QuickBooks Integration Module

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