FundSvcs Community

Greetings Colleagues,

As we enter the early phase of a major campaign, we are reviewing, among other things, our grant recording procedures.  This has raised some concerns for me.   Several years ago, Institutional Advancement and Finance worked with an outside consultant to establish agreed upon definitions and a consistent method for managing philanthropic grants.  Grants, as usual, are managed by a dedicated department, outside of Advancement.  Once a month, that department sends our CFR team a spreadsheet with information on the grants with executed agreements that meet the definition of philanthropic.  After CFR's review, the spreadsheet is passed to the Gift Processing team. They record the philanthropic grants as outright gifts in our system of record, Banner.   We do not enter them as pledges. Reporting counts them in fundraising totals. Then we move on - there is no tracking in Advancement of grant payments or of funds that are returned to the granting entity, and amounts are not reduced in Banner or reflected in reporting.  Payments and reductions are managed by the Grants office in their own system.   All of this is documented and was approved by university leadership.

Is this a typical arrangement?  I am concerned that we are over-counting.

Thanks very much for any insight you can provide!

Thank you - this is very helpful!   I'd love to introduce automation into the process; we'll see how it goes.