FundSvcs Community

Our fiscal year runs June 1-May 31. Our practice for many years has been to process as many contributions as possible by the last business day of May. But if the volume is such that we can't process all that we have received, they are entered in the new fiscal year on the first business day of June - not backdated to May 31.  Our new auditors are telling our Finance team that all donations received in our office by midnight, May 31, must be backdated to May 31 for however long that takes in June.  Certainly this would be any credit card gifts made through our online portal on May 31. We don't receive the report to work from to process those donations until the first business day of June.  We date stamp envelopes when we receive checks in the mail but typically don't process them in the database for a day or two, so it would be the same end result.  Generally speaking the dollar amounts are not going to be material - we would have already prioritized larger checks that we had received.  This caused me to wonder how other shops operate at fiscal year end - do you backdate?  Our Finance team didn't know of any FASB or GASB rule changes that would be causing this shift and it all seems very odd to me.  Thank you!

Thank you for your response.  When we pointed out that even if we backdate on our side that the feed date to the Finance system will still be a June date, their response was that they would be holding them in suspense and then manually moving them to the FY23 ledger - it just seems so crazy!  Your advice to ask for the FASB rule in writing is a good one.  Thank you!

Hi all, I thought you might be interested to know how this discussion turned out.  Our audit firm is indeed taking the position that Isaac described in his reply to my question.  The key word is "received" - when was it in our possession.  On a practical note, at fiscal year end, any gift transmittal forms accompanying checks or any other monetary device, any donations wereceive by mail, and any credit card gifts run in the office or through our online pages on or before May 31 will be processed with a contribution date of May 31.  We use Ellucian's CRM Advance software and additionally, we have an "Override Feed Date" field in which we can enter the May 31 date and when the batch is fed to Banner Finance, it will reflect the May 31 date.  Normally this field is set to the actual date we are feeding the batch to Finance.  If a check is dated in May or postmarked in May but we don't receive it in our office until June, they will be processed as June dated donations.

While there could be a materiality threshold applied  (i.e. maybe this would only apply to donations of $5,000 or $10,000 and up) it was decided to honor the "spirit" of the audit finding and process all donations regardless of amount.  Kind of a pain but there we are!  Thank you for your input and help.