Benefits Applied to Pledge or Payment?

Gracie Schild

Hi - we take pledges for biweekly or monthly payments for table sponsorship at our gala.  My question (an answer to which seems to be nowhere in the Knowledgebase or the How-to Documentation) is: how do I apply the benefits of a seat at the dinner?  We enter that in batch when entering cash gifts, but I'm not clear how to do that with pledges.  We don't send acknowledgement letters for every payment - only for the pledge and when the last payment is made or at the end of the calendar year.  Up till now, I've had to remember to go in and manually change the gifts to include the benefits and the altered receipt amount for the eventual final payment or end of year acknowledgement. What will happen if I apply the Benefit to the Pledge? Will it automatically set the receipt amounts to  $0 until the value of the benefits is paid off (unlikely - but the most sensible system!)? If I don't set the Benefit count on the pledge, how will I count the number of seats taken if I have to do it at a rate of 1 or 2 per payment - and remember to do that manually every time I enter a pledge payment in batch? Seems like this scenario wasn't imagined when RE was created!


Anyone have a solution? Thanks!

Sunshine Reinken Watson

I haven't done that in many years, but when I did it was all manual for the benefits and receipt amount when the payments were made. I had to pay close attention and do manually adjustments so the receipt amounts were accurate.

Beth Romano

From my experience you put the benefit amount on the pledge and when the payment comes in you have the benefit apply to the payment, this can be done thru batch.  There is one catch, if the person is paying in with installments, you will need to manually adjust the distribution on the cash gift.  The benefit does not automatically adjust for installments.  At year end, I run a query of all pledges that have benefits on them and make sure that cash payments reflects the correct benefit and receipt value.