Setting your goals

Setting these is one of the first and most important things to do with a new Karani account. Almost every percentage in the product is computed against them.

Go to Settings → Preferences, or karani.co/account/settings, and find the Budgets section.

karani.co/account/settings

Two of these five fields matter. The rest are optional.

Fiscal year start month

The month your organisation resets its financial year. Almost always January or July; if you don’t know, leave it at January and ask.

This drives everything with the words “this year” attached — percent funded, year-to-date giving, behind-on-giving calculations, the Fiscal Year Giving report.

Changing this later reshapes your reports

It doesn’t alter any gift or pledge, but it changes which ones fall into “this year”, so every year-based total shifts. Set it correctly at the start and leave it alone.

Yearly pledge goal

How much you need to have pledged this year. For most people this is identical to their annual fundraising budget.

This is the denominator for Percent Funded on the Finances page and for the pledge progress bars on your dashboard.

Next year pledge goal

The same number for next year. Optional, but setting it makes the forward- looking half of the Finances page useful — Karani will show you how far ahead you are on next year while you’re still working on this one.

Yearly gift goal and monthly gift goal

Leave these blank unless you have a specific reason not to.

If empty, Karani calculates them from your pledges, which is what you want. Set them only if your expected income genuinely differs from your pledges — for example, if a large share of your giving reliably arrives in December and you want the monthly bars to reflect that rather than an even twelfth.

Saving

Click Save all at the bottom of the section.

Checking it worked

Open the Finances page. Percent Funded should now show a sensible number, and Left To Raise should show both a total and a monthly figure.

Percentages over 100%? Or in the hundreds?

Almost always a goal problem rather than a data problem. A new account defaults to a $10,000 pledge goal — if you’ve imported real pledges without updating it, everything reads as several hundred percent funded.

The other settings on this page

The Budgets section is the important one, but the same page also sets out-of-touch and unthanked thresholds, page sizes, and international fields. See Account preferences.