>If you have an active development program, either, or both, current and
>deferred giving, you should consider a donor/gift recordkeeping system
>that integrates with your accounting software to eliminate any duplicate
>recordkeeping and insure that the two systems are always in agreement.
>You will probably not find any small business commercial software
>accounting programs that will do this which is another reason to look at
>fund accounting systems.
>
Our museum is a state-owned museum and we do not have much of a choice, but
our foundation, which has offices in the museum, is a Public Non-Profit,
does their own payroll, and maintains a very large donor database. They use
two programs which do everything they need. One is called MIP, which is
their in-house payroll and accounting package. This package also handles
vendor payments, etc. A very impressive package. The donor database package
requires considerable disk space (up to about 100MB now for the data
alone). The package, FundMaster, is also a very impressive package. The
people in our foundation did an excellent job in shopping for packages to
meet their needs.
 
Do not rule out a package just because it was not designed for museums.
Look for flexibility. A very small museum could even do their donor
database on something like FileMaker Pro or a similar database program. I
have been impressed with what some of our people have been able to
accomplish on their own with only a basic knowledge of the Macintosh
operating system.
 
Anyway, just some ideas on the table...
 
--john
 
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John Chadwick                                    |
system analyst                                   |
New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science | Insert your favorite
1801 Mountain Road NW                            | quotation here...
Albuquerque, NM 87104                            |
[log in to unmask]              |
phone: (505) 841-8837 FAX (505) 841-8866         |
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