Explain how gift designations work and why a consultant should care about getting them right.

Designations are how the system answers the question finance and auditors actually ask: what may we spend this on?

1. A Gift Designation represents funds designated for a specific purpose — a scholarship fund, a building fund, unrestricted operations.
2. Gift Transaction Designation is the junction that lets a single gift be split across several designations with an amount each, so a $1,000 gift can be 60% scholarships and 40% unrestricted.
3. Defaults cascade, which is the part people miss in configuration. A campaign's gift default designations are inherited by a gift commitment associated with that campaign, and gift transactions generated from that commitment inherit the designations from the commitment. Set the default at the right level and staff stop designating every recurring payment by hand.
4. Why it matters: designation is the boundary between a reporting error and a compliance problem. Spending restricted money as if it were unrestricted is the kind of mistake that ends up in an audit finding, and the CRM is where the evidence lives.