End-of-Year Giving Statements Made Simple with Givelify
The year-end giving push has a mere few days left. Are you ready to send end-of-year giving statements to your donors? You will need an easy way to create these statements and reports for your donors for tax purposes. In this post, we will walk you through how simple it is to collect this information with Givelify.
What are End-of-Year Giving Statements?
An end-of-year statement is a one-page letter that reminds your donors of their total giving over the past year. It’s easy to gather this information from Givelify. It’s also a terrific time to thank them for their support.
Ten percent of all giving happens in the last three days of the year. One way to increase these donations is by sending those end-of-the-year statements! Thanking your donors and letting them know they have just a few days left of the year for giving may encourage them to give more!
How to Pull End-of-Year Giving Information from Givelify
Year-end giving statements are due by January 31st. However, sending them a few days before the end of the year, may be the best way to ignite last-minute giving. Here’s how easy it is to gather this information from Givelify:
- Login to your Givelify Dashboard
- Click on Data Export
- Go to Donors and Click on Get Report
- Select Dates: January 1 to Current Date for Yearly Report
- Select the Export Info button to populate the report
(If you have a large number of donors, this report could take longer than normal to populate). - Once the report is populated, you can use it, along with all other donations per donor to create your own tax statement/year-end giving statement. (You can do this in your Church Management System (ChMS) or incorporate all cash gifts into a spreadsheet to share with each individual donor. Also, if you use Givelify integrations with your ChMS, you can pull a report here: https://www.givelify.com/integrations).
What’s the difference between an annual summary and a giving statement?
Every year, Givelify provides each donor with their Annual Giving Summary. This document is sent via email on or before January 31 each year. The summary includes the gross donations, visual graphs, and data from all gifts a donor has made using Givelify. The summary does not include donations made with cash, checks, or through other donations platforms.
The IRS doesn’t accept Givelify’s annual report, so organizations will need to send one statement that incorporates all annual gifts (Givelify, cash, checks, etc.) directly to each of their donors. That is called the year-end giving statement. This statement is accepted by the IRS. The statement will include a person’s donations made through Givelify and any other donations made this year either through check, cash, etc. The donor will include their year-end (or end-of-year giving) statement in their 2020 tax return. Make sure to remind your donors of the recent tax laws that encourage more generous donations this year, as described in our recent blog about the CARES act.
Tax Deductible Envelopes
Givelify allows places of worship and nonprofits to set up “envelopes” or “campaigns” for any cause of their choosing. However, Givelify does not keep track of which envelopes are tax-deductible and which are not. Donors should check with their place of worship or nonprofit organization to confirm which envelopes are tax-deductible.
Watch a Tutorial on How to Generate Year-End Giving Reports
If you’d like to watch our resident finance expert’s tutorial on how to run these reports from the best online church giving platform, click here.
If you have any other questions about generating year-end statements including questions about merging accounts (if you have created more than one Givelify account), discrepancies, fraud, and refunds, reach out to Givelify support. We’d be happy to help!
