Best Practices for Year-End Tax Receipts

The holiday months are a great time to reflect, get organized and plan for the upcoming year.  It’s also the best time to review your designations and get ready to send out your Year-End Tax Receipts.

Stewardship has made the tax receipt process easier than ever, and we’ve added new features that let you create personalized receipts so you can show your donors their gifts are appreciated.  And we’ve added more options so you can choose to send tax receipts via email, print, or both.

To make sure you’re getting the most out of the Stewardship platform, here are some best practices for Year-End Tax Receipts.

Step 1: Double-Check Your Designations

Before you send your tax receipts, it’s always a good idea to verify which options are selected for your designations.

To speed up the process, designations created in 2020 will automatically have the options checked for both Include on Tax Receipts and Tax Deductible unless you specify otherwise.

How to Set a Designation to be Included on Tax Receipts

Step 2: Donor Management

If you or your donors prefer paperless communications, you now have the option to email Tax Receipts. Take the time to review your donor accounts and make sure you have the most up-to-date information—including email addresses in your Donors tab.

If there’s an email address entered, the Use this email for delivery of Tax Receipts checkbox will be selected by default which will give you the option of sending an emailed Tax Receipt.

If you have a bad email address on file, or if you are certain you want to stick to only printed Tax Receipts, you should uncheck this box. Otherwise, just make sure the information is accurate.

It’s also good practice to merge any duplicate donor accounts so that they can get a single, consolidated Tax Receipt. To merge duplicate accounts, go to the Donors tab, select one of the duplicate entries then click Merge Donors. You can then Add the remaining duplicate entries before selecting Merge to group them together.

For a more detailed explanation, read more here:

How to Merge Two or More Donor Accounts

How to Confirm a Donor’s email is Used for Tax Receipts

Step 3: Personalize Your Tax Receipt

Another great update is that we’ve made it easy to add your logo and personalize the tax receipt letter that goes out to your donors.

This is a great way to show your donors how their donation impacted your organization this year. With their support, how many families were you able to feed? What new equipment were you able to purchase to serve your clients better? Make this area count and show them how much they are appreciated!

Personalize Your Tax Receipt Settings

Step 4: Configure your Email Cover Letter

If you’re planning to send emailed Tax Receipts, the next step is to configure your email cover letter. This is the email message your donors will see when you email their tax receipt. This is another great area to let your donor know how much they have made an impact this year.

You can add a subject line, enter body text, and add a signature image that will appear at the bottom of your email.

You can see a preview of your email on the same page as you configure your cover letter.

Configure Your Email Cover Letter

Step 5: Issue Your Tax Receipts

Once you’re ready to issue your Tax Receipts, you can set a filter for the minimum amount to send a tax receipt (for example, only donors who gave $200 or more for the year). To issue a receipt to all your donors, simply keep this amount at zero. You can always choose to either print or email your tax receipts.

We’ve also added a filter to include donations from the entire year.  If you’d rather issue monthly or quarterly, uncheck this box to display only the receipts received for donations since the last time receipts were issued.

Make sure to review and verify the details of the batch to see the list of donors who are included, and their total amount given before issuing their receipt.

Any printed tax receipts will fit in a #10 double window envelope. This eliminates the need to print off address labels!

How to Issue Your Donors’ Tax Receipts

After you have printed or emailed a tax receipt batch, you will also have the option to reprint a printed batch or resend or reprint an emailed batch.

Step 6: Issue Receipts for A Single Donor

Lastly, if you do not want to issue a batch of tax receipts, you also have the option to just issue a receipt for a specific donor in the Donors tab. This is handy if a donor misplaces their receipts and request another copy.

How to Print a Tax Receipt for a Specific Donor

With these simple steps, we are confident that the receipting process will offer another avenue to engage your donors and celebrate all that you have accomplished this year.

Click on the video below for a demo over Year End Tax Receipt Best Practices.