A fundraising report card summarizes your organization’s profits and expenses. Covering a given period or over time, this document informs key stakeholders, including your board and current and future donors. If you have multiple funding opportunities (or, as we like to call them, “collections”), you can even break down the profitability by event.
Here, we not only show you how to use your Cheddar Up reporting data (which will be the payments you’ve received) to prepare financial reports, but we have a free spreadsheet that will convert your numbers into some pretty snazzy graphs.
Not a nonprofit? Not a problem! This spreadsheet will work for any group looking to summarize payment activity and evaluate profit and loss.
Summarize your group’s profit and loss in a fundraising report card
You’ll need these three items:
Item 1: Cheddar Up account-wide summary
Within the reporting center, Team plan users can download a spreadsheet that details your entire Cheddar Up history. It includes both overall totals and totals by collection.
(Not a Team user? Don’t run away! This process will still work for you — you’ll just have to review each collection individually in the reporting center.)
Item 2: Expense log, categorized by event
Because we don’t track your expenses, you will manually input these in the second tab of the spreadsheet.
Item 3: Our exclusive fundraising report card spreadsheet
Available to download here. Open the document to find the instructions for populating your data. After you’ve input your account-wide summary data plus your expenses — voila! You’ll have this magic dashboard.
You can use the file internally to keep your team up-to-date on high-level financials, or you can export it to share externally.
Other ways to use your account-wide summary to evaluate financials
Your Cheddar Up account-wide summary includes the following details — all by collection and with an overall total:
- Total amount collected
- Total cash or check received
- Payouts (withdrawals)
- Fees that your organization absorbed
- Payer fees that your payers covered
- Pending balance
- Total available to withdraw
The account-wide summary can be a valuable resource during your organization’s review processes. Here are a few ways:
In leadership transitions, you can see any outstanding concerns, like which collections’ payments have not been transferred to your group’s bank account.
As your reporting year comes to a close, you have a clear overview of pending balances and what they’re related to — and you can refer to the specific collection in your reporting center for appropriate follow-up.
Do you have the bandwidth to cover payers’ fees to encourage more buy-in? The ability to see an exact number for your account’s fees can help make this easier to decipher (and deliberate).
Which collections performed well and which didn’t? What can you change for the upcoming year?
Should you continue offering cash or check? If it’s not a significant percentage of payments received, you may consider eliminating that option for convenience.
In short, before you go
We’ve created a simple spreadsheet that turns your Cheddar Up data (all payments received) + your provided expenses into a colorful dashboard detailing your organization’s profitability. Use this fundraising report card to evaluate financials within your team, or send it to board members and donors to promote transparency.
