CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Disclaimer:  I am very new to CiviCRM and this is the first forum I have ever joined, so please forgive me and give me feedback if I use improper etiquette or don’t post in the right way/place!

Background:  I am a volunteer for a non-profit choral group that is replacing a dBase/single user system with CiviCRM 4.4.3.  Our initial implementation will enable mailing list maintenance and “offline” contribution data entry and reporting.  We have no current plan for CiviCRM to track financial accounts, but we acknowledge individuals who contribute to specific “designated use” funds in our concert program booklets.

Issue:
I am interested in being able to designate a contribution to one or more funds.  For example a donor may give a $250 gift and want it split between the general fund ($150) and the Larson fund ($100).  I found three different posts that suggest that there might be different viable ways of dealing with this:

A 2010 post that mentions creating a custom field:  “We have created a field called "Fund" which we use to indicate where in our organization a gift is being designated.”  (Note:  This doesn’t address the splitting issue, although I suppose establishing a repeating “Fund ID / Fund donation amount” structure could address that aspect.)

A more recent one (2013 post ) which implies funds might be setup as Campaigns: “…a goal of providing users with the option to split their total contribution between multiple funds/campaigns.”  (Note:  Perhaps a fund could be defined as an open-ended campaign?  This post also mentioned price sets: would they need to be set up if data entry is all offline?)

And an even more recent one (2014 post) which suggests that soft credits might be used: “With multiple soft credits, you can split out the contribution's soft credit to multiple people.”  (Note:  Although our funds are all named for people – most of whom are deceased – we aren’t really crediting the people.  We also will record matching corporate gifts, and may use soft credits for that.  I don’t know if it would be confusing to use soft credits in both cases, although matching gifts don’t get credited to designated funds.  I also see that soft credits are to be enhanced in 4.5, but I’ll need to do something before then.)

Have a lot of groups dealt with this before?  Is there a best, “most natural” way to do it?  Being new to CiviCRM, I would like to avoid having to establish custom fields/actions whenever possible.  And if the best way in the future to do this is with soft credits, which path should I take now to ease transition?

Thanks for any advice/examples you can give!

You can split a single contribution to multiple "funds" ( ie "Financial Types" in CiviCRM) as long as you use a price set when recording the contribution.   ( I have a very generic priceset called "Split Contribution" that I always use for these situations in the back-office.  )

What I did: 
 (The first 3 steps are one-time only setup steps)
1) In the top menu click "Administer ... CiviContribute ... Financial Types" and set up a financial type for each of your funds.

2) In the top menu click "Contributions ... New Price Set" and name your price set ( in my case its named "Split Contribution") "Used for" should only be "Contributions"

3) Add fields to your new price set of type "Text/Numeric Quantity" , set the price as 1 , and choose the financial type you prefer. ( In my case, I choose a label that is almost always the same as the financial type name)

Repeat step 3 for as many financial types as you need/prefer

4) Click "Create New ... Contribution"   next to the amount field click your new priceset.   Now you can enter the partial amounts for each financial type.  Then click "Save"   

The procedure that I am suggesting only became possible with CiviCRM version 4.3, so that may be why older forum posts do not suggest this.   From an accounting point of view, the way I am suggesting will also export correctly (with the correct fund/financial type detail) when exporting to your general ledger. (Which is done using the area at "Contributions ... Accounting Batches" )