>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 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 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 | =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=