Donations

The recommended way to capture donations to Mission Trips is through the Portal's Mission Trip Giving page. Gifts that come through this page are processed along with any other online donations from the Portal.

If mission trip donations are made via cash or check, the Batch Manager Tool make entry simple.  After entering the donation normally, select the Mission Trip Event and the correct Pledge (trip participant) in the Designations tab of the Donation Details page.

If you provide a scholarship to a mission trip participant, you have a couple of options for recording the scholarship against the Pledge:

1. Change the Pledge Amount to reflect the typical fundraising goal less the scholarship. If desired, you can use the Notes field on the Pledge record to record scholarship details.
2. Create a Scholarship Donor, and apply a non-cash Donation from that Donor to the Pledge.

Scholarships

If you are giving a scholarship to a trip participant, we recommend keeping the internal payments out of MinistryPlatform entirely. Simply decrease the fundraising goal (Total Pledge) for individuals whose trips are being subsidized by other budgets.

For example, Steve has $1,000 coming from two other budgets to cover a $2,000 per person trip. Decrease his fundraising goal (Total Pledge) by $1,000 and make a journal entry in your accounting system to move the money (credit the trip, debit other budget).

Alternatively, you could create a Donation of "Internal" Payment Type by fake Donor ("Internal Transfer") and make a journal entry in your accounting system. Whether this is a manual JE or flows through the usual Batch > Deposit > Export workflow for Donations will depend on where the scholarship funds are coming from and if the offset needs to be known/recorded in MinistryPlatform.

Transfers

If a participant changes trips, you might need to transfer money between Mission Trip Participants (Pledges).

Create a $0 Donation with a -$x Distribution to one Participant's Pledge and a +$x Distribution to the other Participant's Pledge. The Donor can be assigned to a generic Church Donor (e.g. Church Admin, Miscellaneous, etc.) or a Donor record could be created for "Internal Trip Transfer", if desired.

This will likely mean that Donations are changing Programs, so, these $0 transfer Donations should flows through the usual Batch > Deposit > Export workflow for Donations so that the your GL is updated accordingly.