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POLL: What time of year does your organization prepare its budget?
Are you on a calendar year budget and do your budget planning in the fall? Does your fiscal year end in May and you work through budgets early in the year? Vote in this anonymous poll, and share additional details on your processes below!
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Best Practices for using ACHs
Hello, Our foundation is thinking of moving away from checks and utilizing ACHs to make our grant payments. I was wondering how other organizations that are using ACHs get the banking information from the recipients. Thank you for your input. Linda Cleveland
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Auditor Access
We are starting our audit soon and this is the first year we are fully in Csuite for our audit. I am wondering if any of the other foundations have allowed their auditors access as read only during the audit to look at and verify the information that they are looking for? And if so, what access and permissions were given?…
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How do other Canadian foundations produce a receipt report for their audit and T3010?
Hi, I am trying figure out how to get a report that has our receipt numbers on for our auditors. There are so many fields to pull for a custom report and I have been unable to produce one. We also switched from RE to CS mid-fiscal year.
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Expenditure and Check Approval/Signature
Our CF is in the process of updating/reviewing our internal processes and procedures regarding check signing approval/signature for both operational (AP) expenditures as well as grant/scholarship checks. We are a CF with assets of around $200m, total FT staff of 20 and a Finance department of 4 FT staff (CFO, Dir of…
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Shameless request for Compass votes! Check approval notifications
It would be so wonderful if the system had a setting that could be turned on to be notified when a check/batch has been approved. We have 2nd approvers for checks over $1500 on two different accounts. Sometimes it might take a day or two for them to get to them. The only way I know if I can print checks is to continually…
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GIFTVII Matching Gift procedures for CSuite
This topic came up in a Foundant meet-up discussion yesterday. If anyone has any procedures for how they processed the match in CSuite for GIFT 7 that might be useful for people to utilize for GIFT 8, please share! I have procedures I can share once I'm able to review and clean them up a bit.
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Agency Fund Third-Party Donations
Hi am interested to see how you are treating your third-party donations to agency funds. Are you setting up a separate designated fund for these donations or are you including them in the original agency fund? Additionally, if you are including them in the original agency fund are you keeping track of what donations are…
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What is the best way to enter stock donations if you do not sell the stock?
We received several shares of different stock from a donor and our investment manager decided not to sell some of the stock. If I enter the information in public securities, I have to then "sell" the stock in CSuite. Should I only enter what was sold and then enter the other portion as "other payment?" This is the first…
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Audit
Hello - This is our 1st audit using Foundant which is much different from our previous systems - Sage Accounting, Excel & Income Manager. I find that some of the suggested journal entries are either redundant as CSuite already handles them through their modules, or they can not be entered as a "journal entry". Is there…
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Positive Pay file for Bank of America
Does anyone use Bank of America Positive Pay and how do you pull the information from CSuite to upload?
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Going Paperless for All Grants
I know this topic was raised at the height of the pandemic but I'm wondering if any other foundations have gone to a paperless grants process. We shifted to paperless for all of our competitive grants processes we manage through GLM but I am wondering about how others are handling their non-competitive grant requests from…
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Grant Type
Good morning! We migrated to CSuite two years ago and have waffled with whether to leave the grant type blank for internal grants to funds that then make external grants. EX: Fund ABC makes internal grant to Fund XYZ then, Fund XYZ makes external grants to orgs. The concern is that over time a historical grant pie chart by…
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How are you communicating the spendable amount for the coming year to your Fund representatives?
This question came up in today's "Ending the Year in Style" Coffee Talk. Do you use a spendable letter to tell your fund representatives about the coming year that you'd be willing to share with other funders?
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Payment Options
For donors, does anyone have payment options other than credit card or cryptocurrency on their website? I'm thinking e-check, quick checkouts, google/apple pay, venmo, etc for mobile options. If you do have these other options, can a donor who creates an account save their payment information for quick check out in future…
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Charting Projected Giving/Workflows
Hi Compass, I'm wondering how others are understanding and charting their projected giving. We're currently struggling to understand what our next year looks like in terms of paying out installments, and how heavy our reporting workflows will be because there isn't a straightforward way to track estimated/anticipated…
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How do you confirm an ACH has been received successfully?
Hey everyone, We use ACH to pay our grant installments and send an email to confirm each one has arrived successfully. I am curious to hear how others confirm transfers (in case there is a more efficient way to do this). Thanks!
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Segregated Accounts - Performance Reporting
Any organizations using a program like Morningstar or Black Diamond to produce performance reporting of their investment pools or segregated accounts? If not, how is your organization preparing investment performance reports?
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Rate of Return on Fund Statement
Does anyone put the annual rate of return on your fund statements?
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Moved: Credit Card/Expense Reporting
This discussion has been moved.
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Spending Policy Funds
hi all! I really hope you guys can help or give some advice regarding spending policy funds and how to run reports that will reflect the spendable amount and the grants paid over the year. Any advise is greatly appreciate it!! thank you
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Post donation to next fiscal year spendable
Any recommendations for posting a donation to an endowed fund's next fiscal year's spendable? We don't want the funds posting to either principal or current year spendable. Support suggested that I post-date the donation to the next fiscal year, but doesn't sound like a good fix. I'd like to post to a deferred revenue…
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Moved: Template Questions
This discussion has been moved.
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Award Letter with ACH language
What language do you use in grants paid at award through ACH? We use to process checks, but now our bank is stopping the service, and have to quickly move to ACH. Our award letters used to have the following language: By depositing the checks, your organization certifies that, to the best of your knowledge and belief, no…
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Next Coffee Talk: Effective Internal Communication, Thursday, May 11, 10 am MT
REGISTER HERE Join us for a conversation about internal communication practices. With every struggle comes a new trick or process. Learn from your peers how they have created communication practices across departments and job types at their organizations. Be ready to share your own struggles and tips. This unique Coffee…
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Sales Tax on auctions - California
We are a new Foundation. We are located in California, which does not grant exemption to sales tax to non-profits. We have had a couple of auctions and have received some items from local retailers to auction. I am confused about the regulations. How do others report the basis for sales tax on tangible items where the…
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Indiana-based Third Party Accounting
All, we are a nonprofit scholarship org in Indiana that recently switched to Foundant. Our independent, 3rd party accountant who performed monthly reconciliation left and took another job. The firm has assigned someone else, but there has been a slow transfer from the former person to the new person. If we decide to go…
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Best Practice for Donor Record Retention in CRM Software
I am wondering if anyone has best practices for how long you keep an inactive donor's record in a database? We keep all donation history in our accounting system but our CRM (DonorPerfect) charges based on number of profiles, so we have been culling some small batches of donor records to stay within the current bracket for…
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Submitting grants to board for approval
Our board allows staff to approve grants $5,000 or below as long as due diligence has been completed. Our grant committee approves anything above $5,000 via DocuSign. We currently submit an exhaustive list of all grants processed from donor advised funds, designated funds, scholarships, expense to fund, etc., regardless of…
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Benchmarking
We are a community foundation in Central Kentucky looking to establish some benchmarking with similar size foundations. We currently have $30 million in assets in 196 funds. We are particularly looking at this from a growth and staffing standpoint as well as general comparisons. Open to learning and other areas of…
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Moved: Impact Investing
This discussion has been moved.
