The year is completed and now the process of producing contributions statements has begun. Before finalizing your statements we recommend you make sure all of your contributions are either imported and online giving has been associated in Breeze, and anyone who has passed away has been archived.
Before you generate statements there are a few important things you might want to consider before moving through the next steps of generating statements.
- Confirm all contributions are in Breeze
- Associate Contributions
- Archive Deceased
Confirm All Contributions 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 contributions 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 over into Breeze.
Associate Contributions.
We often see churches that have a number of unassociated gifts in their account from online giving. The unassociated gifts, if not associated to a profile in Breeze, will not show up on the donors giving statement. The donor should have received the email receipt from their initial gift, which can technically serve as their receipt for IRS purposes, but you may still get questions from contributors when they get their statement and their online contributions aren’t listed.
An important part of year-end statements is accuracy and making sure all online donations are associated is a vital step in that direction.
To know if you have Unassociated Gifts in your account,
- Navigate to "More" > "Contributions" > "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 "More" > "Contributions" > "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 Contributions with Profiles.
Archive the Deceased.
This is not to sound morbid, in an effort 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 name of deceased individuals from your statements.
If you'd like to learn more, check out our documentation on best practice for handling deceased people and moving contributions from one person to another. Below is an example video showing you how to remove a deceased individuals name from a statement:
If you do not move the contributions from the deceased to the remaining family member, the giving statement will include the name of the deceased.