Funds and Sources

Funds help you track where your money is going to, and sources track where your money comes from. For most organizations, funds would represent your programs (e.g. "Orphanage Fund", "Building Project"), and sources would be fundraising campaigns (e.g. "Regular Newsletter", "Year-End Appeal", "Online Donations").

Aside from semantic differences, the major difference between Funds and Sources is that a donation can have many funds (in the case of a donation that is split between two or more funds), but it can have only one source. Here's a picture to help illustrate the difference:

QuickBooks™

For the purpose of exporting donations to QuickBooks, Funds map to QuickBooks' classes, and sources map to income items.

Archiving

After a while, funds and sources can start to build up. If you have a lot of fundraising campaigns, then you'll end up with a lot of old sources that you no longer use. The same might happen with funds.

To help you keep things organized, we just released a new feature that lets you archive your old funds and sources. Archived funds and sources won't show up on donation reports or your online donations pages. (You can still run access the donations reports by going to "Settings", "Funds" (or "Sources"), and clicking on the underlined link showing the number of donations. In the example below you'd click on "90 donations".)

You can archive a fund or source by clicking the "Archive this fund?" checkbox on the fund or source form.

Alternatively, you can enable a fund or source until a certain date, or beginning on a certain date, or between two dates. For example, you can have a fund expire on a certain date, at which point it will be automatically archived.