Align Avid with your CRM reporting using Data Quality Control (Data QC)

Use this article when

• You are completing the Validate your data onboarding step or opening Review Quality Control on your CRM connection.
• Avid’s revenue, donor, gift, recurring, or online totals differ from the fundraising report your team normally uses.
• Someone compares Avid to QuickBooks, an accounting general ledger (GL), or payment processor payouts and sees different numbers.
• You want to upload a CRM report, replace a previously uploaded report, answer counting questions, or download your approved Business Rules PDF.

Align to your fundraising CRM—not QuickBooks or finance GL

Before comparing numbers, make sure you are comparing Avid to the same fundraising report your development team runs in your primary donor CRM—not QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, audited financial statements, or Stripe/bank deposit reports.

What to pull instead: Run your organization’s standard fundraising summary report directly from the primary donor CRM connected to Avid, grouped by your Fiscal Year, using your normal fundraising filters. Data QC will then align Avid to that exact way of counting.

Before you start

Where to open Data QC

You may see Data QC referred to in three places in Avid—they all open the same workflow:

• During onboarding: Click Validate your data in your onboarding checklist.
• From Connections settings: Go to Settings → Connections → Systems, open the three-dot menu (⋮) on your primary CRM connection card, and select Review Quality Control.
• From a connection’s dataset view: Open your primary connection, click the three-dot menu (⋮), and select Review Quality Control.

If your data is still building for the first time, Avid shows Your data is still being prepared until the initial sync and mapped view finish. When ready, click Compare My Data to start.

Step 1: Enter or upload your CRM numbers

Data QC compares Avid against your expected CRM totals across four sections, in order:

1. Revenue
2. Donors and Gifts (unique donors and gift count; supports fiscal-year and monthly views)
3. Recurring (Recurring Revenue and Recurring Gifts)
4. Online (Online Revenue and Online Gifts)

To add your reference numbers:

1. Click Compare My Data (or Update Your Numbers in the header or three-dot menu if a report already exists).

2. In the Upload & Compare modal, choose one of two ways to provide your totals:

   • Upload a CRM summary report or screenshot: Drag and drop or click to upload a summary report or screenshot showing your totals broken down by year or month (not a raw list of individual gift transactions—if you upload a transaction-level export, Avid warns This file is a list of individual records, not a summary; for unique donor counts, include a yearly total because monthly unique donors do not add together). You will see Edna is reading your report while Avid extracts your totals and matches them to the right fiscal years. If extracted values differ from numbers you entered earlier, click Use These Numbers to apply them.
   • Enter data manually: Click Enter data manually to type totals by fiscal year (or switch to the monthly view) or paste a block of cells directly from Excel or Google Sheets.
3. Save your numbers. Avid immediately analyzes your CRM columns and filters (Comparing your data) to identify what explains any gap.

Need to replace an uploaded file or start fresh? Open the three-dot menu (⋮) at the top right of the Data QC page and choose Update Your Numbers to upload a replacement summary file or edit cells, or choose Reset Report to clear the current reconciliation and start over. Note that general Edna chat outside Data QC does not accept file attachments—always upload reconciliation reports through Upload & Compare on the Data QC page (or send full raw data exports via Settings → Connections → Files).

Step 2: Review findings and align counting rules with Edna

Once your numbers are saved, each section displays what Avid found—grouped into Needs Attention / Next Steps and Minor Checks. Common fundraising rules Avid checks automatically include:

• Gift and transaction types: Whether pledges are counted when committed or when pledge payments arrive, and whether in-kind gifts, reversals/refunds, write-offs, or planned-giving commitments are excluded.
• Soft credits and householding: How Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), foundation checks, spouse/household credits, and solicitor credits affect revenue and unique donor counts. See Counting Gifts in Avid and Soft Credits.
• Constituent exclusions: Whether organizations, foundations, estates, anonymous records, or deceased records are included in your standard donor count.
• Date basis: Gift Date vs. batch/post date, and fiscal year offset.
• Recurring and Online definitions: Which CRM flags, gift types, payment methods, appeal categories, or channels define a Recurring or Online gift at your organization.

Work through each section:

1. Click Answer This Question on a finding to confirm how your team counts that item, or apply a recommended rule directly when it closes the gap across fiscal years. When multiple rules match, you can click Use All Rules.

2. If a gap remains, click Need Help? on the card and select Chat with Edna.

   Edna opens the Data QC fix panel alongside your numbers, asks targeted questions about your CRM setup, tests candidate filters or flag mappings against your data, and proposes the exact rule change. Use a desktop or wide browser window—if your window is too narrow, Avid displays Make your window wider to fix this with Edna.

3. If a tiny residual difference (typically well under 1%) comes down to a handful of individual CRM edits made between syncs, you can run Sync Now from the three-dot menu (⋮) or accept the remaining minor difference when approving.

Step 3: Approve sections and download your Business Rules

1. As each card lines up with how your team reports, click Approve on that section (Revenue, Donors and Gifts, Recurring, and Online).
2. Once all four sections show Approved, click Done in the footer.
3. Review the confirmation dialog (Confirm these numbers?) and confirm.
4. Avid saves your baseline, applies the confirmed filter and mapping rules to your data set, and rebuilds your reporting views (We're applying the rules you confirmed and rebuilding your data. This usually takes a few minutes.).
5. After approval, you can open View Business Rules to download a PDF summary of every counting rule your organization confirmed—useful for sharing with leadership, new staff, or agency partners.

FAQ and common issues

Related articles:

• Counting Gifts in Avid
• Soft Credits
• Reporting Period Classifications