End of Year: Sending a Tax Email

Hello and welcome to our pre-recorded webinar on US, End of Year, tax, email procedures. If you are from Canada, we do have separate procedures for you in a different pre recorded webinar. Our Canadian clients have a slightly different procedure from everybody in the US, and specifically, Read More

Hello and welcome to our pre-recorded webinar on US, End of Year, tax, email procedures. If you are from Canada, we do have separate procedures for you in a different pre recorded webinar. Our Canadian clients have a slightly different procedure from everybody in the US, and specifically, this is for us, end of year tax emails, if you are in the US, but doing end of year tax letters, that is a separate set of steps for generating them, whether it’s email or letter, you’re gonna have to make sure that you have good data for the prior year either way, and that’s where we’re going to start today. Hi. My name is Sean Potero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect, often working one on one with clients to teach them about the nonprofit industry and DonorPerfect. I do get to do these fun recordings every now and then, because it is very universal. This process hasn’t changed for several years as the date of recording, this is October of 2024 so for the demonstration today, I’m going to be generating an end of year tax email for 2023 and that’s where we’ll start off. 2023 gifts are we using those currency fields correctly if you are getting gifts beyond normal, donations, maybe in kind, donations or sponsorships at events, there are some calculations we have to consider so that We are giving a accurate receipt, Amount total that they can claim to the IRS. We call them calculated fields, and you’re going to have to have them in your system when you are taking gifts, beyond just donations, also a good idea to create a backup of your database and merge any duplicate records. If you haven’t done this yet this year, great opportunity to consolidate records so that we’re only sending one constituents, one email. I’m going to hop off, hop on. DonorPerfect here, and I’m going to start off with one of my constituents and one of their donations from last year starting off on the gift screen, let’s look at one of these donations from last year, and let’s start off with a normal donation. They donated $375 last year, and the gift amount is 375 pretty normal. That’s where the monetary amount of the transaction goes. They didn’t get anything in return. This wasn’t a good or a service. It was just a donation. So there is no fair market value. And then we have our last receipt amount field, our last currency field, where it is showing us that the receipt amount, what they can claim as a tax deductible donation to the IRS is, accurately, $375.

if you are taking in kind donations, the data entry for that is going to be a little bit different. There is no monetary amount of that donation, but the Declared Value of that good or service that they’re donating is going to go in fair market value. In this case, we use animal rescue as a nonprofit example, a lot of the times here we have an in kind donation, maybe of kennels. They value that at $45 and it gives them a receipt amount of $45 that’s the value of the item. That’s what they can claim. Where it gets a little different is, say, for an event here we have some tickets where the tickets cost $165 but those tickets included $75 in food and perhaps a gift bag for attendance with that ticket. So they can’t say that I donated $165 but what they can say is that they donated the receipt amount $90 the gift amount was 165 that’s how much they were charged. The fair market value was $75 that’s what they got in return. Subtract one from the other, and we have the receipt amount of $90 and this this field you’re going to have to have if you are using fair market value for any of your data entry. Now, you should have receipt amount somewhere on the gift screen. But if you suspend. That it is not calculating correctly, or if you have difficulty finding it, this is a rare instance where we can reach out to support. Well, you can always reach out to support, but if you don’t have these calculations that I’m talking about, they will go in and they will fix it for you, because essentially, to get that receipt amount field to show the appropriate amount. There are three different calculations that are going on on the back end, and they they have to be in here. If you started with DonorPerfect and say, 2020, or beyond, you likely have these already. If you’re an existing donor, pro DonorPerfect client from several years ago, you might not have these. It’s also possible somebody could have deleted these, and then that would throw off the receipt amount calculations. It should be very obvious, as you’re doing the data entry, that receipt amount just will not calculate appropriately without the behind the scenes calculation. We can double check though by going to settings and calculated fields, and then from here in the field to Update Column, we are looking for three different calculations that have RCPT underscore amounts. These are the three calculations that are ensuring that we have the right amount. You might need to go to the top right there is a search box. If I put in the word receipt, we’ll see the three that we need for the end of year email. And if you’re doing the end of your letter, you will need a fourth that adds up all of those receipt amounts from the previous year, but that’s just for the letter. For our email. We primarily need these three. If you’re missing them, though, reach out to the Support Department, and they will create those calculated fields for you. They need to be in there, especially if you’re using fair market value, not needed if you are just taking regular donations. These email templates, we do have a starting point for you underneath mailings and email templates, all of this is done directly within DonorPerfect. You don’t need another software for this, and there should be a sample in there for you already called sample, email template, annual, consolidated. It already has everything in there that you need. I would suggest copying this The DonorPerfect sample, and then customizing from there.

Let’s take a look. Let’s hop in here. Let’s find that template in mailings and email templates. Now, even if you’ve never been here before, there should be at least seven. Let me do a search here at the top right, here is our sample, a sample email template, annual consolidated and certainly, if you find one in here from a previous year, you can copy that one as well. But this is the one I’m going to start out with, sample email template, annual, consolidated. I’ll go to the copy icon and then copy and edit. We’ll give it a name. We’re going to need to put in a reply to email address. When this shows up in someone’s inbox, it’s always going to be from thank dash u@emails.donorperfe.com but if they want to respond, or we can send them to somebody internally, and not a bad idea to have somebody blind copied on these so you have a record of all these emails that are going out. A subject is going to be required. And if we wanted to include a merge field in the subject, we could do that with the Insert Merge Field button say we want to include the constituent salutation.

And if we’re copying the annual consolidated it will already have salutation in here for us, but we have the same Insert Merge Field button for adding any field that we want. We could also insert images using this icon at the top. Clicking here will open up your file explorer where you can find the image. Or if you go to browse, if you’ve created email templates previously, you could always use those other images that you’ve used previously, as long as they are a JPEG or a P and G, and I’m more concerned with. The function over the style of this. I know all of you will spend more time on the message in here than I will. What is important is this table down here. Now this table has up to five different columns where we get to pick the fields from last year’s gifts that we’re going to preview prompt one through five. And these can be anything we want them to be. At the very least, we’re going to want date, we’re going to want amount, and then we can pick up to three other fields I would recommend fund if your general ledgers are written out in a way that people would understand. We could also include the type of gift as a cash, as a check, and then we can put in our reference number. And when we go to preview this we might find that we need to shrink or expand to these columns. If in the fund column we have a very long name, it could wrap around into the next row. We might need to experiment by clicking in between our columns and clicking and dragging to adjust. And what’s nice about these email templates is they will total themselves. The amount column that I have, it will just give me a total at the bottom, whereas the letters needed a separate field to show that total. Here, the columns just add up. Something else that this template has as well. Are these symbols. You’ll notice this carrot and slash before and after. Don’t delete those. If you delete those, the table won’t work, won’t show up. We won’t have anything. We need to have these carrots in there. They don’t show once you actually send the email out, but we do see them in the templated version. 

And off we go from there. Now this was already in here because I copied a version that had it. If you were making one of these email templates from scratch, you can include this GIF list set of columns by going to Insert Merge Field and then the very bottom. In functions, we have consolidated GIF list where it’ll put it back in again. We have these symbols before and after our gift list. They have to stay as is and pick your fields, put those labels in there for the prompts, and then save, no auto saving going on anywhere in DonorPerfect. Make sure you are saving occasionally. Oh, and if you’re interested, and you are like me, struggle to come up with communications. We do have a fundraiser bot that is powered by chat GBT that’ll help you write letters. It’s pretty good about it too. We could also have have a PDF attachment if we wanted, but not required. And there we have it. Now we have our email template we are ready to generate. This is going to happen from the receipts module. From there we’ll check off annual consolidated email. There is an option we can see in the preview annual consolidated email that we can check off from there, we’re going to want to narrow it down further to selected dates. Last year’s dates. We want to include things that are already processed, even if that gift had a thank you, email or letter sent previously. This is a cumulative one. We want to include it, and then we’re going to have to filter for the folks that actually have an email. Plenty of people donated last year, but do they have an email? A selection filter is going to ensure that from there we click Generate receipts preview and send you back in DonorPerfect in the white ribbon at the top, here is my receipts button, and here is my annual consolidated email as an option. Now, if you are following along and you get to receipts and you don’t see annual consolidated email as an option. Pause this video. After my next set of instructions, I’m going to tell you how to fix that if, for some reason, you are not seeing annual consolidated email as a check box. What you’re going to do. Do is you’re going to go to settings and you’re going to go to parameters. These are system wide settings, including some settings for acknowledgements, receipts and for the annual consolidated email these first two check boxes are going to need to be checked, activate receiving and activate consolidated proceeding. So once enabled, you’ll save it’ll prompt you to log out, then log back in, and then you should be seeing this check box here, so I’ll check it off annual consolidated email. There is a gear icon next to it, where, once I click it, it gives me five different drop downs. These drop downs are four different fields the different columns in my email. So let’s select gift date I had as the first column.

There we go. Gift underscore date. We have to tell it what column it’s going to go into. The second one is receipt amount. I have fair market value and use. I’m going to use receipt amount instead of gift amount. Column three. I’m going to have is general ledger, also known as GL, underscore Code column three and general ledger GL Code as a drop down menu we want to display the description of that general ledger. So any drop down that we add, like general ledger or gift type that I’m about to add, we’ll need to check off that option for code display. And lastly, I had reference and column five, and then I will click on save, and then we can show more options for our selected dates, let’s select last year, January 1 to December 31 we want to include already processed gifts, even if that those individual gifts were thanked, we still want to include them in this cumulative letter. And then lastly, we need our selection filter. Without this selection filter, it will include people that gave in 2023, but we might get folks without an email address and anytime. Most of the time, DonorPerfect requires you to segment data or pick and choose a selection filter is going to be at play. Whenever we’re building a selection filter, we’re essentially building instructions or rules for our output. And in this case, my rule is email is not blank, and when we’re building these filters, it will let us use any field, but we’ll keep it simple. This always works left or right in four steps. Step one, pick where your field of interest lives. That’s the main bio screen. I’ll then select it in box number two, but it’s not one of the favorite fields, so I’ll have to go to all fields and then box two is showing me all the fields on the main bio screen. If you start typing, it will get you down there. Let’s find email. And we want to say is not blank. Email is not blank, and they’ll be included from here. I’ll say, continue.

Give it a name so it could be used again and share it and done. Next, we can generate receipts. We have 685 gifts from 120 donors. I can click on my email template, drop down and select my annual consolidated email.

If you forget what they look like, or if you have multiple you can click on Preview Template to get a preview of what it looks like. Then we will go to next, preview email receipts. And then this might take a little bit of time. It might take a little time to load, but it might take even a little bit longer to spot check these, double check see if there’s any any errors that are in here. It. Margaret’s name misspelled? Do we have everything in order within the body of the email? Because if we spot something that’s off, regrettably, this is a read only preview, and it won’t let us edit any mistakes that we see here. So if Margaret’s name was misspelled, that’s the salutation. We might have to go to the salutation field and edit that, or if the body of the email was wrong, we’d have to go to mailings and email template, edit it, and then come back here. Either way, it would be in your benefit to double check everything, make sure everything lines up exactly the way you see it and the way that you want, and it doesn’t look like my funds are running into multiple lines. That was a concern. If the annual fund General Ledger code was longer annual fund, and then maybe we had the account number next to it. It could be taking up more space, but not bad. 120 emails here. I’m not going to go through all of these once. They are all previewed. You can click on next send email receipts, where we have a pop up message, just letting you know, once these are sent out, that’s it. We can’t we can’t pull them back. So really do make sure that you double check those emails for accuracy before sending the email receipts now, and that’s all there is to it, folks, you have just sent your end of year tax emails. I’ll reach out to the support department if you run into any issues, this has been us, end of year, tax, emails, I have been Sean Potero, and you have been a great audience. Thanks, everybody. Take care. Bye.