Most people think of the week between Christmas and New Year’s as a great week to take vacation. Families fill planes, trains and automobiles to get together across the country, snowbound New Englanders head for the Caribbean, groups of friends shop the after-Christmas sales, and in general most people aren’t thinking about work.

But if you work in the nonprofit industry, you know that someone has to be in the office during that critical week between Christmas and New Year’s, because that’s when lots of donors make last-minute donation decisions. If there’s no one in the office to handle the nonprofit’s side of the donation transaction (especially with regard to a donation of stocks, or property), the nonprofit might lose out. Then there are all the checks arriving by mail during the week as well; someone has to process those donations and get the checks to the bank.

Regardless of who is designated to handle these end-of-year donations, your entire team can benefit from a robust donor management system when it comes to efficiently processing the end-of-year rush. Capably getting the hard copy checks to the bank is pretty straightforward—but if you don’t have a donor management system in place, your team might be playing “catch up” in January in order to get annual donor letters out the door in time.

You also never know if someone is going to walk in the door and announce that they want to donate a parcel of property down the street, or call to arrange a gift of some of the stocks they inherited from grandma 6 months ago. Without a powerful software system that is tailored to the particular needs of nonprofits, these donations can be pretty difficult to handle appropriately in a short period of time.

If your accounting and fundraising teams are not completely in sync, you might find yourself mandating work days at the end of December—when you could be letting a software program do the bulk of the work. Yes, someone will need to mind the office during the last week in December, but if you have appropriate donor management software in place, when staff returns to work in January, they will be able to easily pick up their piece of the process and seamlessly generate thank you notes, financial reports and management updates with ease. So prepare now for the end-of-year giving rush, and implement an updated donor management program today.