Data Migration 4: Best Practices - Financial Information

Links to other Data Migration Articles: 

Sending this article to your bookkeeper? Considering sharing our Bookkeeper FAQ article as well.

Bringing in financial information

In general, there are two types of financial information that you are likely bringing in:

  1. Donations or Sales that are tied to Relationship information
  2. Past financials that are tied to your financial reporting

When it comes to donations and sales, we recommend bringing these into your MonkeyPod in full. You can import these under the Relationships import.

If you are reading this article, you are likely interested in bringing in the information under Past Financials.

It always starts with your chart of accounts

When it comes to bringing over financial information, the first thing to do is bring over your chart of accounts. Migrating to a new system is an opportunity to take a look at your chart of accounts and clean it up a little.

To enter your Chart of Accounts, check out this article on how to work with the Chart of Accounts in MonkeyPod.

Be sure to keep track of which accounts are now going where. One of the steps in bringing over your account information is going to be to bring over summary entries for past financials. If you are changing your chart of accounts, you're going to need to keep track of which old accounts are now mapped to new accounts!

Make a clean break when bringing in financials

When it comes to migrating your accounting information, it is best to make a "clean break" whenever possible. Many accounting systems (e.g., QuickBooks) do not support non-profit accounting concepts, so anything you bring over will inevitably copy over the various workarounds that are no longer necessary in MonkeyPod.

Making a "clean break" means two things:

  1. Bring over your data at the beginning of a fiscal year: Whenever possible, make your Bookkeeping Start Date the start of a fiscal year. That means that any financial reporting from prior fiscal years will need to be run from your old system, but everything going forward can be done with MonkeyPod. This approach allows you to make a fresh start with a clean, streamlined chart of accounts that is consistent with nonprofit accounting principles and best practices.
  2. Bring over only necessary information: Import Pre-MonkeyPod transactions that are useful from a relationship management standpoint only. That usually means importing your Pre-MonkeyPod donations and sales so that donor and customer relationships are enriched with that full historical context. You can probably skip bills, checks, or other expense-related transactions. 
  3. Bring over summary entries for accounts: if you want to bring in more information so you can perform year-over-year comparisons, we recommend bringing these in as summary entries.

To start using MonkeyPod bookkeeping at the beginning of a new fiscal year, the first step is to set up a clean chart of accounts, entering opening balances as of the last day of the previous fiscal year. From that point on, just record your transactions as they happen, reconcile your bank and credit card accounts monthly, and you should be in good shape.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. How should I best migrate recurring donors?
    1. Check out this article explaining the best way to do this
  2. How can I bring over grant information
    1. Check out this article that explains how to do this!

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