step 4: Add to you Donor management system

Donor management systems like infoodle which integrate with Xero will import the one transaction into its own database. The system already knows about the donor (step 1), the actual amounts donated (step 2) and the fees associated with that transaction, and the transaction (step 3). The complete transaction and split to each donors can now be created – then returned as a journal to xero if required.

Step 5 (UK): Gift Aid processing

If required, your donor system has the donor, approval, transaction value, date and whether it can be gift aided or not. By the click of a button it can be sent to HMRC.  Systems like infoodle make this a breeze.

Step 5 (Rest of the World): Receipts

Receipts need to be sent out – based on real, received monies (not assumed income!). Using the donor and transaction data, receipts can be designed and issued by post or email in bulk.

How's that for saving massive amounts of time so you can focus on the task of working in the charity (rather than for the charity) to give a bigger contribution to your organisation’s mission and purpose

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