Gifts and channels

A channel is a way money reaches you. A gift is one act of giving. A small arts charity typically has more channels than staff.

The channels Relae handles

Ticketing platforms, where a ticket buyer adds a donation at checkout.
Online giving portals, where donors give directly and the platform issues its own receipt.
Card processors, for donations taken through your own site.
Bank transfers, arriving as a line on a statement.
Cheques and cash, entered by hand, usually in batches.
Major gifts and grants, which arrive as an agreement rather than a transaction.
An existing CRM, read in as another channel.

Two ways they arrive. A connected channel syncs itself. Everything else imports from a file you drag in, and Relae remembers the layout so the next export from the same source maps itself.

Why channels make totals disagree

Each platform reports money its own way, and the differences are the reason two honest people produce two different annual totals.

Gross against net. Some platforms report what the donor paid. Others report what landed in your bank after fees. Both are true and they are different numbers.

What is receiptable. A gala ticket is not a donation in full. Part of it buys dinner. The receiptable part is smaller than the amount paid, and platforms disagree about which figure they put in the export.

Dates. The date a donor gave and the date you were paid out can straddle a fiscal year end.

Names. Formatted differently by every system.

Relae normalises all of this into one shape: who gave, how much, on what date, through which channel, and what portion is receiptable. Your total stops depending on which report you opened.

Ticket donations

Where a donor adds a donation to a ticket order, that donation is a gift and the ticket is not. Relae separates them so your ticket revenue and your donation revenue do not merge into one misleading number. How that split is handled is a setting, and you can decide per import.

Recurring gifts and pledges

A monthly donor produces a gift a month, and they belong to one record and one lifetime total.

A pledge is different: a promise to give an amount, usually in instalments, sometimes across several years. The promise and the payments are tracked separately, because a pledge affects your forecast from the day it is made while the money arrives later. Each instalment counts in the year it falls due.

In-kind gifts

An in-kind gift is goods rather than money. A donated piano, a case of wine for the auction.

Record them. They belong in a donor’s history, and they stay out of your cash totals, because you cannot pay a musician with a piano.

Relae does not issue receipts for in-kind gifts. See issuing receipts for what to do instead.

A note on services, because it catches people out: donated time and services are not gifts under Canadian rules and cannot be receipted, however valuable they were. A lawyer who works for nothing has not made a gift. The usual route is that the charity pays the invoice and the supplier donates the fee back, which is two real transactions and a receiptable gift. Ask your finance lead before relying on it.