Make Your Own Receipt for NPOs with Ease

Make your own receipt for NPOs

welcome christian laufer with instant nonprofit and i am so excited today to talk about something that's simple but super necessary and can actually help you raise additional funds as part of your fundraising program uh fundraising is really it's not a linear process it's not from point a to point b it is actually a circular process a loop and your end of your donation receding process uh and and the communication that goes out as a part of it can really help bolster your ability to raise money from people in the future from your donors in the future and also there's some legal requirements and things that and just good habits you know best practices that are part of end-of-year donation receiving so we're going to cover that right now in this brief video tutorial so your end of year donation receipt and acknowledgement process is important now you might ask well maybe i already issued a donation receipt when the donation was given um and and maybe you didn't right but most people if they donate online they're going to get a receipt automatically to their email or if they drop some some money off usually someone's acknowledging that and giving them receipt but why would you need to give an end of year receipt even if you've already received them or even if you haven't maybe you're doing some fourth quarter fundraising and and this is uh you know inside this this month of december which is you know really it's december whatever it is it's the december 10th it's close to the end of the year but people donate more in the fourth quarter than they do and corporations also have massive focus on fourth quarter fundraising so you want to be able to do this and for one thing you want to meet irs requirements both yours and especially uh your donors right they need some information so that they can the the reason that they're incentivized to give to you is because they're going to get a tax write-off part of the incentive is a tax write-off next year and if they don't have a decent donation receipt they won't be able to meet irs requirements certainly number two is better donor relations everyone wants to be acknowledged for their contribution in the world and it's super important that you bolster donor relations and maybe even have the opportunity to ask for another gift right on right on the heels of a donation receipt um because you're building better donor relations by communicating well and then number three for your own information management there is a discipline that comes about in issuing end-of-year donation receipts where you're going to be going down your list of donors and you might go oh gosh you know this i didn't even realize this person gave you know a thousand dollars or something of a major gift and it might prompt you to just write a couple of names down on even something as you know caveman as a sticky note and make a phone call to that person which could lead to a conversation either for them to give again next year or for them to give again at the end of the year because maybe they had a great year and they have a lot of you know profits in their own stock portfolio maybe they inherited something there might be a reason to ask them again but at minimum you're going to go through an exercise that will improve your information management skills and for a small non-profit we're not going around spending a lot of times creating databases and really uh you know powerful ways of of querying into what people have given us and what the patterns were and all of that kind of stuff so there's a discipline that comes with doing end-of-year donation research that will allow you to be stronger as an organization today and going forward now the irs requires donation receipts in certain situations if anyone makes a single donation greater than 250 dollars that you are required to give them a donation receipt secondly when a donor receives goods or services in exchange for a single donation greater than 75 dollars they do need to get a donation receipt and in that case the donation receipt should include the value of what was given back for example maybe uh you know maybe there's a training program and there's some materials that that the attendee gets that are that are worth several hundred dollars it's a four or five day training and if there are goodies that are given along with that training program they exceed 75 dollars in value you technically need to give them in a receipt the value of what they got back even if it was a thousand dollar you know experience and then you do need to be able to give a donor a donation receipt whenever they request one right so even though that sounds kind of random if you're set up for this ahead of time then it's going to be no problem for you it's not going to be a big disruption to your day or or one of your volunteers or staff to go ahead and issue a donation receipt you're just going to be able to press the button and go and again we cover a lot of things that have to do with a little bit more of the accounting the arcane ends of starting non-profit this is no different um donation receiving does not sound sexy although i love it because i love to make fundraising requests and it just gives me another excuse to get get in touch with some of my favorite people in the world donors um but you do need to have a habit of keeping records of any expenses um like what you spent their money on and and and the donations as well in xero quickbooks or in a spreadsheet and many organizations run off of a spreadsheet for a really long time uh some some organizations do that into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars depending on how many donors they have but it is best to get it into a software system at the point that the organization can handle it you've got an admin or you've got a volunteer who's good with something like that but if you are the kind of person who is running on a spreadsheet you're just getting off the ground you don't really have a software program that you want to use or go through the complication of setting up zero or quickbooks we actually do have something we call the house file database it's very simple it has a salutation as you can see here it has first name last name title company address phone email etc and this is something you can set up we really strongly recommend google sheets instead of excel google sheets is automatically backed up in the cloud and you never have to worry about losing any data you've got you're able to jump back if you need to go back several versions and excel simply doesn't have that and with a local file like excel in a spreadsheet as well if you if your computer goes down your hard drive crashes there's a fire whatever um you often that date is lost forever and the number one asset for a non-profit generally is uh the database of donors that it has even if you have 10 uh 20 you want to remember the dates and then you know not only for legal reasons but this is the lifeblood it is the biggest asset that your nonprofit will have so we do have a free template house file that you can get at the end of this presentation if you're interested and we'll we'll give you a means to get that either with a link below or depending if you're watching this on a video or you're attending a webinar we'll make sure that you can get that and you can always request it by emailing support instantnonprofit.com so if you want to get a hold of the sample file house file what's called a house file and that's just an old-fashioned name for your donor database then you can you can get that we'll provide that to you free of charge so even if you are using a simple spreadsheet you're using google sheets hopefully not excel or you're using um something that's not super robust as far as managing all your finance finances you do want to make sure that your donations and expenses are kept in a digital backup and that includes receipts maybe you have a phone you know a picture or a phone app that you take pictures of receipts you can easily upload those to the cloud icloud dropbox onedrive if you're in microsoft or i think that's microsoft product or google drive which is our preferred cloud the storage is free why not use it take a picture email it to yourself or take a picture and just send it to google drive and you are free and clear and most of the time you don't need to produce these records but it's really important that you have them backed up somewhere this slide shows a scanner but with with smartphones as good as they are there are awesome apps that turn things into pdfs or at least pictures and you can back them up so easily now let's get into the particulars of the actual donation receipt itself the thing that you will print out or email to your donors to acknowledge their gift there are several items that that donation receipt needs to have and should have on it number one is the name of the organization to which the donation has been made or to say it in a lot less words your organization's name um some sometimes it's easily it's easy to assume that your letterhead and your maybe you have your logo at the top of your letterhead or something and that they're going to know the name of the organization but it's important that you have the legal name of the organization in the donation receipt second you need a statement that the nonprofit is a public charity registered as a tax exempt organization under the irs with section 501 c3 it should state that on the letter because remember it's not just about you with this process it's about your donor and even your donor cpa and if they see all of this information on a letter that's passed along they don't need to call and say are you sure this is a non-profit uh the name of the donor of course right so um many times it's easy to kick out a receipt um and and you know there's a name and address but it should name the donor in the receipt as the giver right because maybe you're mailing it to another family member or you're mailing it to an office or something and that donor name is not going to be specified as the actual person or corporation who gave the gift so make sure the name of the owner's in there of course the amount of the cash contribution is important now if it's a non-cash contribution there are a couple of other things that apply that we won't get into but if it's let's just say if it's a non-cash in-kind donation you're given uh some material some property something of value that the value of the the material should be on there and that should be provided that should have been provided by the donor but the main thing is when you get a cash check stripe uh online donation whatever just make the amount of cash contribution on there now those four elements are the most critical elements to have on your donation receipt you'll see in our donation sample letter right on the screen here we have some additional things right you want to communicate this you don't just want to print a printout with those four things on here it's really important that this is something a letter of appreciation to your donor so we put our mission on here we put the thing that we're trying to eradicate on here as well so that people go oh yeah that's why i gave the money right because some people write so many donations or so many checks and maybe your name of your organization doesn't tell exactly what you're doing with the organization it doesn't speak to the mission so you always want to say what the mission is thank you for helping us fight childhood hunger or domestic violence or whatever uh you know you've really contributed to our mission of keeping families safe from domestic violence and uh it's made a big difference in the lives of however many families so it's important to have that kind of stuff on the letter and what's cool here is we have a free donation letter template a receipt template that you can get at the end of this presentation so we're going to give you a free uh house file uh sample and that'll be like a google sheets uh uh that'll be a google sheets file that you can make a copy of for yourself and save saving your own google drive which is completely free and we're also going to give you a donation letter template at the end of this presentation so that you can just download a copy and either use it in google sheets or word or however it is that you want to manage that and sometimes you can marry the two if you were to look up how to mail merge if you're a small organization you don't have a big fancy program to print out a bunch of form letters what you can do is you can take our house file and you can do something called a mail merge mail merge m-a-i-l-m-e-r-g-e a mail merge we're not going to teach on that right here but there are plenty of videos where you can learn how to do a mail merge and take your database and feed all of the values in your database into those places highlighted in yellow on our donation letter template and then that makes even if you have to send a 100 letters all you have to do is make sure that the name is in the name column the address then the address column etc connect the mail merge push the button and all hundred letters will go out it makes it so much easier to manage this stuff and yes it might take an hour of training or learning are you watching a youtube video on how to do that but once you do you will a feel like a ninja and b you'll save yourself untold hours both this year and next year as your donor donor database grows how to do a mail merge and get these letters out without investing in any software or having to learn quickbooks and all of that kind of stuff so excited to share that with you and so you can get the free training download these templates and a lot of other neat stuff if you go to instantonprofit.com and sort of poke around the website and look around some of the free resources and training and our our online boot camp there's lots of things on there or wherever you're seeing this video you can just use the links below or the link somewhere on this page that we've provided that'll bring you directly to some of those resources so we're super happy to give you some of those things and we want you to succeed we do we're in the business of starting non-profits painlessly fast easy and and without a lot of expense um but it's not about just getting a product into your hands uh it's it's it's not about selling our service it's we really want you to succeed and so these kinds of videos are intended to help you be successful and stay focused on your mission and not on you know bureaucratic or or incredibly burdensome paperwork tasks we want you to be out there mixing it up with the people that you're helping and the world that you're trying to make a difference in so thanks so much i'm gonna stop the share and um yeah that's it that is our presentation for today and i hope you uh hope you enjoyed it please give us feedback like subscribe etc do all the things to stay connected with us and we will continue to deliver awesome uh you know awesome material like this to to you for whatever reason that you that you need it for so thanks very much have a great day all right i think we're still rolling so all right thank you so much for attending today um i hope that was valuable and what we're going to do is every month we are going to do a training and then we're going to do a live q a where you get to ask questions and then get your particular questions answered so that you don't have to uh you know call lawyer or a cpa or get a bunch of conflicting information off the internet so i hope you enjoyed today's training and i look forward to sharing uh in the future some particular questions that might be affecting you because chances are if someone else has the question you do and if you have the question lots of other people do so that's why we do live q and a's and we're going to slice those and dice those and share those in a way that's really easy for you to access in the future so um have a great day hope you enjoyed it and keep making a big difference out there we're all in this together god bless have a great day