Incorporating previous donations for new envelope numbers

Joetta Trimble · Post by **Joetta Trimble** » Thu May 12, 2005 2:23 pm

When visitors who do not have envelope numbers drop a check in the offering plate, it is included in our loose plate contributions. If the visitor becomes a regular attender or a member, and we assign them an envelope number, they like to see ALL their donations for the year on their contribution statements. I have run into this situation before, and have usually designed manual statements for those folks, but I thought someone might have a better solution!

My concern is, if you go back and try to re-enter each individual check, reversing the entry from loose plate to envelope giving, it gets messy with the reporting, because in the current case, their donations go back to March. We're talking small amounts here, five checks totaling $75, but on occasion it's been larger amounts.

Any ideas?

sardcc · Post by **sardcc** » Thu May 12, 2005 3:02 pm

We assign an envelope to everyone who makes a donation with a check. Simply because we have their name and address, which is all we need to send out a contribution statement. We would need to send out a statement, even to visitors or one-time givers, if the gift is above $250. If we feel they are a visitor or a 'one-time' giver, we assign them an envelope above 5000. All the regular givers are assigned a number from 100 to 4999. From time to time (after the year-end statements have been printed) we review the envelopes assigned greater than 5000 to see if they can be removed or not. If the visitor becomes a member, their existing envelope number can be re-assigned to the next sequential envelope number available for members.

Joetta Trimble · Post by **Joetta Trimble** » Thu May 12, 2005 3:31 pm

We may have to consider this. We also routinely assign numbers to donations over $250. We usually don't add people to the database until they express a desire to be on our mailing list...we have a form that they can fill out with the necessary information. However, having "contribution only" names in the database would be easier than having to go back and retrieve previous donations. Thanks for the reply!

Randy B · Post by **Randy B** » Thu May 12, 2005 3:43 pm

I think you have identified the solution as going back and enterning a negative contribution in your loose plate and entering a postive contribution for the same amount to the individual. You can check your entry before you post to make sure you do compound your dilemma with another problem.

Another idea on visitors is to issue them a manual receipt like from the cash receipts books you buy at any office supply store.

NeilZ · Post by **NeilZ** » Fri May 13, 2005 12:31 am

We have a policy that anyone who drops a check will get a number. We tried entering checks under the 'loose cash' envelope, but we found a problem with one set of our counters, and a missing $10.00 check.

Seems that they entered a cash contrib as a check, and didn't catch it when they did the final check verification (they have been retrained). Problem is the bank, when they went through the PC+ created bank deposit slip, couldn't understand what these checks were listed as 'loose cash'.

We then do a cleanup of the contributions database following the annual statements. If only one or two contributions were found, we reset the envelope number to zero. Normally this is done in the summer, after all taxes have (supposedly) been filed.

Of course, we keep end-of-year backups on CD just in case we need to get to that data.