Scheduling Aid Pickups and Stewarding the Fund
Give approved families a pickup time from the slots you offer, book a household on their behalf, and report how the fund was stewarded: category, zakat in versus out, how much zakat is still undistributed, and runway.
Approving help is half the job. The other half is a time for the family to collect it, and an honest account of where the fund went.
When you’d use this
- Twelve households were approved for a grocery box and you need to spread them across Saturday morning.
- A family has no internet and you are booking their slot for them over the phone.
- Ramadan ended and you need to show how much zakat came in against how much went out.
- You want to know how many months the emergency fund has left at the current rate.
Offer pickup slots
Nonprofit > Aid & Assistance > Scheduling runs on top of the same pickup engine the distribution events use, so you are not maintaining a second calendar.
- Choose a Pickup event from the selector at the top. Every slot and appointment on the page is scoped to that event.
- Generate the slots: the interval, the capacity per slot, and the window they cover.
- Book approved households into slots.
If the selector says No distribution events yet, create a distribution event first under Distribution; scheduling attaches to an event, it does not invent one.
Book on somebody’s behalf
Not everyone will book their own slot. The book-on-behalf panel lets you pick an approved request and place it in a slot yourself, which is how you handle the phone call and the person standing at your desk.
The stewardship report
Nonprofit > Aid & Assistance > Stewardship answers the question a board or a donor actually asks: what did you do with the money.
Set Period to This quarter, Year to date or Last 12 months. Three figures sit at the top:
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| Total disbursed | Everything paid out as assistance in the period |
| Zakat received | Zakat contributions in |
| Zakat undistributed | Zakat received but not yet given out |
Below that, two tables:
- By category: disbursed and grant-funded amounts per assistance category, so you can see whether rent is eating the fund.
- By fund: each fund’s Balance, its Monthly burn, its Runway, and the date it Depletes at the current rate. A fund with no recent outflow shows No active burn rather than a misleading runway.
Export CSV and Export PDF give you the report to attach to a board packet or send to a funder.
What it affects
- Booking a household into a slot creates an appointment on the underlying distribution event, so the desk sees them on the day and the event’s capacity counts them.
- Slots generated here are the same slots a recipient sees if they book themselves, so generating too many is a real promise of capacity.
- The stewardship report reads disbursements, so voiding a payout on Aid Disbursements changes the figures here.
- Zakat undistributed is a live number. It moves every time you disburse from a zakat fund, which is why it is worth checking before you decide this month’s awards.
- Runway is computed from actual burn, not from a plan. A month of heavy giving shortens it.
When it goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Couldn’t load events on scheduling | The event list failed to load | Press Retry. |
| No distribution events yet | There is nothing to attach slots to | Create a distribution event under Distribution first. |
| Select a pickup event | You have not chosen an event | Pick one from the selector; nothing below it is scoped until you do. |
| Slots exist but nobody can book | The event is not published, or its registration window has closed | Open the event and check its status and dates. |
| Couldn’t load the stewardship report | The report query failed | Reload the page, or narrow the period. |
| No assistance disbursed this period | The period genuinely has no payouts | Widen Period. A quarter that has just begun will be empty. |
| No fund activity this period | No fund moved in the window | Widen Period, or check that payouts were charged to a fund. |
| Couldn’t export the stewardship report. Try again. | The export failed | Try again. Narrow the period if it is very large. |
| A fund shows No active burn but you know you paid from it | The payouts were charged to a different fund | Check the Fund on the disbursements and correct the attribution. |
| Zakat undistributed looks too high | Zakat came in but was disbursed from a general fund | Charge zakat payouts to the zakat fund so the in-versus-out reconciliation is true. |
Next step
To report the outcome rather than the spend, go to Aid impact, distribution analytics and the food-pantry reports.