When you purchase FundRaiser with the QuickBooks® Integration Module, you get the best of both worlds in donor management and accounting. Your FundRaiser program comes with a full set of functions that enable two-way sharing of information between QuickBooks and FundRaiser, eliminating double-entry.

You use FundRaiser for donor management activities that focus on the individual donors, such as recording their donations, which campaign they are responding to, membership status, letter-writing, reports that analyze their giving history, segmenting donors for mail or email campaigns, etc. From an accountant's viewpoint, you could say that FundRaiser serves as the “Accounts Receivable” portion of QuickBooks.

You use QuickBooks for financial reports and other accounting activities where your interest is in general donation categories rather than the specific names of those who donated.

The integration includes three basic functions. The first two are typically one-time activities: a rather quick setup in FundRaiser, and the import of QuickBooks customers and donations into FundRaiser (also quick).

The third is the ongoing posting of information from FundRaiser to QuickBooks. This will be part of your daily routine and happens automatically. It eliminates the need for duplicate entry of data.

All the functions of the integration are done by means of additional screens, menu choices, buttons, and fields conveniently placed in FundRaiser itself (not in a separate external program). There are also automatic actions that happen behind the scenes, that you never see.

Here's how the Setup works...

1. When setting up FundRaiser, you tell it which Bank and Income accounts to post donations to. You can fine-tune this setup by identifying certain kinds of donations as exceptions. For example, you may want most donations to be deposited into the regular checking account, but have donations to the Capital Campaign deposited into a different bank account. Or you might want donations given at a special event to be recorded in a different income account.

2. Contributions received in the form of pledges can be handled a little differently because the initial pledge (the promise, not the payment) can be posted to a Pledges Receivable account instead of to a Bank account. If this method is chosen, the Income account shows that the full amount of the pledge was recorded on the date pledged, not when payments are received. Payments are posted to a Bank Account and subtracted from the Pledges Receivable account.

3. You choose how to report your FundRaiser donors to QuickBooks. Because there is no need to also record every donor in QuickBooks as a customer, and because of some limitations in QuickBooks as to the total number of customers that it can handle, we group the posting of donations by date of deposit and by mode (check, credit card, etc) and, optionally, by Donor Type or Donor Source. FundRaiser creates "customers" in QuickBooks, putting "FR-" in front of the type or source, like “FR-Individuals” and “FR-Businesses”.

At time of posting, donations are grouped by Donor Type and recorded in QuickBooks as Sales Receipts. Each detail line of the Sales Receipt contains a donor's name and the amount of their donation.
If you prefer, you can group your donors (and their donations) by Donor Source code instead.

Here's how the Import from QuickBooks works...

1. QuickBooks “customers” are imported into FundRaiser as individual donors.

2. Contributions that were recorded in QuickBooks as “sale receipts” or “invoice payments” are put in the appropriate place in a donor’s giving history. (Pledges, recorded in QuickBooks as Invoices, are not imported because there is insufficient information for FundRaiser's purposes. However, pledges may be manually entered and the already imported payments then applied to the pledge.)

Here's how the Daily Operation works...

You record your donor information and giving details in FundRaiser normally. When you enter, change or delete a donation or pledge in FundRaiser, it updates QuickBooks accordingly.

Specifically, here is what happens when you enter a donation or pledge...

1. FundRaiser looks up the default QuickBooks accounts. You can then manually override those accounts if you need to.

2. When you click Save, FundRaiser makes an entry in a temporary file from which it will post to QuickBooks.

3. Periodically (we suggest once a day or so), you post that file to QuickBooks with a single click. Delaying the posting like this gives you a chance to review your FundRaiser entries for that batch and make any changes before posting.

lf you find an error after you post to QuickBooks, just make your change or deletion in FundRaiser as you would normally. FundRaiser will automatically make the proper correcting or counter-balancing entry in QuickBooks.

The QuickBooks Integration Module is included as standard in FundRaiser Professional (as are all the Select-optional modules), and is available as an option in FundRaiser Select.

Requirements:

QuickBooks® Pro, Premier, or Enterprise version 2003 (2004 in Canada) or newer. More detailed information about this module is contained in the Help for both FundRaiser Select and Professional.