How are you communicating the spendable amount for the coming year to your Fund representatives?

KellieUtzingerKellieUtzinger Posts: 40
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edited December 2022 in Finance & Operations

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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emilyszewczykCathyWrightKaraAdams (Former Community Manager)GrettaKraus

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  • JesikaEllisJesikaEllis Posts: 147
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    @KellieUtzinger Do you mean a letter conveying what their spendable balance is for the coming year, after calculation?

    KaraAdams (Former Community Manager)GrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
  • KelleyHoaglandKelleyHoagland Posts: 8
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    @JesikaEllis Hi! I asked the question in the Coffee Talk today. Yes, we want to tell our fund reps the spendable amount that is calculated for the coming year. This would just be the percentage that would be added to the balance if they are still carrying over grant dollars.

    KaraAdams (Former Community Manager)GrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
  • KellieUtzingerKellieUtzinger Posts: 40
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    edited December 2022

    Thank you for clarifying the question for everyone. I'm obviously in Marketing and not Finance😆

    JesikaEllisGrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
  • CarolReynoldsCarolReynolds Posts: 108
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    As soon as our payouts are calculated based on our spending policy, and that is approved by the board, we send letters to our surviving scholarship fund founders letting them know what their payout will be and asking if they would like to add to it or if they would like to re-endow part of it. For example, if the payout is $1,036, often they will re-endow the $36. If it is a new fund and not paying out our minimum scholarship amount yet, we give those fund representatives the option to donate pass-through money so that their scholarship can pay out. We ask for all of those decisions to be made by October 31 so that our scholarship guidebook can go to print. We mail the guidebook to each public high school senior in our county and provide them to guidance offices, libraries, etc.

    We also notify nonprofits benefitting from designated grants what their payout will be so that it can be included in their budgets. We ask them in that correspondence to let us know if they DON'T want their payout and want to re-endow it. If we don't hear from them, they get a check March 1.

    Hope that helps!

    KaraAdams (Former Community Manager)KellieUtzingerGrettaKraus
  • KellieUtzingerKellieUtzinger Posts: 40
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    @CarolReynolds Thank you for providing such helpful information!

    KaraAdams (Former Community Manager)GrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
  • KelleyHoaglandKelleyHoagland Posts: 8
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    edited December 2022

    @KellyMiller Here's the thread of our questions from the Coffee Talk.

    @CarolReynolds Sounds like the recipients of your communication is similar to ours. Do you generate your letter using CSuite or export the info to merge outside of the system. In your example, is the $1,036 figure just what is calculated for the coming year, or is it a culmination of any dollars they may have left in spendable?

    @MandiOlson Our calculation date is also 9/30. So you merge the letter outside of the CSuite for mailing? I'd also like to ask the same question I asked of Carol regarding the example - does the report you generate in the sandbox just give the new grant dollars calculated for the coming year, or is it a running total of dollars that includes anything they may have left in spendable? If you run the distribution in Sandbox, you then have to run it again in the Live Site and post it, correct?

    From what we understand, if you want to use a template in CSuite, you can only use the spendable balance merge field and that give the culminating total of any dollars that are in spendable. We're just trying to figure out the most accurate yet most process friendly way to generate this communication to our donors.

    Thanks everyone for your input so far! 😀

    GrettaKrausKaraAdams (Former Community Manager)JesikaEllisemilyszewczyk
  • JesikaEllisJesikaEllis Posts: 147
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    @KellieUtzinger I've been in both, so I was preeeettty sure I knew what you meant ☺️

    @KelleyHoagland We used to send out a letter generated outside of our previous database (FIMS) that had a simple table merged directly into it with the fund and spendable amount information that had been exported. We have since made our 'spendable' letter a second fund report instead, generated within CSuite, using our standard fund statement template. We update the letter portion of the template, and have the cumulative current spendable flow in to the report table , with a note underneath to call us if they'd like to know the rollover spendable amount included in the cumulative current spendable total.

    GrettaKrausKellieUtzingerKaraAdams (Former Community Manager)emilyszewczyk
  • CarolReynoldsCarolReynolds Posts: 108
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    @KelleyHoagland we do mail merges from the spreadsheets for the communications. There is really no place in CSuite to pull that number from. As far as the scholarship money, our normal policy is not to carry money forward in spendable unless there is some sort of extenuating circumstances.

    KaraAdams (Former Community Manager)GrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
  • JesikaEllisJesikaEllis Posts: 147
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    edited December 2022

    @CarolReynolds Yes, the info can be pulled into a spreadsheet (or two) - but I found the process requires combining two spendable reports: one for the last day of our fiscal year (6/30) and then one from the first day of our next, once spendable calculations are loaded (7/1). Of course, this requires us to have NO OTHER transactions occur on 7/1 - but it does provide us a clean way to capture both rollover amount AND current calculated amount separately. We have only used this for our internal scholarship award review, prior to development staff going to the fundholders and asking for supplement, and not for any outer-facing communications. This is probably very similar to what @MandiOlson describes.

    I do wish there were more options directly from CSuite into templates for this kind of comparative reporting.

    KaraAdams (Former Community Manager)GrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
  • ChrisRingkampChrisRingkamp Posts: 1
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    edited August 21

    I am late to the discussion, but when we switched to CSuite, I thought my days of mailing paper grant notices were over. Our 20-quarter distribution formula ends on 12/31, but the spendable isn't available until July 1. I run the distribution in February with a July 1 post date. The easy solution would be to populate the Fund Advisor Portal with a future spendable balance on the home page of each fund:

    "Current Spendable Balance: $xx,xxx"

    "07/01/2023 Spendable Balance: $xx,xxx"

    SusieLotreckGrettaKrausemilyszewczyk
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