Income Categorization & Classification

Introduction

Gnosis has a number of ways to classify income for reporting and accounting purposes.  Each of the available classification types is listed below with a description of their purpose.  

Best Practices:

1. Do not include the actual year in any of the classifications below, as the date of the donation provides that information.
2. Consult Support if you have question about existing codes in your system or want to evaluate new codes.
3. Administrative users can manage these lists within Reference Data Management.

Account

The account code is the one required classification for gift entry and primarily serves to classify the income into an appropriate account within your accounting system.  

If posting gifts directly from Gnosis into QuickBooks, the Gnosis account values will be mapped to existing QuickBooks accounts for seamless posting. If you previously relied on QuickBooks for reporting of income, it is recommended to change your process and rely on the detailed reporting capabilities of Gnosis instead as this will allow you to slice-and-dice income information in more useful ways.

We recommend to not include individual events by name in Gnosis Accounts unless they are major fundraising events that you wish to specifically track in your general ledger.  For all other events, the Source, campaign, and or Solicitation Code lists are better suited for event tracking.

Campaign

A campaign generally records a certain fundraising drive, either a one-off or possibly an annually recurring drive.  For instance, 'Year-End Appeal' and ‘Capital Appeal’ could be Campaigns. If you are using the Gnosis peer-to-peer fundraising system, you may want to create separate campaigns to track the income for each peer-to-peer event for which you want to separately track income.

Source

Typically, the source refers to an event or partner organization that generates revenue. This is also the appropriate field to classify income from specific events, including annual named events, like galas, runs/walks/rides, and also including annual third party events. This may also be used to track something like 'Rotary Club', or, 'Downtown Donations Box' - basically, any location or organization that consistently works to generate donations on behalf of the organization.

Solicitation Code

Solicitation code is generally used to classify the following

1. Type of 'ask': Email campaign, TV campaign, Direct Mail, Phone call, Street can drive. For events, this field can be used to separate the various types of income: tickets/registrations, donations box, raffle, silent auction, paddle raise, etc.
2. Reason or intention of the gift: program services, facility needs, etc.
3. Group or person responsible for the gift - e.g., Board.

Example Classifications List Values

Gnosis is designed to use the above combinations of fields to achieve proper tracking and reporting instead of one massive and clumsy list for categorizations. The following examples depict some typical classifications that would appear in these four lists:

 

Example Gifts Entries

Example Reporting Criteria

• For all golf event income > report criteria: Source = Golf Event; result fields include Solicitation Code for the overall review
• For all event sponsorships > report criteria: Solicitation Code = Event Sponsorships; result fields include Source for the overall review
• For all golf event sponsorships > report criteria: Solicitation Code = Event Sponsorships and Source = Golf Event

See this reference for Managing Tribute Donations.