Changing a older pledge payment from one pledge to another

Shannon Stepanek

I hope someone can help me out.  We have a large donor database and 10's of thousands of gift entries with multiple people entering gifts.  Sometimes, a pledge payment is posted to the wrong year's annual fund because a donor may still be paying on one year's pledge and has made another pledge for current year.

The incorrect application of payment is usually discovered when a donor calls in about current pledge and doesn't know why all his payments are being reflected.  Unfortunately this to often happens after the previous year has been closed.

The current process to correct this mis-application of payment is to go into the pledge payment itself and simply re-apply it to the correct pledge (please keep in mind we are not using FE and gifts are not "posted").  By doing this the prior year suddenly has an outstanding pledge balance, even though everything was written off prior and the year "closed".  As you can see this plays havoc with our monthly and yearly reports. 

Does anyone have a method to address this scenario that they currently use and keeps peace between their finance office and development office?  Obviously, the best way is to not let it happen to begin with, but unrealistic in our shop because just to many transactions and not enough time (same old mantra).

Any suggestions you can provide will be much appreciated.

JoAnn Strommen

Shannon Stepanek:

I hope someone can help me out.  We have a large donor database and 10's of thousands of gift entries with multiple people entering gifts.  Sometimes, a pledge payment is posted to the wrong year's annual fund because a donor may still be paying on one year's pledge and has made another pledge for current year.

The incorrect application of payment is usually discovered when a donor calls in about current pledge and doesn't know why all his payments are being reflected.  Unfortunately this to often happens after the previous year has been closed.

The current process to correct this mis-application of payment is to go into the pledge payment itself and simply re-apply it to the correct pledge (please keep in mind we are not using FE and gifts are not "posted").  By doing this the prior year suddenly has an outstanding pledge balance, even though everything was written off prior and the year "closed".  As you can see this plays havoc with our monthly and yearly reports. 

Does anyone have a method to address this scenario that they currently use and keeps peace between their finance office and development office?  Obviously, the best way is to not let it happen to begin with, but unrealistic in our shop because just to many transactions and not enough time (same old mantra).

Any suggestions you can provide will be much appreciated.

If your moving $ from a 'closed' year finance will have issues.  But there's not a really a way to avoid I don't think.

I would suggest a business rule pop-up that when you go to enter a gift will indicate that the person has a pledge and when you click yes you want to apply it to an existing pledge, it will list all their current pledges/balances etc.