A deposit lands in your operating account. The description reads BENEVITY, or YOURCAUSE, or something equally unhelpful. It is not a round number. Nobody on staff recognizes the name, and it is not on the pledge list.
The bookkeeper does the only reasonable thing available and codes it to general contributions. The number is right, the books balance, and the month closes.
What actually arrived was forty of your donors.
How the money gets to you
A large employer sets up a workplace giving program. Employees pick charities, often with payroll deduction, and the company frequently matches some portion. All of that runs through a platform, and the platform does something sensible for everyone except you: it aggregates. Rather than sending your organization forty separate small gifts, it bundles them and sends one disbursement, usually monthly or quarterly.
So the deposit is real, the total is correct, and the forty people who decided to give it are nowhere in your bank record. They are in a report, on a portal, behind a login your organization may never have claimed.
If a donor works for a large employer, there is a good chance their giving reaches you this way. Benevity and YourCause are the names most people run into first, but the same shape shows up with CyberGrants, Bright Funds, Millie, America’s Charities, Global Impact, United Way workplace campaigns, PayPal Giving Fund, and every donor-advised fund sponsor. The rule generalizes: any time money arrives from an entity that is not the person who decided to give it, there is a report somewhere with the person’s name on it.
The donor who does not exist
Picture someone who has given fifty dollars a month through payroll deduction for six years. That is a $3,600 lifetime donor with a perfect retention record and not one lapsed month.
In your CRM she does not exist.
She has never received a thank-you letter, because you did not know to send one. She is not in your retention rate, so your retention rate is wrong. She is not in your donor count, so your donor count is wrong. She has never appeared in a major-gift pipeline, even though six years of unbroken monthly giving is close to the strongest predictor of capacity and commitment you can hold. If she leaves that employer, her giving stops and nothing in your system registers a lapse, because nothing in your system ever registered her.
Every one of those is a data problem with a development consequence, which is the whole reason this is worth an afternoon.
Hard credit, soft credit, and why you cannot just type them in
The instinct, once somebody explains the above, is to enter all forty employees as donors. Do that and you have just doubled your revenue, because the aggregate deposit is already recorded.
This is precisely the problem soft credit exists to solve, and it is worth being exact about the vocabulary, because the two terms get used loosely and they are not interchangeable.
Hard credit goes to the donor of record: the entity whose money it legally was, the one your revenue reports total, the one your financials reconcile to. For a workplace giving disbursement that is normally the platform or its associated charitable foundation, because that is the entity that actually sent the funds.
Soft credit is an acknowledgement on an individual’s record that they are the reason a gift arrived, recorded without adding a second time to revenue. It is a relationship fact rather than an accounting fact.
So the employee gets soft credit and the platform gets hard credit. Your income statement stays correct, and your donor records finally know who these people are. Retention, lifetime value, moves management, and the segment queries behind your appeals all start working for a group of supporters who were previously invisible.
An employer match, where there is one, is usually a separate gift from a separate legal entity, and it belongs on its own record rather than folded into the employee’s.
Exactly which entity should carry hard credit varies by platform and by your own gift-acceptance policy, and the receipting and tax treatment questions that sit next to it belong with your accountant, not with me. What I will say is that the answer needs to be written down once and applied the same way every quarter, because an inconsistent rule produces numbers that cannot be compared year over year, which is the failure this whole exercise is meant to prevent.
Two things that will not reconcile, and should not
When you first match a report against a deposit, two gaps show up, and both of them are normal.
The deposit is usually smaller than the sum of the gifts, because most platforms deduct a processing fee before disbursing. The donor gave the full amount and should be credited for the full amount; your bank received less. Recording the gross gifts with the fee as an expense keeps both the donor record and the ledger honest, and it is the treatment your auditor will expect.
The dates will not line up either. A gift made in December on a quarterly disbursement schedule can land in your account in January, in a different fiscal year. If you credit it by deposit date, your year-end numbers will drift away from what your donors believe they gave you, and some of them will notice when their tax letters do not match.
What to do about it
Four things, and the first one is the one that never happens.
- Claim the account. If money is arriving from a platform, someone at your organization can register and get portal access. This is administrative, free, and routinely sits undone for years because it is nobody’s job.
- Download on a cadence, not on a whim. Put it on the same calendar as your bank reconciliation. A report you pull once, heroically, in a burst of enthusiasm is worth much less than a report you pull every month without thinking about it.
- Map the columns once. Work out which field is the donor name, which is the employer, which is the match, which is the fee, and how your CRM wants to receive them. Write the mapping down. Done once properly, the monthly import becomes fifteen minutes rather than an afternoon of remembering.
- Expect anonymity, and record it as a fact rather than a gap. Some donors elect not to share their details with the recipient, and that choice is theirs to make. What matters is that your file distinguishes anonymous by donor choice from unknown because we never looked. Those are different situations and only one of them is fixable.
Why this one is worth the afternoon
Most data cleanup makes an existing number more accurate. This one adds people to your organization who were already there.
They chose you, off a list of every registered charity in the country, and they set up a deduction that comes out of their pay before they see it. That is about as deliberate as giving gets. The only reason they are strangers to you is a report nobody downloaded.
Related: Your list is shorter than you think, on the same file believing it knows more people than it does, for the opposite reason.