Accounting Support: Batches vs. Full Integration

 As we prepare for our session in NTEN’s Technology Leadership Academy [1] we have been putting some thought towards the level of accounting support needed in your donor management system. The big question- how much integration should you consider?  While most (although, not all) systems will support the creation of “batches” of donations, many either do not have the capability to directly integrate with your accounting program or require a hefty fee for access to that functionality.  

A “batch” of donations, or as we define it in our Consumer’s Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems [2], “a set of payments for a particular timeframe that’s grouped and considered as one for accounting purposes” is the baseline essential for anyone who wants at least some accounting integration between programs.  Once the donations are batched you take the data and import it into your accounting program to correlate your systems.  

On the one hand, this process does require extra steps as compared to full integration of systems, but on the other, the multi-step process (likely done by more than one person- your fundraiser and your bookkeeper) creates a built-in double check in data entry that will help prevent number typos or other mistakes from making it into your all-important accounting records.  

So, while you do risk some discrepancies between your systems by using a batch method of integration- for example, many donor management systems do not allow you to freeze the donation after it has been put into a batch, so someone might change the amount later without re-exporting the information- with a fully integrated system you lose a lot of the manual control over your accounting procedures.  And often that manual control and the resulting double-check of sorts is essential to the due diligence of your accounting process.  

Is this sacrilege: a techie saying that there is benefit in doing data entry by hand when you could find a perfectly good way to integrate the processes?  I don’t think so.  In my opinion, there is definitely value in an extra set of eyes checking data and the confidence that your books have the most accurate information about your organizational finances.