recurring gifts in RE that need to be applied to an open pledge

Michele Jenner

We ahve several donors that have moved to recurring monthly gifts in RE.  WE have in the past used cashnet and we would manually enter them as gifts and apply to thier pledge.  However now that we have done away with cashnet and use BBMS and the monthy recurring gift is ran in RE we cannont apply to the open pledge on someone record.  How does anyone else handle this?  its getting confusing and the donors are not happy when they call one of our fundraisers and to see what their balance is and its incorrect

Heather MacKenzie

How are you entering your gifts and running them?  If you have the EFT module, and are running them in batch, you should be able to use the icon up in the toolbar (to me, it looks like 2 pieces of paper with a green arrow on them, and if you hover over it with your mouse, it should pop up with "Apply To") to apply the gifts to the pledge just like any other gift. 



If the donor has been set up with a recurring gift rather than a pledge type gift, you may need to do some restructuring in your base data, though.

Jen Claudy

I might be missing something, but if you run your recurring charges through the EFT Module in RE:7, you can set up your batch to apply payments to a pledge.  We do this and it works well.  When the batch is committed, the gift is applied to the pledge and the type entered as Pay-Cash.  Be sure that the pledges are entered as pledges, and then the payment should go in as Pay-Cash and not Recurring Gift Pay-Cash.



 

Michele Jenner

Thanks for the info. 

Elaine Tucker

There is a difference between Recurring Pay-cash and Pay- Cash.  You can not apply a recurring pay-cash to a Pledge.



If you are only using the Recurring Gift to know when to apply your pledge payments, be sure that you are updating the payment schedule on the Recurring gift.



Open Recurring Gift

Select the Transactions tab

You should see the "next transaction due" date at the bottom of your window.

IF you want to skip that transaction, select the "skip transaction" box



You will then get a message:

"This process will prevent the transaction scheduled for MM/DD/YYYY from being generated. The next transaction will be generated on MM/DD/YYYY. Do you want to proceed?"



Select "yes" - the next transaction date at the bottom of the window should update.



Keeping your next transaction due date accurate will load the correct transactions in your EFT batch when you select

Tools

Automatically generate transactions/payments





 

Michele Jenner

The donors are paying on theeir pledge by their recurring gift.  It will not let me apply to pledge since its a recurring gift.   What do others do when this happens?  I have been going in and writing off a payment each month so that their balance is correct.  i dont like doing this but these donors call others in our office to get a pledge balance and i want it to be correct

JoAnn Strommen

Michele, what do you mean by 'donors are paying their pledge by recurring gift'?  Who is defining it as a recurring gift?  Is there a recurring gift and a pledge on their gift record?  Are they making these payments online? 



I think there may be some confusion on the terminology "recurring gift".  Just because a donor is paying monthly, does not mean their gift needs to or should be entered in RE as a recurring gift.  If they have a pledge of $1200 and are paying $100/month, we enter this as a pledge with monthly payments.  When I enter the gifts in batch I just choose cash and if you're using business rules it should automatically tell you they have  a pledge (or if they do have  a recurring gift set up) that the gift can be applied to. Do not choose 'recurring gift' as the gift type.  Use cash.



Does that make sense?

Michele Jenner

These are recurring credit card gifts that have been setup on our Netcommunity/BBMS donation page.  We have to have these coded ast recurring gifts so that we can pull monthly credit cards and run them in raisers edge.  There is no way to apply to a pledge that the donor wants the monthly credit card gift to be applied to.  I have talked with Blackbaud this morning and they were no help

John Heizer

Michele Jenner:

These are recurring credit card gifts that have been setup on our Netcommunity/BBMS donation page.  We have to have these coded ast recurring gifts so that we can pull monthly credit cards and run them in raisers edge.  There is no way to apply to a pledge that the donor wants the monthly credit card gift to be applied to.  I have talked with Blackbaud this morning and they were no help

I'm a little fuzzy on why you have a Pledge from these donors.  It sounds like they've made a Recurring Gift via NC/BBMS.  Such Recurring Gifts are intended to be open ended without any fixed amount and should not be associated with a Pledge that would the be "completed" after a fixed number of months.  Have they also made an independent Pledge that they later expect the NC/BBMS monthly charge to be applied to?  If so, that monthly charge needs to be, yes, processed monthly via a Batch or EFT or other mechanism, but it shouldn't be considered a Recurring Gift (at least not as far as RE is concerned). 



To be able to correctly report future expected cash flow RE needs to be able to calculate expected Pledge payments (the Installment schedule) PLUS expected Recurring Gifts, but shouldn't count both which is what would happen if Recurring Gifts were then applied to a Pledge.  RE would be expecting both the Installment payment PLUS the Recurring Gift every month, double counting the expected income.



I hope this helps explain why RE is designed to not let you apply a Recurring Gift to a Pledge.

Michele Jenner

They have pledges that they want to pay monthlyu by credti card.  We have been using Cashnet for credit card processing but since we have moved to RE we swtiched to BBMS and NET Community the only way for them to continue their monthly credti card gift was to have them create a recurring credit card gift on our donation page. These donors already have open pledges that we were applying the monthly gift that was processed through Cashnet because we entered those in to a batch.  WE have donors who make a 5 year commitment but wants to pay it monthly by credit card

JoAnn Strommen

It helped to know what software you're using so know why there's an issue.  Maybe someone with NetCommunity experience has some thoughts. 

Otherwise, my only other thought would be for you to just handle their monthly cc payments in RE.  Why have them have to go to website every month?  We process multiple cc/eft monthly pledges for 1-5 year pledges.  To us, it's much easier to handle completely in-house.  Just my thoughts.

Michele Jenner

They dont go to the website every month, they went once and set up a recurring gift on our donation page with is through BBMS.  Then each month we run recurring batch through EFT module and run them through BBMS .

John Heizer

We don't use NetCommunity, EFT or BBMS, but it sounds like you need to find a way to convert the gift type of those monthly charges from a Recurring Gift to a standard "Cash" gift that can then be applied to the pledge before you post the Batch.  I'm not certain what that will take, but the current method is never going to work for the reasons given earlier.



Yes, the gift needs to be charged every month, but it isn't a "Recurring Gift" using RE definitions of a Recurring Gift.  The payments can be done via a Recurring Batch (and the credit card information gets stored securely in that Batch that then gets processed every month).



Here are some links that may help:



https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/43551



https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/43681  (Although that one has some imprecise language in it.  It says " Gift records of all gift types, except pledge, can be applied toward a pledge to reduce the balance." That isn't completely true, as your situation points out a Gift Type of Recurring Payment can't be applied to the pledge to reduce the balance.)



http://www.blackbaudknowhow.com/the-raisers-edge/recurring-gifts-in-raisers-edge.htm



 

Heather MacKenzie

Pledge payments can happen as EFT too!  Have you looked at either altering the EFT information in your existing pledges or setting up new "pledges" for just the remaining balances with the credit card information built into them?  I can help you with this privately if you wish, especially if we can do a screen sharing somehow.



This may mean you contact the donors for their credit card information.  Another way to make this happen is to allow pledges on NetCommunity in your form, and have them set up new "pledges," - just for the remaining balances - with the cc info in them.  Work for your donors, which you may want to avoid, depending on the person, and since you've already had them do the other setup. 



There may be no perfect answer here, but we can get you some options.

Michele Jenner

heather i would love to discuss with you.  i am out of the office today but my email is mjenner@cbu.edu and we can talk about this.  thank you for helping