Notes About Setting Up Funds
You can customize funds, define fund periods, create your own groups and names for fund activities, and set up recurring charges. Before setting up funds, make sure you understand funds, fund periods, groups, and activities.
Before You Begin
It's important to know the following terms in order to understand contributions:
- Contributions are posted/recorded to activities, like "Regular Sunday Offering," "Easter Donation," and "Building Campaign".
- Activities belong to a fund, such as "Contributions," "Diocesan Collections," and "Tuition".
- Within a fund, activities are sorted into groups that have similar purposes. Examples include "Offerings," "Special Collection," and "Fees".
Funds and Fund Periods
- Each fund can have an unlimited number of fund periods.
- A fund can have any number of groups, and each group can have as many activities as you like. Often, funds for specific purposes have one or two groups with a few activities per group. More general funds may have four or more groups with lots of activities.
- Contributions are tracked in the Rates/History/Keywds window in the Families, Parishes & Facilities, and Diocese sections. You can view the totals for each fund period in the Overview window.
- A fund period can be any length of time, but we recommend that they be at least one year long and set at full-year intervals.
Groups and Activities
- You can set up as many groups and activities in a fund as needed. Group titles and activity names must be unique within each fund.
- Add groups and activities in the order you want to see them in PDS and on reports.
- You can set activities with the function Charge as recurring by associating terms and rates with it.
- Once you've used activities, don't reorder the list by changing existing activity names. Instead, click the reorder icon
.
- If you use Abundant, you can select which activities display on your giving page. When you edit or deactivate an activity in the fund setup, the changes are automatically sent to Abundant. If you delete an activity, it's deactivated in Abundant.
Recommendations and Tips
- We recommend backing up your fund data daily, especially if you plan to make major changes.
- When another user is in the program, you can only view information and print reports in the fund setup.
- You can use the predefined funds in PDS as a model when adding new funds. These templates can be modified to suit your purposes. We recommend that you examine these to become familiar with the structure before you create your own.