Recording GoFundMe Donations

GoFundMe doesn't send you money gift by gift. Twenty people give to your fundraiser through the month, and one lump sum shows up in your account later — smaller than the total, because the processing fees came out first.

That gap creates the trap. If you record each gift and record the deposit as income, your revenue is now roughly double what people actually gave. If you skip the gifts and record only the deposit, you've got the right total but no idea who gave, which fund it belongs to, or what to put on a year-end statement.

The way out is a holding account — NP Ledger calls it Donations in Transit, a temporary bucket that parks money between "someone gave" and "the money landed." Each gift goes in at its gross amount (what the donor actually gave, before fees). When the real deposit arrives, it drains the bucket instead of adding new income: the net cash goes to your bank, the fees become an expense, and the bucket returns to zero.

Same money, counted once. That's the whole idea.

Free GoFundMe pays nonprofits two different ways, and they're recorded differently. Before you do anything else, check which one you're on.

Sign in to GoFundMe and look at how your fundraiser is set up — or look at a past payout and see who actually sent the money.

• Paid through PayPal Giving Fund. The money passes through PayPal Giving Fund (a charity PayPal runs) and reaches you monthly. This is the path NP Ledger supports today — jump to Bringing the gifts in below.
• Paid through GoFundMe Pay. GoFundMe sends the money straight to your bank on its own schedule, with no PayPal Giving Fund in the middle. There's no donor report to download for these, so you record them by hand — If GoFundMe pays you directly walks you through it, deposit and all.

If your fundraiser pays through PayPal Giving Fund, you're in luck: PayPal Giving Fund publishes a donor-by-donor report, and NP Ledger reads it directly. Every gift comes in as its own recorded donation, into the Donations in Transit bucket, ready for the deposit to clear it.

1. Download your donor report. Sign in to the PayPal Giving Fund charity portal, open Reports, and download the donor report. Leave the file exactly as PayPal produced it.
2. Import it. Follow Importing a Donation Platform Batch and choose PayPal Giving Fund in the Aggregator dropdown. That page has the full walkthrough, including what to do about rows that don't import.
3. Clear the deposit when it lands. When the payout hits your bank, use Settling Payouts and Clearing Balances to match it against the gifts you imported. The gross gifts, the fees, and the net deposit tie out, and Donations in Transit goes back to zero.

That's it — steps 1 and 2 get the donor detail into your books; step 3 is what keeps the deposit from being counted as new income.

Importing a Donation Platform Batch covers what the import itself does — how re-uploads are handled, what happens to rows that fail, why no second tax receipt goes out, and how anonymous gifts are recorded. Worth reading once before your first import.

What's Different About GoFundMe

Most of the PayPal Giving Fund path works the same no matter where the gifts came from. Three things are worth knowing when they came from GoFundMe:

• GoFundMe pays on its own schedule, and it's slower than you'd expect. GoFundMe pays enrolled nonprofits monthly: donations through the 15th go out that same month, and anything after the 15th waits for the next run. (Gifts that reach you through PayPal Giving Fund from other sources — a Facebook or Instagram fundraiser — move on their own cadence, usually every couple of weeks. If you run both, expect the deposits to arrive on different rhythms.) So a gift and its deposit can sit weeks apart. That's normal, and it's exactly what the holding account is for.
• The money may land in your PayPal account first. GoFundMe's own documentation says PayPal Giving Fund pays into your organization's PayPal account, and from there you move it to your bank or request a check. If that's how yours arrives, settle the gifts against the deposit that reaches your bank — that's the one your books care about, and it may be labeled as a PayPal transfer rather than anything mentioning GoFundMe. Match it on date and amount.
• Fees come out before you're paid. The deposit is smaller than the gifts behind it. Don't adjust the gifts down to make it match — import them at gross and let the settlement work the fees out. That difference is the fee.

If you're on GoFundMe Pay, the money comes straight to your bank and there's no PayPal Giving Fund donor report to download. A proper GoFundMe connection is on the list, but you don't have to wait for it — you record these by hand, and it's two small jobs, not one big one.

The whole trick is the same holding account from the top of this page. Each gift goes into Donations in Transit as it comes in. The batch deposit, when it lands, drains that bucket instead of adding new income. Do it in that order and the double-count can't happen. Here's each half.

Part 1 — Record each gift as it comes in

You'll read these off your GoFundMe dashboard, one donor at a time.

1. Open Quick Entry and choose "I received a donation."
2. Enter the gift at its gross amount — what the donor actually gave, before GoFundMe's fees. Don't net it down to match the deposit; that difference is a fee, and it gets handled in Part 2.
3. For "Deposited into," choose Donations in Transit — not your bank account. This is the one field that matters most on this page. It parks the gift in the holding account until the real money shows up.
4. Leave the fee field blank. It's tempting to enter GoFundMe's fee here, but the fee comes out once, at the deposit — putting it on the gift and the deposit counts it twice. Gross gift now, fees later.
5. Fill in the donor, fund, and date as you would for any gift, and save. Repeat for each donation in the batch.

When you're done, every gift is on the books at gross, sitting in Donations in Transit, waiting for the deposit.

Part 2 — Record the deposit when it lands

The deposit is one lump sum, smaller than the gifts behind it, because GoFundMe took its fees out first. You're not recording new income here — you're moving the gifts you already booked out of the holding account and into the bank, and naming the fee as the difference. That's a New Transaction, not another donation.

1. Add up the batch. From your GoFundMe payout summary, note the gross total of the gifts in this payout, the net amount that hit your bank, and the fee GoFundMe kept (gross minus net).
2. Go to Transactions → New Transaction.
3. Add three lines:
   • Debit — your bank account — the net amount that actually landed.
   • Debit — Payment Processing Fees — the fee GoFundMe kept.
   • Credit — Donations in Transit — the gross total (net + fee). This is the line that empties the bucket.
4. Check that debits equal credits (net + fee on the left, gross on the right — they will, by definition) and save.

A worked example: your dashboard shows 12 gifts totaling $500, GoFundMe deposits $485, so the fee was $15. Debit your bank $485, debit Payment Processing Fees $15, credit Donations in Transit $500. Donations in Transit drops back toward zero, your bank is up by exactly what the bank shows, and the $15 is recorded as a fundraising cost — not carved out of anyone's gift.

If Donations in Transit doesn't land back near zero after a deposit, something didn't line up — the Common Situations below cover the usual reasons.

• The deposit doesn't match the gifts. It shouldn't — the fees came out first. The settlement step is what accounts for the difference. If it's still off after that, Payout Does Not Match Bank Deposit walks through the usual causes.
• Donations in Transit isn't going back to zero. Something got in that hasn't been cleared against a real deposit, or a deposit was recorded straight to the bank instead of settled. Worth a look — that bucket sitting at a stale balance is the early warning that a deposit got double-counted somewhere.
• A gift lands in a closed accounting period. Because GoFundMe pays a month behind, this comes up more here than on other platforms — a report can easily reach back into a year you've already closed. What happens next depends on a setting: by default the whole batch is held back so you don't get a half-finished import, but your organization can instead be set to bring in the rest and skip just the locked gifts. Either way, read the result page — if rows were skipped, those gifts are not in your books, and they won't be until you fix the dates or reopen the period and re-upload.
• PayPal Giving Fund isn't in the Aggregator dropdown. The one-time setup for it hasn't been done for your organization yet. Reach out and we'll get it added — that's the missing piece, not anything you did.

• Importing a Donation Platform Batch — the full import walkthrough this page points you to
• Settling Payouts and Clearing Balances — matching the deposit back to the gifts behind it
• How Automatic Donation Recording Works — how the connected platforms differ from this
• How Donor Giving Works, End to End — where all of this sits in the bigger picture

Open the AI Help panel and try:

• "How do I record GoFundMe donations?"
• "Why is my GoFundMe deposit smaller than the donations?"
• "What is the Donations in Transit account for?"