Reconciling Recipient Soft Credits

Bob Wiebe

I am creating a report of total donors for a given fiscal year.  I need to group these by criteria such as constituent code and address, so I am using a query and an export.  Our organization soft credits individuals who give through foundations and businesses, as well as soft crediting spouses for each others’ gifts.  I can benchmark the total dollars given for the fiscal year by doing a query with soft credit set to donor.  I then run a recipient query and create an export (head of household and gift set to recipients) to flush the donors “hiding” in the foundation gifts.  In order to reconcile to the benchmark, I have done the following: I sorted out and added in the non head of household donors.  I pulled off foundation or business soft credits where both members of a couple get soft credited.  I have done a gift query to identify gifts where there are more than one soft credit on a gift. Thus far the reconciliation has not been achieved.  I would welcome further insights. 

 

Carolyn Moatz

Have you tried exporting all of your gifts with donors and soft credits exported? It'll be a lot of work, but it could help you figure out what is going on by looking at gifts rather than donors. You could export import IDs for all soft and hard credit donor to find duplicates.

Gina Gerhard

Carolyn's suggestion sounds like a good one to list all the gift records, and then output the hard and soft credit recipients specifically on each gift and try to sort it out from there.



How many years have we been asking Blackbaud to enhance the soft credit functionality in Raiser's Edge? (answer: from time immemorial)

• Wouldn't we all love to have the ability to 'type' our soft credits - so we can distinguish between spousal soft credits and institutional soft credits? Sometimes we want to consider one type but not the other, or identify one from the other. So to have some sort of typing in place, and then in query and export be able to pull based on these types.

For a while, Jen Mercer at Blackbaud was doing some active discovery on soft credits but not sure where that all ended up.

Bob Wiebe

Thanks, Gina and Carolyn.  I did some work on a gift query and export, and will take another try.