A development office is not a reconciliation desk.
A development team should be writing appeals and grant reports, not maintaining the spreadsheet that reconciles the CRM against the payment processor. We build the system that holds constituents, gifts, grants and programs together, and we build it to the budget a non-profit actually has.
The same person is four contacts.
A donor gives online, volunteers at an event, sits on a committee and is listed as a grant contact — and lands in four systems that never speak. Development counts one number, finance counts another, and someone spends the last week of the quarter merging exports by hand.
One constituent, one history, every gift.
Non-profits — registrationConstituents, gifts, grants and programs, joined.
The constituent record
One contact carrying donor, volunteer, board, grant contact and beneficiary roles at once, with household and organisation associations so a couple is not counted twice.
Gift and pledge objects
Gifts modelled apart from contacts: one-time, pledge, instalment, in-kind and donor advised fund, each tied to a fund and an appeal so restricted money stays visible.
Recurring giving that survives
Sustainer plans synced from whichever giving platform is already in place, with card expiry and failed payment recovery running as workflows rather than a monthly manual chase.
Campaign and appeal attribution
Appeal codes on every channel — direct mail, email, event, peer-to-peer — so year-end and giving day revenue credits back to the ask that produced it, soft credits included.
Grant lifecycle pipeline
Letter of intent through proposal, award, interim report and final report, with deadlines, funder requirements and restricted spend tracked as stages instead of a shared calendar.
Acknowledgments and receipts
Tax receipts and thank-you letters generated from the gift record with the substantiation language your counsel approved, timed by gift size and donor tier.
Reconcile the totals before touching a field.
Diagnose
We open the donor database, the payment processor and the accounting file side by side and find where the gift totals stop agreeing, and why.
Define
Funds, appeals, gift types, donor stages and the grant calendar written down, technology agnostic, and signed off by development and finance together.
Build
Objects, imports, deduplication, processor sync and the reports the board and the auditor ask for, built against that definition and nothing else.
Hand over
Documentation, training for a small team that changes often, and a giving season run alongside your staff.
The old database is the whole project.
Thirty years of gift history, lapsed donors, tribute gifts and constituent codes have to move without losing a single receipt, and the people who know what the old codes meant are volunteers or long gone. That work is a project, not a weekend, and it is where most non-profit implementations quietly fail.
