Illuminate Your Impact: Aligning Finance and Fundraising to Build Donor Trust

Speaker 1 0:08
Hi everyone, my name is Roberto Campo, and I am a donor perfect training specialist. Welcome to Natalie and Heather’s session. Illuminate your impact: how fundraising and financing alignment builds donor trust. Natalie Anderson is a senior product marketing manager Read More

Speaker 1 0:08
Hi everyone, my name is Roberto Campo, and I am a donor perfect training specialist. Welcome to Natalie and Heather’s session. Illuminate your impact: how fundraising and financing alignment builds donor trust. Natalie Anderson is a senior product marketing manager at Sage, focused on the nonprofit and public sector. For more than a decade, she has worked with nonprofit and government organizations as they modernize finance, reporting, and operations through cloud technology. Natalie partners with nonprofit finance leaders, customers, and research firms to develop practical thought leadership rooted in real-world challenges. Her work centers on translating complex accounting and technology topics into clear, actionable insights that help mission-driven organizations make better discussions and build long-term resilience. Heather Johnson is a solutions consulting manager at Sage, where she specializes in delivering strategic financial solutions tailored to the unique needs of nonprofit organizations, with a deep understanding of both nonprofit operations and financial management technologies. Heather partners with mission-driven teams to help them optimize efficiently, improve transparency, and drive greater impact through data-driven decision making. With over 25 years of experience in the financial technology space, Heather has guided numerous nonprofits through successful digital transformation journeys, empowering them with the tools and the insights they need to thrive in today’s complex funding landscape, and at Sage, Heather Johnson leads with a consultative approach, ensuring that each solution aligns with the organization’s mission, values, and long-term goals. Before we get started, a few housekeeping items: please submit your questions in the Q&A tab, so we can address them during the session. All sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Heather and Natalie, take it away.

Speaker 2 2:13
Amazing, thank you so much, Roberto. I feel so official. I didn’t know you were going to read my whole bio, so I appreciate it. Thank you, and thanks everyone. Super happy to see all of you virtually here, even though I can’t really see you. I am Natalie Anderson. I’m happy to be here. I am coming to you live from actually sunny Minneapolis, so my background is reflecting the actual weather outside. We’d love to hear where some of you are from. If you want to drop it in the chat, let us know where you are listening from today. It’s a fun thing about these virtual conferences. It’s fun to see where everyone’s from. Oh my goodness, Alaska, New York, wow, all over Newfoundland, Canada. Oh, love it. Thanks, everyone. All right, let me advance my slides here, and we will get going. All right, so, as Roberto mentioned, our session today is illuminating, illuminate your impact, aligning finance and fundraising to build donor trust. And again, I really appreciate you all being here today, I want to start off with just some quick framing before I’ll have Heather say hello too, but I just want to start off with some quick framing, because it’ll be important to kind of set the stage for how you hear the rest of the session today. So, we are Sage, right? So, typically you think Sage finance, but this session is not just focused on finance, it’s really about your total organization and about connecting finance and development and the rest of the board. So today I really want to focus on the numbers that you share with a donor or a board member or your leadership team, and how you ensure that those numbers actually hold up, because when they don’t, right, it’s not just a reporting issue, it’s really a trust issue that goes beyond just your organization internally, and unfortunately I see that breakdown happen all too often, and so what we’re going to talk about today is where that breakdown actually happens, and then what can change when teams are actually aligned. So, as Roberto mentioned, I am Natalie Anderson. I am senior product marketing manager with Sage. I have been here seven years, focused solely on nonprofits for the entire time that I’ve been here, and I’ve been working with nonprofits in the tech space for about 12 years now, and joining me today, and who will be presenting a little bit later is my colleague Heather Johnson. Heather, do you want to just say hello?

Speaker 3 4:51
Sure, thanks, Natalie. Great to be here with all of you today. Look forward to showing you all that Sage Intact can do, and similar to Natalie, been working with not. Profits for about the last 27 years, so obviously my heart and my passion for my work are around the nonprofit space. Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2 5:10
Thanks, Heather. All right, so looking at our agenda today, first I will spend a few minutes talking about some research that Sage recently did around market trends in the nonprofit sector and the environment that you all are dealing with right now. Then we’ll take a look at where things tend to break down between fundraising and finance, and where you might feel some of that tension within your own organizations. I’ll then walk you through a very real world scenario that we see all the time, and then Heather will join again and bring it to life with a live demo for you all, and then we’ll wrap up with what actually can change when your systems and your teams are aligned and what that means for you. All right, so let’s start again. I just want to talk about the environment that most of you are operating in right now, I’m going to share some data from our recent research survey, the Sage 2026 nonprofit outlook study. We completed this to really look at market trends and what’s happening in the nonprofit sector. All right, so there’s no doubt the last year plus has been challenging in the nonprofit space, and so we had asked about kind of what challenges are you coming up against, and what we heard, what we saw in the data, you can see on the screen there, but when I look at the way in which our respondents answered this question. The word that keeps coming to mind for me is unpredictability. Right, when I speak with nonprofit leaders, I often hear that, you know, it’s not just that things are changing, but that so many things are changing and moving at once. You know, funding is less predictable, your costs are going up, staffing is still tight, donor behavior is shifting, and on top of that, compliance is getting even more complex. So, any one of those issues on its own could be fairly manageable, but when they all happen together, they really compound, and it gets a lot harder to plan, and a lot harder to answer even basic questions with confidence. Okay, so according to our study, what did our respondents do in response to some of those headwinds they came up against in 2025 and beyond into 2026 so I would say most organizations did a mix of things, right. We saw delayed or reduced spending being the top answer. A lot of organizations have started to look more seriously at diversifying their funding sources, especially those that were heavily reliant on government. There is more effort being put into planning and scenario modeling. Some leaned on reserves when they needed to, and we also saw a lot of organizations investing more in automation to try to streamline some of those processes, free up their time, so they can do things like modeling scenario planning, so if you zoom out on this, this is really about trying to stay flexible and protecting your organization. All right, but here’s the interesting part. We then asked our respondents, what actually helped, what actually made a difference to help you get through those strong headwinds and make progress despite everything that’s changing and all of the challenges that were that we came across unexpectedly, and when we asked, it really came down to two things: visibility and speed, right? Most nonprofits realized that they needed to get the numbers faster, they needed to understand what’s happening without having to wait for someone else, and they needed the ability to see fund and grant activity clearly. So, what I’ve heard from many of our customers at Sage that handled uncertainty with relative ease wasn’t that they had fewer problems, but that they could see what was happening, and they had the ability to adjust quickly. Okay, so let’s talk about why that’s hard. Most organizations are still working across disconnected systems, and that creates some really real issues, so you’re dealing with things like manual workflows and duplicative work, different teams in your organization looking at slightly different versions of the truth, slightly different data, and some. Times inconsistent communication with donors, so this isn’t really about like one person or one department that’s not doing something right, but the fact that the systems typically are not set up to support this alignment and connection, and I like to describe this as the Nike network, right?

Speaker 2 10:22
Like, put on your sneakers, lace them up, data still moves between people instead of through systems, right? So someone enters the data, someone else reenters it, someone might interpret it slightly differently than its original intent, or it’s its original, the original way it was entered, and then every time that happens, you introduce risk to your organization, right. That’s where delays come from, that’s where discrepancies come from, and that’s where tension between teams often starts to show up. So, think about how a typical gift gets processed, right. A gift comes in, development enters it into the CRM, then it gets passed to finance. Finance has to reenter it into the accounting system, and that’s the moment where things can start to drift, because finance doesn’t always have the full context behind the gift, and development doesn’t always see how it ends up being recorded on the accounting side, and so now you have two views of the exact same transaction, and that’s really where things start to break down. Okay, so let’s walk through this scenario here. Okay, in this example we’re looking at a youth services nonprofit, so let’s say in our example there’s a longtime donor who pledges a $500,000 major gift to support a renovation project. The development team celebrates and shares the news with the board and the marketing team, and however they didn’t necessarily clarify that the gift was pledged over three years with flexible payment timing, or somehow that message got missed. So, meanwhile, the finance team enters the full $500,000 as revenue in the current year’s budget and begins allocating the funds to capital expenses, assuming that the cash would be available upfront, so you can probably see where this is headed. Fundraising treated the pledge as secured funding, without somehow, without sharing the full payment schedule, that that piece got missed. Finance treated the pledge as immediate cash, not long-term receivable. The renovation team, meanwhile, moves ahead with contract commitments based on inaccurate cash flow assumptions, so everyone in this scenario is acting on good information. It’s just that it’s not the same information across the board. And then this is where consequences start to show up in very real ways. At first, it could be small, like a vendor invoice comes due, but the cash from the pledge hasn’t arrived yet, so now finance is juggling timing, trying to cover something that was already assumed to be funded, and then the ripple effects start, the project itself slows down, maybe construction pauses, maybe timelines slip, and now there’s penalties or added costs that no one planned for, and externally it can be even harder. Right, leadership has already shared timelines with the board, and maybe even with donors, and so now those timelines don’t hold, so you have to walk them back, which is not a fun place to be, and it can also create some awkward conversations with the donor, because from their perspective they committed exactly what they said they would, but now there’s pressure for that funding to come faster than originally planned, and then finance gets pulled in again during an audit, because now there are questions about, you know, how the revenue was recognized in the first place, whether it was reported correctly, and so what started as a simple misunderstanding ends up touching cash flow operations, board communication, donor relationships, and compliance. So that is the real impact of misalignment. So when we talk about alignment, this, this is what we really mean, right? It’s not complicated, but it needs to be intentional. Everyone needs to operate with the same definitions. What does the pledge mean versus cash? You need the same structure. How are funds and programs tracked? You need shared real-time visibility, so that you know that every team is looking at the same thing at the same data, and you need to eliminate reentry wherever possible, because reentry is where data gets reinterpreted, and of course human mistakes can happen, so when this works, accounting becomes the foundation that holds.

Speaker 2 14:59
Everything together, you can trace every dollar, you can track restrictions correctly, you can clearly explain what has been used and what hasn’t, and you eliminate a lot of the manual reconciliation that tends to slow everything down, and this is where a connected finance system like Sage Intact and DonorPerfect really matters, because all of this only works if your accounting system can actually handle support this level of structure and visibility in conjunction with your fundraising system. All right, so if you haven’t heard, Sage has partnered with Donor Perfect to bring together fund accounting and fundraising. This partnership has resulted in the development of Sage Intacct fundraising powered by Donor Perfect. It is a purpose-built solution made for Sage Intacct customers or those exploring Sage Intacct with fundraising needs. So it has the look and feel of DonorPerfect, with additional reporting capabilities and data that seamlessly flows from fundraising into your fund accounting data in Sage Intact, and really it allows you to spend more time focused on your donors and your mission and less on reconciling data. You truly trust the accuracy and completeness of your financial insight. It helps break down silos and align your team around common goals, so that you can quickly measure, report on, and optimize your performance. And then, most importantly, right, focus on raising more money and using it wisely to maximize your mission, do all right. So, let’s bring this to life here. I’m going to stop sharing my screen, and Heather is going to walk us through what this looks like in real life.

Speaker 4 16:55
Let’s say, thank you

Speaker 3 16:56
very much, Natalie. Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah, okay. We are.. oh, goodness.. hang on one second. Hopefully, all will be well. I’m getting a thunderstorm rolling into my area right now, so that’s great. All right, can you see my screen, Natalie? Natalie, yes. Okay. Great, great, great, great. So, let’s get into some of the functionality that really makes the magic happen, so really tells that story that Natalie shared with you so well, in terms of how we correct those types of things and make sure that both finance and development are on the same page, so right now, of course, you know all of you are very familiar with the view that you’re seeing in front of you. We’ll begin our journey in DonorPerfect and talk a little bit about what this looks like when you have an integrated product like Sage Intacct, and the integration with Sage Intacct and DonorPerfect really, really can help solve for all of those challenges that Natalie mentioned, so looking at our donor here, and we’ll take a look at a couple of his gifts on with them on the donor perfect side of things. If we go in and we take a look at just a, just a standard gift, if you will, when we think about making sure that we’re tying the development office to the finance office, certainly it’s the reporting piece, and we’ll get to that towards the end of the presentation, but that really has to start with those gifts coming in, the processing, and making sure that we are recording all of the important information that we need for a grantor or a funder to know, or that they provide us, so that we are staying compliant to their, to their wishes. So, on this particular gift, you’ll notice that I have scholarship fund for my general ledger portion. I’ve also got capital campaign 2025 So, you’re going to map donor perfect to say gentact, so that really you’re pulling over all of this information from the development side into the finance side, and we’ll, we’ll see a few things here in just a few minutes that really kind of speak to why that’s important, and some of the powerful information you’re going to be able to get once you marry up these two systems, and the great conversations you’ll be able to have. So, looking at the gift here, I can quickly go over to my Sage Intacct instance and take a look at the journal entry that came over from DonorPerfect, and you’ll notice that we’ve got some strong similarities here, right. We can see that fund dimension and say GenTact, where Johnny actually gave to the scholarship fund. We can actually see Johnny as the funder, the donor, the grantor. You can kind of pick your terminology here within, say, Gentac, we can monitor the restriction. This is a permanently restricted gift. Is it temporarily restricted? Was it intended to support a particular program? All of this will be mapped to say Gentact from general ledger mapping perspective, so that when those gifts come over to say Gentac. You’re going to be able to very clearly have a conversation between development and finance. On here’s what Johnny gave us. These were his intentions, and this is what we need to do with these funds. So, the first piece is eliminating data entry. We don’t have to have dual entry in two places. We’re not using export files to exchange the data back and forth, you’re simply entering that information into DartnerPerfect, syncing it with Sage Intact, and all of that great information is going to come over to the general ledger. So, we’ve done a couple of things already, just in these first two screens, eliminated any manual efforts, and certainly reduced risk in terms of maybe it makes it over to the general ledger, but as Natalie said, it comes in as unrestricted, as opposed to permanently restricted. And then we have, then we have some big problems going on there. Now, in addition to being able to sync with the journal entry with a journal entry into Sage Intacct, we also have some additional options in terms of your integration. You do have the capability to kind of choose what level of integration you want between DonorPerfect and Sage Intact. We do have integrations that are possible, where you could actually bring over things like your pledge record.

Speaker 3 21:15
So, why would you want to do that? Certainly, you’re going to be able to monitor pledges, send pledge reminders, those types of things from the development side of the house, but if you really wanted finance to have good purview into what actually is standing out there in terms of accounts receivable, what is the payment schedule for this particular pledge, you actually could create an AR entry on the Sage Intacct side of things, so that again you’ve got good visibility across both solutions. So similarly to what we saw with Johnny’s gift, we have Mickey Mouse’s gift that is also hitting those those general ledger pieces of the puzzle, and if I go back over here to Sage Intacct, we can see that we’ve got what we call a pledge invoice within accounts receivable, so again, you may not want something this deep in terms of integration, but just always want to call out that these are possibilities. Now, in addition to something like a pledge invoice, we also can handle things like membership or event registration and bring those over to Sage Intacct. Now, this is really a use case where you might actually want to do that, because in this case we have a membership invoice that is subject to revenue recognition. So, as I look at my dimensions across the bottom, so tracking all of those things that were important to this donor and are important for us to know as an organization, you’ll also see this rev rec template on the entry, and if I take a look at this particular revenue recognition template, we can see that we’re recognizing this membership revenue over a period of 12 months, and this tool is very flexible, so for instance, if you had a member, maybe it’s museum membership, for those of you who might be arts and cultural, and perhaps part of that membership revenue could not be recognized until they perhaps attended a free show at the museum. You can actually build those types of things into a revenue recognition schedule, so that Natalie’s example was somewhat similar to this, right? Knowing exactly what we can recognize and what we have on hand at any editing point in time. Now, once we have all of that wonderful information over in Sage Intacct, there are so many great things that we can do with this. So, certainly on the development side of the house, you’re going to be able to report out very well on the revenue piece of the puzzle, but having that information come over to Sage Intacct, where you actually have the expenses living, you’re going to be able to have some really impactful strategic conversations about your development efforts going forward. So, what I have in front of you now is a – it’s what we call our fundraising efficiency dashboard. Now, this is just an example. You could certainly tailor this dashboard to, you know, those topics that you are discussing regularly, when finance and development are meeting, talking about next year’s strategy, budget planning, you could tailor this to the outcomes you need to see in order to have those conversations. Couple of highlights here, certainly you have that financial information, so bringing over the different types of revenue from donor perfect, marrying that up with things like your expenses. So, this, this performance card that we see right here, this is actually a calculation that lives behind this card. And what we’re doing here is, we’re, we’re looking at, you know, of all the dollars we brought in, what is that fundraising expense ratio? We can see that it’s trending down. That’s great news, right? We were raising more dollars for lower expenses. We can also look at things like fundraising cost per donor. When we start to look at performance cards like this, we’re also bringing over statistical information from DonorPerfect, so the number of donors, the. Number of event attendees, those types of things, and we can begin to fold that outcome data into these calculations, so that again we can have those conversations year after year, where we say one event was maybe more successful than the other, perhaps some of our fundraising strategies are more impactful at a lower cost, and you really get the full picture of all of your development efforts, as opposed to just looking at the revenue coming in. Now, I suspect you’re all measuring that, right?

Speaker 3 25:29
But the key is, are you having to do that in spreadsheets, create some of those reports on your own, versus having two systems that are married up that can give you the complete picture of everything from a development perspective, you can certainly do some charts and graphs within here. We’ve got event revenue versus expense. We can see very clearly that the golf event was much more successful in terms of generating more revenue at a lower cost, being able to look at different things like your revenue by source. You could even do this from like a donor perspective if you wanted to, so there’s a lot of great information that you can produce right here within Sage Intacct. Once you have those two systems integrated, what’s more is when you’re having those conversations and you’re looking at a dashboard like this, I can very easily click into some of this information, and once I start to do this, you’ll see I’ve got my contributions separated out from the quest and legacy, let’s say that I perhaps have some additional questions about contributions by campaign. I can drill into that contributions figure, and you’ll see that I can actually start to look at some of the journal entries that came over from DonorPerfect in this example, and we can actually drill all the way into the journal entry, really take a look at all of the detailed information that came over for your finance folks. They love having this audit trail. Auditors love it as well, so that you can actually see if something went through an approval process, and that type of thing. So it’s not only having the information for those strategic conversations, it’s then being able to drill down and dig into that conversation again, because the two systems are married up now. If you are an organization where you know, sort of the grant management side of things lives within development, so we look at grants from a couple of different perspectives, and Sage Intacct, really the long and the short of it here is that Sage Intacct can handle, you know, the entire grant life cycle. So, if you are looking for private grants, you know, maybe coming from other types of nonprofits like private foundations, those types of things, certainly you can manage that on the development side, but just wanted to highlight that Sage Intacct does have the capability to manage that grant application process and really track the reporting deadlines, application deadlines, those types of things. Then, once the grant comes in to the organization, certainly that’s going to pass through into, say, Gen Tech, and then you can begin to do things like budgeting around grants and those types of things. We also have additional solutions that can help with giving out of grants as well, and managing that financial piece within Sage Intacct, as well. And then the last thing I have, we should have plenty of time for questions, and I think that’s mine and Natalie’s favorite part, anyway, because we’d love to hear your feedback. I saw some great conversations going on in the chat already about what this process looks like for your teams, but this is where we really, really can, can wow the board right by having these two systems integrated. This is one of one example of our visual board reporting capabilities, and you’ll notice that certainly we’ve got financials, budget to actual over here that drill into any of these areas, it produces a new visualization for me, but then when we get over here, the development folks typically love this piece, right, because it’s not just about the financial piece of the puzzle, it’s talking about things like individuals served by the programs, perhaps it’s the number of scholarships that we gave out in a given year, so it really allows you to do some great visualization of not only that financial data, but also again, when we marry up revenue and expense, we can really talk about how we served the communities that we’re serving, what the impact was, and then really produce a good financial picture around what the cost versus the revenue was. There, did I miss anything, Natalie?

Speaker 2 29:23
I don’t think so. I love that, Heather, because you can pull those charts right into your annual report, sort it on

Speaker 5 29:29
your website, use it

Speaker 2 29:30
to tell your story, and we know that donors are more engaged, more likely to give when you can show, demonstrate the impact that their fund, that their dollars made, so that’s awesome. Thanks for showing us that. Yeah, all set. Great. Yeah, yeah. All right. Stand by, everyone takes a minute to reshare. So, all right, let’s see. And I’m back, all right, thanks, Heather. I’m just going to wrap it up here, and then we’ll get to some of your questions. Okay, so what did Heather show us? Taking a step back here, what actually changed before we had the alignment? We talked a lot about all of the reentry that needs to be done, potentially multiple versions of the truth, and the time that it takes to answer questions, and then there’s always a little bit of risk involved, whereas after alignment it was what Heather showed us: shared data, clear definitions, real-time visibility, and most importantly, you have confidence, confidence in the numbers that you’re sharing, confidence is what you put out there to all of your key stakeholders. It’s just a different operating model, and this is what it means for your organization, right? You’re able to answer your donor questions much more quickly. Your board discussions are based on real numbers versus ones that you’ve reconciled. Finance and development are working off of the same information, and you can clearly show, like Heather showed on that dashboard, how your funds were actually used, and that’s really what builds donor credibility and trust. Okay, and then I just wanted to share this example. This is one of our customers, First Baptist Church of Milford. This is what this can look like in practice. Before they moved to Sage Intact and Sage Intact Fundraising, powered by DonorPerfect, they were dealing with a lot of the issues that we’ve been talking about today. Their financial data was spread across multiple entities and multiple projects, and it had just become really hard to manage, and the previous system that they were using just couldn’t keep up with the complexity, although if you heard the name of the system, you would think that it would be able to keep up with this complexity, as they definitely say that they can, but they were just dealing with a lot of inefficiencies and inconsistencies on the fundraising side of the house, tracking donations for them across all of their multiple funds and dimensions was really difficult, and actually they ended up hiring third party support just to keep things moving, so right, it’s not even about the inefficiencies, then it’s like now there’s an added cost just to manage their data, and it’s just a perfect example of what happens when your systems don’t align. Finance is doing one thing, development is doing another, and it takes so much effort just to reconcile it all. So they decided to move to Sage Intact for their financials, and Sage Intact Fundraising, powered by Journal Perfect for their development and connected their fundraising and financials, and there’s this shift for them was really about simplification and consistency. They were able to bring both sides of the house together. This meant that their data was structured the same way across finance and development, and most importantly, it meant that information could flow without being reentered or reinterpreted along the way, and you can see on the screen how that translated into outcomes for them. They Barry estimated that they improved their efficiency overall by 20% They saved a ton of time, especially on reporting, which is where we see a lot of manual effort tends to sit, and then the most important piece is to me is the last one. There it is, the confidence that they felt in their numbers that is the real outcome here. So, right, confidence in your numbers doesn’t just affect the finance team or the development team, it really changes how your organization makes decisions. It changes how you communicate with donors, and it directly impacts how much trust you’re able to build with your stakeholders and your community. And then I love that quote from Barry on the bottom there.

Speaker 2 33:55
I think it just captures the shift that it’s not just about better reporting, but it’s about having confidence in the data and freeing up time to truly be able to focus on your mission instead of chasing down numbers. All right, so I am going to look at the questions here, and Heather, I will lean on you. I know there was a lot of questions around QuickBooks, Heather, and I know you work with a lot of organizations evaluating Intact and looking at other accounting softwares as well. Can can you give us just like your high level comparison between like QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, and Sage Intacct?

Speaker 3 34:39
Sure, absolutely. So we actually, we migrate a lot of customers off of QuickBooks, and my overall statement is typically that QuickBooks is a great little program until it’s not, and for many nonprofit organizations, if you need to begin to track things like grants, programs. Funds, campaigns, appeals, restrictions. You can see me counting on my fingers here. If you’re familiar with QuickBooks, you know that there are some limited capabilities. You know, we’ve had a lot of clients who are trying to shove multiple values into the class field. So, let’s say, for instance, that I wanted to report on a very specific fund with a very specific program, very specific restriction, and perhaps even, you know, some grant funding in the mix. In order to do that, in QuickBooks, it’s my understanding that you have to, you have to do a lot of jumping through hoops, exporting out, massaging the data in Excel, which, of course, is time consuming, and it introduces risks to your financials, so that’s the, that’s the biggest component I would say that we hear from customers that are moving away from QuickBooks is they’ve simply outgrown it, because the reporting needs of nonprofit organizations, as you all know, are much more robust, if you will, than than a typical organization, so that’s that’s probably the overarching theme that I hear, Natalie.

Speaker 2 36:03
Okay, yeah. Thank you. That’s really helpful. And I’ll just add that, you know, while Sage Intacct is used across many industries, nonprofit customers make up our largest percentage of our customer base by far. So we put a lot of dollar, like development dollars and effort toward nonprofits specifically, and it really is. I’ve worked for other nonprofit software companies, and I’ve just.. this product works so well with fund accounting specifically, and we have so many happy nonprofit customers. Okay, Heather, what does importing a gift? How, sorry, how does importing a gift work with transaction fees? We record the gift and donor perfect as what the donor gave in total, while finance records the gift as the total minus the fees. We report the fee difference manually to finance at the end of the month for reconciliation,

Speaker 3 37:02
the that’s a great question, and a very common question. So I think it’s twofold. It’s the way that we structure the integration, first of all, to make sure that we’re pulling over the separate pieces, if you will, of the transaction, so that you’re not doing that manual true up. We also have something called bank fee functionality, bank feed functionality that can sometimes help with this, because we have what we’re able to do with bank feeds is above and beyond what I’ve seen with other solutions with bank feeds, where it can actually start to match up multiple transactions to a single transaction or vice versa, so sometimes that reconciliation challenge that you have when there are credit card gifts coming in and there are fees associated with them, sometimes we can resolve, resolve that with a bank feed rule as well. So I think it’s twofold there. I think a lot of it is how we structure the integration and those transactions come over, and then the other side of it is the bank feed functionality within Sage Intacct, very common.

Speaker 2 38:04
Yeah, and I saw someone ask, say they’re using Sage 50, can we add Sage Intacct fundraising, or do we need to move to Sage Intacct first? You would need to move to Sage Intacct in this example. Okay, Heather, can finance enter interest, dividends, and loss to the individual funds with this program with Sage. Absolutely,

Speaker 3 38:28
yeah, yeah. So we have a, we have a great cool, a great cool, a great tool called Dynamic Allocations. So I’m assuming you probably have investments slash endowments, maybe a combination of the two. We actually can, you know, keep track of the balance within that pool by fund, and then we can use the dynamic allocations tool to distribute out gains and losses based on everyday average daily balances. We do have some folks that are actually still doing unitization, and we can use statistical values to help manage the distribution by unitization. Hopefully, that answers that question.

Speaker 2 39:10
Thank you. Are soft credits integrated into Sage? If yes, do those affect the reporting, like cost per donor, without duplicating revenue, that is actually a good question. If we can get the name of that individual, we’ll follow up with an answer. Anonymous user, if you want to know the answer to that, please write in again with your contact info. Okay, what else? How are monthly donation pledges treated in accrual reporting in Sage? In DonorPerfect, they show as $0 on cumulative reports because they are booked as $0 infinite pledges. So,

Speaker 3 39:56
yeah, I would think that that’s going to depend. Depend on how we post it over into Sage Intacct, so I showed you two examples, right, where you could actually have a journal entry, and you know, journal entry is just very straightforward. We’re just probably booking it to for a pledge, you’re going to book it to AR, but then if we want to actually book that pledge into accounts receivable within Sage Intacct, you’re going to have some additional options there in terms of how you actually want it to reflect on the receivable side. I think I’d have to read that question again just to make sure I’m answering it in total, but I think the short answer is that you have options there in terms of how you post that over, and I think if you post it over to the AR side of things, you’re probably going to get more of what you’re looking for in terms of what is actual revenue versus a true receivable over time?

Speaker 2 40:45
I think you answered that in full, but if we did not answer your question, let us know. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about the integration cadence? Is it when does that get updated if you enter something into DonorPerfect? When does it show up in Sage Intact?

Speaker 3 41:10
You actually have some flexibility there as well. We have many clients who let the sync run overnight. We have other clients who are doing this on, you know, a couple of hours basis, so depending on how we set up the integration, and you know what your cadence of entry is into development, you know, if you have 1000s upon 1000s of gifts coming in on a daily basis, you may want that sync to occur more frequently, but you know, I think most clients are setting this up so that it sinks over into Sage Intact at night.

Speaker 2 41:41
Thank you. Okay, and then I know there were some questions around, is this included, or how does this all work? So I’ll just add a note that Sage Intacct and Sage Intacct fundraising are, you know, separate products, so you would need to subscribe to Sage Intacct, and then you could work with DonorPerfect to move your subscription, your current subscription to Sage Intact Fundraising, so that you’re able to take the advantage of this integration. I think I think that’s all the questions. So last call, if anyone has anything else. Oh, soft credits, it sounds like that was the part of the question that maybe didn’t get answered. People are saying the chat now. I lost the question.

Speaker 3 42:32
Are soft credits integrated into Sage? That’s the one that we have, the follow-up one, Natalie. If we can get contact information,

Speaker 2 42:40
I’m sorry, everyone. That’s okay. No, I believe the answer is yes, but I just want to follow up on the specifics on that. Okay, great. Will this recording be shared? Would love to share it with my team. Yes, it will. Right, Roberto.

Speaker 1 42:55
Absolutely. Well, it’s going to be available on our website.

Speaker 2 42:59
Okay, so please share it with your finance team if you are sitting in the development office. Share it with your friends in finance. We would love to chat more. I think we are all set.

Speaker 1 43:15
Okay. Great. Well, thank you for that great presentation, Natalie and Heather. So next on stage one is Alice Ferris with I’m Not a Bot, why your donors are counting on you to be to stay human, or hear from Patrick Costa from Constant Contact on stage two when he discusses the digital concierge, personalizing major donor journeys at scale, and no matter what session you choose, you won’t miss any contact content, since it’s going to be all on our DonorPerfect site. After the conference, we’ll see you in a few. Thank you, everyone.

Speaker 2 43:52
Bye, everyone.