AdventistGiving Information

When you go to church each week, you can drop your offering in the plate or bag or bucket, or if you are like me, I often had to chase the deacon or treasurer down at the end of the service, since I was usually at the piano when the offering was taken up. But once the counting is finished and the treasurer has left the building, that is it until next week. Adventist Giving is different. You can donate all day, all night, any day of the month. But at some point, they have to close that offering and start a new one. And they do that twice a month. Let’s use March as an example. On the 15th of March, at midnight, Adventist Giving closes or cuts off the March 15th offering and opens a new offering. They then total up all the donations given during the first half of that month and a deposit report is prepared and posted to your church’s Adventist Giving page, usually by the next day after the cutoff. Then the donations that were collected from the 1st through the 15th are deposited into your church bank account several days later. Any donation that is given after midnight on the 15th is included in the March 31st “offering plate.” On the last day of the month, whatever the last day is, at midnight, that offering is closed/cut off. Whatever your donors have donated to your church’s Adventist Giving account during the last half of that month is counted and a deposit report is prepared and appears on your church’s Adventist Giving page on the next day. And the March 31st deposit shows up in your church checking account a few days later. Two Adventist Giving Deposits per month. Over and over, throughout every month of the year. This is what your church’s Adventist Giving page will look like when you log in. Notice the heading. “Official Deposit Reports. ” Notice that in the “Official deposit reports” section there are 4 columns. “Deposit Date:” the date that your deposit is transferred/deposited to your church checking account “Cut-off Date:” the ending/posting date of that offering “Total Amount:” the total of the donations given for that particular deposit “Downloads:” the report for that offering, in two formats It is very important to understand the difference between the “Deposit Date, ” the date that the offerings are deposited to your bank, and the “Cutoff Date,” which is the actual date that should be used when this deposit is posted in Jewel. And if you import, Jewel will automatically use the “Cutoff Date. ” 1 NOTE: All offerings should be entered into Jewel in the month they were donated, not the month they were deposited. If January 31 was a Sabbath, you would count the offering and take it to the bank sometime in the next couple of days, and it would show up on the bank statement in February. But you would still enter it in Jewel as a January offering, not a February offering. AG works the same way. If you want to know which AG deposits should be entered into Jewel in February, always look in the “Cutoff Date” column. The “Cutoff Date” column tells us that we have a Feb 15 and a Feb 28 deposit to enter into Jewel in February. If we were to look at the “Deposit Date” column, we might assume that the February 6, 2025 offering is a February offering. But nope, February 6, 2025 is the date that your January 31 offering is being deposited to your bank account. It was donated in January and should be posted to January, as a January 31 offering. NOTE: The Cut-Off Date tells us what month these offerings were donated. The “Deposit Date” tells us what month they were deposited. Ignore the “Deposit Date,” use the “Cut-Off Date.” Let’s look at “Pending” donations. If someone says to you “I just donated for the first time last night, and I want to know if it worked. Can you check for me? You can log in, enter selected dates, and verify it for them. But, you should never use the “Pending” list to enter donations into Jewel. See, Adventist Giving tells you that right here. Always use the “Official Deposit Report” that comes out twice each month. 2 Why am I making such a big deal out of posting the correct Adventist Giving offerings into Jewel? Because I often see and fix errors that come from doing it incorrectly. Errors like: • When your AG deposits are incorrectly dated, offerings will be often be skipped or duplicated. • Because if you are not crystal clear about which offering belongs in which month, sometimes you will put the March 31 offering in March, and sometimes you will wait and put it in April. And sometimes you will accidentally put it in both March and April. • Or you will assume you put it in March when you didn’t, and you won’t discover it until it pops up on your bank rec and you realize you didn’t enter it at all, at which point you will need my help to enter it, and your bank rec will be delayed as we fix it. • Also, skipping or duplicating offerings causes your monthly remittance to the conference to be incorrect, sometimes by quite a lot. • And last but not least, if you are not in the habit of dating and posting the Adventist Giving offerings correctly, you will likely post the December 31 Adventist Giving offering incorrectly – to January of the next year. • Which will mean that your donor receipts for the year are inaccurate. • Which makes for unhappy donors and having to issue corrected end-of-year tax receipts. You can see why this is one of those cases where I am very specific on the correct way to do it. Because doing it incorrectly will cost both you and your support person a lot of time in the long run, and doing it right keeps both your donors and the IRS happy. It is well worth the time it takes to learn to do it right! And, if you get this nailed down, your Adventist Giving experience from here on out will be smooth sailing. Because what we just went through, getting the correct report into the correct month, is the hardest part of Adventist Giving. It is all downhill from here!