Best Practices for Categorizing Gifts with Funds

The core decision

Every gift is a transaction in the same ledger, whether or not it's tagged to a Fund, the difference is purely about whether you want to track that money toward a specific purpose separately from general Tithes and Offerings.

Recommendations

• Create a Fund for anything with a defined purpose or goal, a building project, a mission trip, a youth camp, rather than lumping designated gifts into general Offerings
• Avoid creating a new Fund for every small, one-off collection, a proliferation of near-identical Funds makes your Funds list harder to navigate and dilutes reporting value
• Close a Fund once its purpose concludes rather than leaving it open indefinitely, this keeps your active Fund list relevant to what's currently being collected for

Closing a Fund never deletes its history, past gifts recorded against it remain fully visible in reports.

Best practice

Review your Funds list once a quarter, close anything that's served its purpose, and confirm still-open Funds actually reflect current giving campaigns rather than ones nobody's actively promoting anymore.