Best Of
Re: How does your organization break down fund groups, subgroups, divisions, and segments?
We are currently evaluating how we have been using groups and divisions, as our current use requires us to filter for Board reports, whereas if we adjust, we can use the dashboard view.
As for segments, because you can create spendable grants from it, we use assign each Fund a spendable segment, based on the month the grant is to go out, and if the grant is designated or not. This helps us to do two things:
- For designated grants, we can create the spendable grants for that month real easy.
- For all grants, we have a report that shows what grants are to go out in what month, and have on that report also fields about the type of fund, the fund advisor, etc.
Lorna
Re: 1099s - What software do you all use to do the 1099s?
We use taxbandits ( ). It is very easy to use.
Re: How does your organization break down fund groups, subgroups, divisions, and segments?
This is something I've been wanting to investigate further, as I'm not happy with some of our grouping but I think it was set up this way in FIMS and I've been in my role for a year and a half and haven't changed anything yet. But we have ours set up as follows:
Group - typically the type of fund (DAF, designated, FOI, scholarship) but is further split out in some respects (donor or org founded for designated and scholarship funds, endowed vs nonendowed for DAFs).
Subgroups - this is where I struggle, as it appears the subgroups are a mixture of asset types that we now ultimately track through investment strategies in CSuite (Community Foundation Pools is our most common, but we do also have outside managed investments as well as subgroups for individual complex assets like annuities, trusts, etc). We also track fiscal sponsorship/project funds in subgroup as well. Ultimately, some funds could fall into multiple subgroups, which is why I don't like our setup.
Division - used to group funds by whether they are part of one of our geographical affiliates, our supporting org (gifts/maintenance of property), or our main org. I don't like this because if I want to run a 1099 or 990 report in CSuite, I can only pick all or none for the divisions (i.e. not a checkbox) so I can't always use it.
Segment - used for scholarship funds only to track how the scholarship is awarded (school directly, foundation-managed, etc). I don't like this one either, but I'm told nobody else had a use for it at the time so the scholarship team decided to use it.
Re: 1099s - What software do you all use to do the 1099s?
I inherited using EFile4Biz.com from my predecessor and I'm happy with it. It's probably not unique to this website, but they have a template that you can fill in the information on a spreadsheet and upload it so you can fill them out in advance and easily submit them.
Re: 1099s - What software do you all use to do the 1099s?
I have used this service last year and plan to use it again this year
Re: Collection of Audit Files
We use follow up forms for our clients to track these documents. That allows us to create a merge document that exports all the uploaded files.
You could probably also:
A. Use an evaluation form (if you're not using them for actual proposal evaluation)
B. Add internal questions to installment forms (e.g., Receipt received for this payment? checkbox or date field reply)
C. Add internal questions to approval forms (if there's only one document per request)
