Items to Remove

$0.00 donations - unless you are doing prospects, then you need a base starting about. If so, set the to $1.00
Negative dollar donations - as these are invalid

Items to Keep

Keep the donation, even if you do not know who it belongs to. Assign it to a generic patron (i.e. House account) as later on after the data gets into Theatre Manager, the client may be able to track down who the donation really belongs to and transfer the order. Even if they do not, at least there is a historical record of 'something' coming into the organization in the form of a donation.

Make sure that there are NO future dated donations. Reset them to at least have a current date, or remove them from the import.
A future dated donation may mean that the data has not been entered into the accounting system and thus at year end, may not match Theatre Manager's data.
Check really old donation dates to make sure for accuracy. Showing just a 2 digit year is not good enough. Many donations may come across as 1903 instead of 2003; 1904 = 2004. Rule of thumb is anything prior to 1985 should really be reviewed closely as electronic record keeping prior to that is minimum.

Prior to determining the calculation for this field, you will need to know when the Fiscal Year start month and if they show the Year at the Beginning or at the End.
Sort the Donations by Date Donated and assign the Fiscal Year
Keep in mind, this fiscal is for financial reporting, not when to show the donation in the program. The fiscal year needs to be set into the proper year the donation was received.
If the donation is to appear for a different season or program year, use the Program Year field to set this.
If the donation is NOT paid for and there is a note about it being paid in a future year, you can set each Pledge Payment into a separate future Program Year.
Again, this field is tricky to set and all we can do is our best. Once the data has been imported, the client is able to go through and set them as they see fit. If there is a mass easy change that can be done, AMS Developers can quickly update this field after the data has been imported.

The program year is a bit more harder to give an exact answer. If the data clearly defines it, then it is easy.
In most cases, it does not follow the fiscal year, as the donations leading up to the end of the fiscal year may indeed be for the next program year.

Review the data and do not alter this information (unless to clean up). This is important information to know and should not be overlooked. It is critical that this information remain intact
Review the data and if there is information in a column to say this is an Anonymous donation, make this field say 'Anonymous'
If no program name is given, it will be set upon entry based on the information in the patron's marketing record for the default publication name, then in Company Preferences for the default setting based on the patron name.
HINT: If the word 'anonym' appears anywhere in the Donation Notes field, then the Program Name is set to be 'Anonymous' by the import routine. So if you miss setting it, there is another internal check. This is an important field to set.

This is important to ask the client if all the donations about to be entered have been paid for in full.
If so, set the payment amount field to match the Donation Actual Amount column. Otherwise you will get Accounts Receivable amounts created.

If both are supplied in the spreadsheet, which one gets Theatre Manager's Campaign (DC_CAMPAIGN) setting? Go review the Chart of Accounts listing. This will tell you how they want the donation revenue divided up. Theatre Manager's campaigns are based on the option to go to different General Ledger Accounts.
Place the other Campaign or Fund into a donation pop-up field.
Now even if you get it wrong and the client wants it changed later, we can using the assistance of the AMS Developer to run a routine that will switch the data around