The year is completed, and the process of producing giving statements has begun. Before finalizing your statements, we recommend you make sure all of your giving transactions are either imported or online giving has been associated in Breeze, and anyone who has passed away has been archived.
Before you generate statements, you might want to consider a few important things before moving through the next steps of generating statements.
- Confirm all Giving Transactions are in Breeze
- Associate Giving Transactions
- Archive Deceased
Confirm All Giving Transactions Are In Breeze
This is important. Breeze can only generate statements with the data that is actually in Breeze. Before you generate statements consider if you have added all of the previous years giving into Breeze. If you manually import giving, you will want to make sure you have imported all of your giving into Breeze from the previous year.
If you use an automated third-party integration, check your batches to ensure all giving has been pushed into Breeze.
Associate Giving Transactions
We often see churches with many unassociated gifts in their account from online giving. The unassociated gifts, if not associated with a profile in Breeze, will not show up on the donor giving statement. The donor should have received the email receipt from their initial gift, which can technically serve as their receipt for IRS purposes. However, you may still get questions from donors when they get their statements, and their online contributions aren’t listed.
An important part of year-end statements is accuracy; ensuring all online donations are associated is a vital step in that direction.
To know if you have Unassociated Gifts in your account,
- Navigate to Online Giving.
- Look at the "Associations" tab and see if there is a red circle with a number. If so, this is the number of "unassociated gifts" in your Online Giving. If the number displayed is anything over 0 you have gifts that need to be associated with a profile.
To associate the payment with the correct profile:
- Navigate to Online Giving.
- Click on the "Associations" tab.
- Type the name of the person in the Assign To box and select the individual from the drop-down list.
For more detailed instructions on associating gifts, check out this article on Associating Giving Transactions with Profiles.
Archive the Deceased.
This is not to sound morbid; to respect the loved ones of an individual who passed away in the previous year, you may want to make sure that you remove the names of deceased individuals from your statements.
If you'd like to learn more, check out our documentation on best practices for handling deceased people and moving giving transactions from one person to another. Below is an example video showing you how to remove a deceased individual's name from a statement:
If you do not move the giving transactions from the deceased to the remaining family member, the giving statement will include the name of the deceased.