oregonmatt wrote:Our scouts are embarking on their approved annual fundraiser tomorrow, where they are collecting Christmas trees for recycling. They have distributed envelopes stamped with the troop number to every house in the ward boundaries with printed instructions to attach it to the tree or place it on their front door with their donation.
As a newly called financial clerk, I am aware that these donations go into our "Other" category for scout camp, but what donor should they come from? It's fairly obvious that the cash donations could be entered as an "Anonymous" donation, but should I attempt to enter donors based on checks that people write? That could quickly become a nightmare based on the number of "single time" donors that we may have, but there will be members of the ward (like myself) that may benefit from the bookkeeping. No slips of any kind have been included in the envelope.
Since those who contribute to the fund-raiser are getting a service for their money, it is not a tax-deductible donation. Furthermore, all payments to the "Other" category are specifically excluded from the year-end Official Tax Statement. So there's not a lot of benefit to the individual donors in making separate donation slips for each person.
However, one scenario where it could be helpful is if any of the checks bounce. In that case, you'll be told the name of the person who wrote the check and the amount, but you'll have to be able to go into MLS to cancel that portion of the donation attributable to the bounced check. You need to make sure that you will have some way to make that connection so that you can properly cancel the donation.
But if you have some other means of matching up checks to donors, you could just create a miscellaneous donor like "Christmas Tree Project" and enter all the donations for that one donor.
oregonmatt wrote:As a side question, both the cubs and older scouts are participating in this. We are dividing up the money based on the number of scouts that help. I'm thinking it would be easiest to enter all of the donations to the "scout camp" subcategory and then do a transfer of the relevant amount to the cub's "day camp" category or vice versa. Is this allowed or is there an easier way to do this?
I think that you have hit on the most practical way to handle this. It is straightforward, and the single transfer leaves a reasonable audit trail. That's how I would handle it (and have done in a very similar situation in the past).