DAF Grants & Soft-Credit Acknowledgments

A donor-advised fund (DAF) grant is a gift that arrives from a sponsoring charity — Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, your community foundation — that a real person advised. The check says Fidelity, but the Smiths are the ones who told Fidelity to send it.

That splits credit two ways, and NP Ledger keeps the two lanes separate:

• Hard credit goes to the sponsor (Fidelity). They're the legal donor of record — the gift is booked from them, and no tax receipt goes to the advisor.
• Soft credit goes to the human (the Smiths). They don't get a tax receipt, but you still want them in your donor history and on your thank-you list.

This page shows you how to record both.

Here's the trap. When a DAF grant lands, you get one of two wrong outcomes if you only have one place to put the donor:

• Book it to Fidelity and the Smiths vanish from your records — you've lost the relationship history with the people who actually gave.
• Book it to the Smiths and you've just sent them a tax-deductible receipt they can't use. The advisor already took their deduction when they funded the DAF; deducting again would be double-dipping. That's a real compliance problem.

Soft credit is the third option. Fidelity stays the donor of record, and the Smiths get stewardship credit — visible in your books, on your thank-you worklist, and never on a tax receipt.

• The DAF sponsor set up as a supporter (e.g., "Fidelity Charitable")
• The human advisor(s) set up as a supporter too (e.g., "John & Jane Smith")
• The grant recorded as a donation — see Donor Giving Statements and Quick Entry

1. Mark the sponsor as a Donor-Advised Fund

1. Go to Supporters (in the sidebar under Accounting) and open the sponsor's record — or create it.
2. Check "Donor-Advised Fund sponsor."
3. Save.

That flag is what tells NP Ledger to keep this donor's grants off tax-deductible giving statements. Grants from a DAF aren't deductible to the sponsor or the advisor, so they're excluded automatically — and the giving-statement screen will remind you to thank the humans instead.

2. Record the grant to the sponsor

Record the donation the way you record any gift, with the sponsor as the donor (Fidelity Charitable). This is the hard credit — the legal donor of record. Nothing special here; it's a normal donation entry.

3. Add the soft credit on the donation

1. Open the donation's detail page (from the transaction list, or the link on the confirmation).
2. Find the "Soft Credit" panel.
3. Pick the contact — the human advisor behind the grant.
4. Choose a role: DAF Advisor, Recommender, Household Member, or Other.
5. Amount is optional. Leave it blank and the contact is credited for the full gift — the usual case. Fill it in only when you're splitting credit across more than one person.
6. Click "Add soft credit."

You can add more than one soft credit to a single gift (a couple, a household, co-advisors). Add or remove them anytime, as long as the donation isn't voided.

Note: The amount you enter here is stewardship information only. It's never posted to your ledger and never added to giving totals — it's just a note about who to credit.

4. Work the acknowledgment worklist

1. Go to Acknowledgments (in the sidebar under Accounting).
2. The "To thank" tab lists everyone owed a thank-you and hasn't gotten one yet — who, for which gift, from which sponsor.
3. Reach out however you normally do — a call, a card, an email. NP Ledger doesn't send it for you; it keeps the list so nobody slips through.
4. Click "Mark thanked" once you've reached out. Changed your mind or clicked too soon? "Undo" puts them back on the list.
5. The "All soft credits" tab shows the full history, thanked or not.

• The grant shows the sponsor as the donor of record, not the advisor
• The advisor appears in the Soft Credit panel on the donation
• The advisor shows up on the Acknowledgments worklist under "To thank"
• The sponsor's giving statement is empty or flagged — DAF grants are correctly excluded from tax-deductible totals

• Booking the grant to the human instead of the sponsor. The check came from Fidelity, so Fidelity is the donor of record. Put the human in the Soft Credit panel, not the donor field — that keeps an improper tax receipt from going out.
• Forgetting to flag the sponsor as a DAF. Without the "Donor-Advised Fund sponsor" checkbox, the sponsor's grants can land on a tax-deductible giving statement, which they shouldn't. Set the flag once and it's handled going forward.
• Expecting the two totals to add up. Hard credit and soft credit are separate lanes on purpose. A gift counts once toward your revenue (as the sponsor's gift) and shows as a courtesy credit for the advisor — they're never summed, or you'd be counting the same money twice.

Accountant note: A DAF sponsor is the donee of record for the grant it makes to your organization; the individual advisor already claimed their charitable deduction when they contributed to the fund, so no further §170 acknowledgment is owed to either party for the grant. NP Ledger enforces this by excluding gifts hard-credited to a DAF-flagged contact from tax-deductible giving statements. Soft credit is a stewardship record only and carries no tax or ledger effect.