A nonprofit using NPSP wants to track all donations that go to a designated fund. What should a consultant recommend?

The recommendation to create a General Accounting Unit (GAU) record for the designated fund is appropriate because GAUs are specifically designed within NPSP to track funds and their allocation across donations. Each GAU represents a specific fund, allowing for both tracking and managing financial data accurately. This structure supports fund accounting practices by ensuring that each donation can be easily attributed to the correct fund, providing clarity in reporting and accountability.

Using GAUs maximizes the functionality of NPSP, enabling nonprofits to effectively allocate donations to specific funds as they receive them. It allows for comprehensive reporting on how much has been raised for each fund and helps organizations manage their finances in a transparent way, which is vital for donor trust and engagement.

Creating an Opportunity record type or a custom object, while feasible, would complicate tracking without fully leveraging the built-in capabilities of NPSP specific to fund management. Similarly, GAU Allocation records are used for distributing amounts from Opportunities to different GAUs but don’t independently track the existence of the fund itself. Thus, creating a GAU specifically addresses the need to track and manage donations for that particular fund directly.