Some general guidelines: It’s best to record your transactions as accurately as possible, meaning in this case, that if a gift comes in 3 days after the end of the FY, the transaction date should reflect the actual date that the transaction was recorded in GENERATIONS. That said, since the FY of the transaction is essentially determined by the transaction date coupled with the preferences for when the FY ends, this practice can lead to some unhappy donors who may not get credit for a gift that they intended for the previous FY. Here are some suggestions for handling this situation.

Let’s say that your 2010 fiscal year ends on June 30th, 2010, and a $100 Annual Fund gift arrives in your office on July 4th, 2010. It’s clear from your relationship with the donor and their pledge fulfillment card that the donor wishes to get credit for the 2010 FY Annual Fund and you’d like to do your best to credit them appropriately. You have some options as to how you record this transaction. The simplest thing to do is to back date the transaction so that is falls within FY 2010 (e.g. June 30, 2010). This is practical only for a limited time after the end of the FY. In this specific case, with the transaction arriving in the office on July 4th, it’s a reasonable choice since you probably haven’t delivered your final batch of checks to the business office for processing anyway. You’ve got a little “wiggle room” with respect to the actual transaction date. While this may work in some limited cases, it is certainly not appropriate in all cases, and may cause issues with your auditors (especially if the check date is *after* the date of the transaction!), and it gets progressively more difficult to use this technique as the receipt date of the transaction falls farther and farther into the new FY.

An alternate approach is to record the transaction accurately; in this case, that would mean that the transaction date would be July 4, 2010. That would put the transaction in FY 2011 (since the 2010 FY ends on June 30th). The obvious problem now is that the donor is going to get credit for this donation in FY 2011 which is not what they want. The trick to accommodating both the needs of recording the transaction accurately, and satisfying the wishes of the donor, is to create two new soft credit transactions, one which gives credit to the donor in FY 2010, and a second one which takes the credit away from FY 2011.

Something like this should work nicely:

July 4, 2010 Jim Stevenson $100 GIFT Annual Fund (FY2011) 
June 30, 2010 Jim Stevenson $100 SOFT Annual Fund (FY2010) 
July 4, 2010 Jim Stevenson -$100 SOFT Annual Fund (FY2011)

Note now that when you run a complete (or mini) update, that Jim is going to have a $100 Annual gift on record for FY 2010, but $0 on record for FY 2011. The actual gift is recorded in FY2011, but as far as Jim and the annual report is concerned, his $100 is credited to the AF in FY 2010 as he wanted. (note that you’ll need to be sure that you are including soft credit transaction in your FY giving totals for this to function properly – check your preferences).

Note also that your aggregate reports in Transactions and your Advanced reports are going to account for this gift in FY 2011.