Gift Processing on the Go: How to Process Donations Without Staying Glued to Your Desk

While nonprofits depend on donations and major gifts to fund their missions, the time it takes to reliably process gifts and donations tends to undercut their impact. The fundraising process often takes focus away from achieving the organization’s cause.

Despite being a mission-critical activity, it’s also easy for non-profit leaders and staff to feel glued to their desks as they tediously work through all of their financial reporting paperwork. They might accept that the process can’t be streamlined based on the requirements to ensure accuracy, transparency, and other essential goals.

Luckily, the PairSoft team has built a better way to process gifts and donations. Keep reading to learn more about how the standard approach to gift services compares to our modern, paperless, mobile solution — and see how your organization can reap the benefits.

The traditional approach to gift processing

It’s never a bad sign when your nonprofit is swimming in donations. We know you rely on the gifts of generous, passionate donors to help you meet your goals and achieve your missions.

However, a sea of paperwork and tax receipts associated with those donations can make it feel like you’re drowning. Gifts must be appropriately captured, filed, and reported, but when the processing of gifts is not only laborious, but wasteful for the environment, any effective nonprofit leader can see that there must be a better way.

Dealing with physical paperwork can also make your team feel like they’re handcuffed to the physical office, which is not ideal for the various demands, duties, and responsibilities that fall upon nonprofit staff and their leaders. And we can’t ignore that time spent on paper-based gift processing procedures carries hefty hidden costs that impact a nonprofit’s bottom line.
Between the time, energy, and money it takes to effectively execute the gift processing procedures for nonprofits, it’s essential to find a better accounting system.

When Carlos Molina, the CFO and senior vice president of finance and administration for United Way of Miami-Dade, upgraded his organization’s processes with a paperless solution, he found that not only costs related to paper supplies, storage, and postage disappeared, but he was also able to create three new office spaces with the elimination of filing cabinets for paper storage.

Why nonprofit teams need a mobile solution for gift processing

Nonprofit leaders are busy and have to be in many different places at once. They must have adequate time to meet with existing donor databases, build relationships with potential new donors, travel, attend events, lead meetings, and participate in other important activities that keep them away from the office.

Between these in-person and virtual demands, nonprofit leadership and human resources need a streamlined way to handle gift processing and donor records. And because accuracy and transparency are critical for gift processing, a mobile solution is ideal for meeting busy nonprofit teams where they are — wherever they are.

Imagine your nonprofit’s leadership being empowered to process gift batches while attending events, getting on or off planes, or waiting for a meeting to begin. With a mobile and paperless gift processing workflow, it’s possible for nonprofits to access their documentation, monitor gift transmittal workflows, and process donations anytime, anywhere — and, with even greater ease than if they were in their physical office or using a laptop.

Why is mobile the way to go?

• Lower processing costs
  With paperless processing, nonprofit stakeholders no longer have to deal with the costs of paper, supplies, ink, postage, storage, equipment upkeep, and all the different expenses related to paper-based processes.
• No more manual data entry and reduced risk of errors
  Manual data entry is time-consuming and rife with human error. Even the most capable data entry specialist can misread or mistype a digit, leading to inaccurate entries. A mobile app with automated document capture can precisely extract gift form data from documents using the phone’s camera, greatly reducing the risk of mistakes.
• Increased visibility
  On-the-go gift processing enables teams to keep tabs on the workflow and track approvals and cashflow throughout the fiscal year, even while away from the office.
• No more bottlenecks and inefficiencies
  Mobile gift deposits and approvals lead to enhanced collaboration among teams and fewer bottlenecks. Being able to process gifts anywhere means teams no longer have to wait for approvers to get back in the office. Workflows can continue moving seamlessly, regardless of where leadership is located.

Introducing the new PairSoft mobile app for gift processing

Did you know? PairSoft just launched a new mobile app to make all of your gift entries easier than ever. With the new app, users are able to easily add documents from their phone in-kind and scan pages and images directly from their phone camera or camera roll with the app’s intuitive optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities.

No longer is it necessary to wait until teams are back in the office or able to access their desktop devices. Additionally, users can create custom gift processing workflows; route gifts for gift batch approval; find any documents attached to a record in Blackbaud RE, RE NXT or CRM; commit batches to be sent to the general ledger account in Blackbaud; and more. And the ability to conduct keyword searches across all documents makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, fast.

PairSoft works with the tools you already use

PairSoft integrates with the ERPs that nonprofits use every day, like Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, Blackbaud RE NXT, Blackbaud CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sage Intacct. These seamless integrations mean you and your team will no longer be switching back and forth between tools, because users can process allocations, edit documents, create records, and more from a single app while they’re on the go.

In other words: no more staying glued to your desk drowning in paperwork! For additional information or to see how your nonprofit can use PairSoft to process gifts, get in touch today.