By Michael Culler

1. Breaking the Communication Barrier:
Getting Your Finance and Development
Teams to Talk
PRESENTED BY DZAUYA NKUCHWAYO, JONATHAN
HOWELL, MICHAEL CULLER

2. After this session, you’ll be able to:
• Describe the needs of the Development and Finance departments
• Better share common language between departments
• Avoid common reconciliation problems
• Understand best practices for integration

3. What does each office care about?
Development
• Acknowledging and
receipting donors quickly and
accurately
• Accurate reporting on gift
source and gift designation
• Answering donors’ questions
• Securing the next gift!
• Acquiring new donors
Finance
• Recording cash, revenue, and
receivables quickly and
accurately
• Ensuring that designated
revenues are tracked and
expensed/released correctly
• Reconciling data entry, reports,
and bank accounts
• Presenting accurate and usable
financial statements
• Maintaining control of cash

4. Poll
By a show of hands
How often does your development department meet with the finance
department to reconcile donations?
A. Weekly?
B. Monthly?
C. Quarterly?
D. Once a year?
E. Aside from someone’s birthday celebration, we never see the two in the same
office together?
How do many of you (finance and development) work together to
establish the annual budget?

5. Speaking the same language
So how do we improve?
• Build financial literacy across the organization
• Align planning cycles across teams
• Create regular communication and cross training routines
• What ideas do you have?

6. Shared definitions
• Integration: How we tell Finance about the
gifts Development has received
• Gift: Cash, pledge, stock/property, in-kind, or
planned
• Pledge: A legally enforceable promise to give
• Stock/Property: Must be sold to obtain value
for your organization
• Gift-in-kind: Valuable to your organization as-is
• Restriction/Designation: A donor’s direction
on how or when a gift must be spent
• Journal Entries: Debits and credits entered in
the General Ledger to account for gifts

7. How should the database integration look?
Too many orgs attempt this: When it should be this:
CRM Accounting CRM Accounting

8. Integration considerations
• What information MUST be shared between development and
accounting?
• What information MAY be shared between development and accounting?
• What latitude do you allow your donors when they designate gifts?
• How many credit card channels do you use?
• When do you find out about direct deposits/credit cards? Who handles
the money first?
• How many bank accounts do you use?
• How does the bank present information in its statement to you?

9. Reporting considerations
• Who is your audience?
• Which system/office holds the data?
• How often will you generate the reports?
• Which numbers are you trying to match between offices?

10. Common challenges
• Only the reporting from Finance is “trustworthy”
• We attempt to report development info out of
our accounting system
• Reports don’t match
• Donor designations are more specific in one
database than the other
• Pledges are either not recorded, or are
constantly written off
• Timing of cash entries makes bank
reconciliation difficult
• Records are adjusted constantly
• People don’t talk to each other

11. Best practices
• Let each system do its job
• Determine how much latitude to grant donors when
designating gifts
• Record pledges as receivables when they’re made
• Don’t call something a pledge unless it’s truly a
pledge
• Post to one or two bank accounts…
• …or post to a single clearing account
• Post daily
• Reconcile weekly
• Don’t enter a gift until you know everything you
need to know
• Adjustments should be the exception, not the rule
• Talk to each other!!!

12. Are you pumped up and ready to go?
Don’t forget to complete
a session survey!
Each completed survey enters you into a drawing to win a
complimentary registration to bbcon 2015 in Austin, Texas*.
*Blackbaud reserves the right to change or withdraw this promotion at any time, without advance notice. Promotion has no cash value and may not be
exchanged, applied to, or combined with any other offer.
12 #bbcon