A donor drops a check in the mail on December 30. Your office is closed until January 4. The envelope sits in the box over the holiday, someone opens it the following week, and the gift gets entered with a January date. In February, the donor gets a receipt that puts their gift in the wrong tax year.
Nobody was careless. The gift was dated by when your office handled it instead of when the donor made it.
That gap between the gift date and the processing date is where most year-end gift processing mistakes happen. In a small shop, the person writing the appeal is often the one opening the mail, and December leaves no time to think about it. So here’s the case for spending an hour this month writing down your dating rules, and what those rules should say.
Why the date matters more this year
The last days of December carry a lot of weight. The 2026 M+R Benchmarks Study found that nonprofits received 37% of their 2025 online revenue in December, 10% in the last week of the year, and 4% on December 31 alone. If your organization raises $90,000 online in a year and follows that pattern, about $3,600 arrives on a single day. Some of those donors are giving precisely because the calendar year is ending.
Starting with 2026 gifts, more of your donors have a reason to care. Under the new federal law, people who take the standard deduction can deduct up to $1,000 in cash gifts ($2,000 for joint filers), according to Fidelity’s summary of the changes. That applies to gifts to charities like yours, not to donor-advised funds. If you haven’t already, here’s what to tell your year-end donors about the new charitable deduction.
For years, a wrong date on a small donor’s receipt was an annoyance. Now it can matter to far more of the people on your file.
The donor’s method decides the date, not your mailroom
IRS Publication 526 explains when a donor makes a contribution. The general rule is that a gift is made at the time of its unconditional delivery. Then it spells out what “delivery” means for each way people give:
- Mailed checks. A check mailed to a charity is considered delivered on the date it’s mailed. The postmark is your evidence, not the day you open the envelope.
- Credit cards. Gifts charged to a credit card are deductible in the year the charge is made, even if the donor pays the bill in January.
- Text-to-give. Gifts charged to a phone or wireless account count in the year the donor sends the text.
- Stock. A properly endorsed certificate counts on the date it’s mailed or delivered to the charity or the charity’s agent. If the donor hands it to their own broker or the issuing company to transfer, the gift isn’t made until the stock is transferred on the company’s books.
- Pledges and promissory notes. A promise to give isn’t a contribution. The gift happens when the payment is made.
Read that list from the donor’s side and one thing stands out. A donor who mails a check on December 31 has done everything right. Whether their receipt says so depends entirely on you.
Where small shops get the date wrong
Most dating errors come from a few predictable spots.
The envelope goes in the recycling. The postmark is usually the best record of when a mailed gift was made. If envelopes get tossed when checks are opened, the January checks lose their December date. I’d keep every envelope that arrives in the first two or three weeks of January, clipped to its check or scanned with it, until the gift is entered.
The batch date becomes the gift date. Many databases default the gift date to the deposit or batch date. That’s fine in June. In the first week of January, it quietly moves December gifts into the new year. Whoever enters gifts needs a clear instruction to override the default with the postmark date.
Online gifts land in the wrong time zone. Some payment systems record transactions in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Midnight UTC on January 1 is 7:00 p.m. on December 31 in New York and 4:00 p.m. in Los Angeles. If your form, processor, or import tool uses UTC and nobody checks, a donor who gives at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on New Year’s Eve could see a January date on their receipt. Run a test gift this month and compare the timestamp in your processor, your database, and the receipt email.
Stock transfers start too late. A stock gift isn’t complete when the donor calls their broker. For a typical electronic transfer, plan as if it’s complete only when the shares reach your account. Transfers can take days, and brokers get busy in late December. Publish your brokerage transfer instructions early and suggest that donors start transfers by mid-December. Also remember that your acknowledgment should describe the stock (for example, “100 shares of XYZ common stock”), not put a dollar value on it. IRS Publication 1771 says the receipt should include a description, but not the fair market value, of donated property.
The receipt says “received.” The sample language in Publication 1771 thanks a donor for a contribution the organization “received on” a given date. For a check mailed December 30 and opened January 5, “received on January 5” invites a worried phone call. Consider listing the gift date (or the postmark date) on receipts for gifts that cross the year line, and run the exact wording past your accountant.
Pledges, DAF grants, and the gray areas
A few situations look like year-end gifts but aren’t, or don’t fit the rules neatly.
A pledge made in December and paid in January is a January gift for tax purposes. You can thank the donor for the commitment in December, but the receipt follows the payment.
Gifts from donor-advised funds are their own case. The donor took the deduction when they put money into the fund, so the date a grant arrives at your office doesn’t change their taxes. That also means your year-end tax language doesn’t apply to them, which is one more reason to find out whether your donors can actually give from their donor-advised funds.
Then there are gray areas: checks sent through a private delivery service, a check dated December 31 that arrives with no readable postmark, a check slipped through your office door slot sometime over the holiday weekend. Decide in advance who makes the call on these (usually your finance lead or accountant), and write the answer down so the same situation gets the same treatment next year.
Write a one-page gift dating policy this month
You need one page that answers the questions your gift processor will face in the first week of January. Imagine a food bank with a part-time database manager and a volunteer who opens the mail. Their one page might say:
- Mailed checks: The gift date is the postmark date. Keep envelopes for all checks received January 1 through January 20 and attach them to the batch.
- Online and card gifts: The gift date is the transaction date in Eastern time. The database manager tests a gift in early December and checks that the processor, database, and receipt match.
- Stock: The gift date is the date shares arrive in our brokerage account. Transfer instructions go on the website and in the November mailing, with a suggested start date of December 15.
- Pledges and DAF grants: Dated on the date payment is received.
- Exceptions: Anything unclear goes to the finance director, who decides and logs the decision.
- Donor wording: Year-end emails say “Online gifts must be made by 11:59 p.m. on December 31, and mailed gifts must be postmarked by December 31.”
That last item matters. If your emails and reply devices state the deadline plainly, donors give with confidence, and your staff has a rule to point to. Your gift receipt may be the most-read letter you send, so the date on it deserves the same care as the thank-you language.
A note of caution: I’m describing how the IRS publications explain gift timing, not giving tax advice. Have your accountant review your policy and receipt language, especially if your organization has unusual gift types or state-specific rules.
Start with one test gift
Don’t overhaul your gift processing this week. Start smaller. Make a $5 online gift to your own organization today and follow it all the way through: the processor, the database, the receipt. Check the date at every step. Then ask whoever opens your mail what happens to the envelopes.
If either answer worries you, you’ve found your first two fixes.
If you’d like help planning the rest of the campaign those gifts come from, our year-end fundraising course walks through planning and running a year-end fundraising campaign.
