Is Relae where your giving officially lives?
A setup question worth getting right, and what changes depending on your answer.
Some organisations run their giving entirely in Relae. Others keep it in an existing system and use Relae to understand it. Both are fine. Relae just needs to know which one you are, so it does not claim to own numbers that belong somewhere else.
If Relae is where giving lives
You add and edit gifts here. Your totals are your totals. This is the default and is what most people want.
If your giving lives somewhere else
Relae holds a copy so you can see the whole picture, but the other system stays in charge.
- You add and correct gifts in that system, not here. Relae turns off gift entry so the two cannot drift apart.
- Imported gifts are marked as copies.
- Totals say where they came from and when they were last checked, instead of presenting themselves as yours.
- Relae tells you when the two disagree, which is genuinely useful and hard to spot by eye.
Relae is not your accounting system either way
This is worth being plain about. Relae is a fundraising record: who your donors are, what they have given, what you should do next. It is not your books. Your bookkeeper's software stays the authority for anything an auditor or the CRA will look at, and your bank statement is the authority for what actually arrived.