End of Year: Sending a Tax Letter and Email

Hello and welcome to our pre-recorded webinar on the U.S. end-of-year tax letters and emails. If you happen to be one of our Canadian clients, we do have a different set of steps that you’re going to have to follow in a different webinar for everybody else in the United States preparing Read More

Hello and welcome to our pre-recorded webinar on the U.S. end-of-year tax letters and emails. If you happen to be one of our Canadian clients, we do have a different set of steps that you’re going to have to follow in a different webinar for everybody else in the United States preparing their end-of-year tax communications. You are in the right place. I am Sean Patero, your training specialist, here to guide you through this process that you probably might have forgotten if you’ve done it before. I would have if I was in your shoes and didn’t have to talk about this as much as we do. You only do it once a year. Fortunately, the process hasn’t changed all that much. Here is your refresher. We have some best practices every time that we do this, where first you’re going to make a backup of your database before merging duplicates. If you’re not doing this already, here’s a great opportunity. Once a year, before we do the end of year tax letter or email, we want to make sure that our constituents are only represented in one file, so that we’re only sending them one letter or one email. We do have a different webinar about this that you can check out. Make a backup beforehand. Merge those duplicates before double checking. Perhaps one other thing: our year and calculated fields throughout DonorPerfect. We have smart fields that we call calculated fields, performing a variety of tasks, and in the case of today’s topic, the task is accurately calculating the tax-deductible amount a donor can claim to the IRS. These things should be here for us already behind the scenes in settings in calculated fields, and if they’re not, pause this video. Reach out to the support department. Have them rectify that for you. They’re always there to help. This is one of the few times they’ll go in and do something for you. Always there for guidance. But if you happen to be missing these calculated fields, we need them. We need them for this process, reach out and they’ll make sure that they get in there for you. Let me log into DonorPerfect here. Point out what I’m talking about, and first I’ll point out the help menu at the top right, where second option here we have chat support from the help dropdown in the blue ribbon at the very top. Chat support, and then if you’re looking for any of our webinars or the one on managing duplicates, we have our on-demand webinars. Now, what am I talking about with these calculated fields? I’m talking about our data entry throughout the year. Now, if you are a nonprofit that is just taking monetary donations, this doesn’t apply to you as much because as you’re maybe taking those check donations, there is just a simple gift amount representing the financial transaction from their bank account into your nonprofit’s bank account. And here, this is September 2026 as this is being recorded. So as I’m doing this now, I’m going to be looking at 2025’s donations. You’ll be watching this in the future, likely looking for 2026 donations. But I’m not through my year yet. It’s really the only difference from one year to another is which date range we’re looking at. Something else that’s not going to change much is what we’re including. Anything that has a record type of gift is what we’re including, not soft credits, not notifications from tributes, only hard credit donations, but 2026 will handle that in 2027. If I scroll down further, just looking at our gifts for 2025 that are going to be included in today’s process, we have we have some monthly giving donations that have a normal gift amount. If I look at this particular transaction, we can see a normal donation. We have a gift with a gift amount, an amount of gift of $10, no fair market value, no value. Of in-kind gifts or non-deductible portions contributed to an event is what fair market value would be used for. And over the right, we can see this field receipt amount, a calculated field that is correctly calculating that this 10-dollar donation is showing the correct receipt amount. $10 for a $10 donation. Not the case if, say, we had an event like this gala sponsorship from last year. If I edit this gala donation, yep, it was a cash sponsorship to last year’s gala.