Pledges and recurring gifts reporting

Amanda Downes 2

In order for our numbers to more closely match with our Finance Office (not on FE) we've been asked to change our reporting to show committments (record full pledge in year made) vs. what's been received (pay-cash). I'm wondering how to handle recurring gifts, since we have employee payroll deduction and other donors with perpetual online gifts we record as such. Should we make these pledges instead so we can report on the total committed in a fiscal year? As of now I do a monthly recurring gift batch and I am not aware if there is an easy way to record these if they were pledge payment transactions instead...? I also need to be able to do a comparison wih past FYs. My VP is suggesting I go back and convert all the past recurring gifts so we are comparing apples to apples, but am wondering if there is a workaround to account for the difference these would make in the final numbers. Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated--thanks!


Amanda

 

Jennifer Lucarelli

Amanda - I have the same issue too. For all external purposes, I only report the actual total committed - which includes cash, pledge, and recurring gifts. However, internally, we want to see the REAL numbers that might be realized by end of year in regards to our recurring gifts. Since standard reporting only captures the recurring gift plus any payments received, I often combine that with a Cash Flow report to be able to include expected income not yet recorded. This gives us a better "big picture"...... but in our case, we do not share that second report with finance office.

Nicole McMorrow 2

I don't know how you would convert a recurring gift, which has no specified end date or amount, to a pledge, which requires an end amount and number of installments. At my former place of work, we used an accrual based accounting system in which we would report a full pledge amount in the year it was made, regardless of when the installments occur and post it to the GL. Recurring gifts we would not post to the GL--RE would record it as Recurring gift pay-cash but it would get posted to the GL as a cash gift.

JoAnn Strommen

Before getting to recurring gifts, when you say "record full pledge in year made" I'm confused.  Pledge is entered with date this year, it may or may not have payments extending into future years. In accounting those are accounts receivable.  In RE, that's just a difference in selecting which gift types you use for your reports (pledge, vs pay-cash) to report as they request.


I agree with previous two posts. Recurring gifts show as pay-cash.


Changing the recurring gifts to pledges would be tons of manual work for past records. You would need to make a pledge on each records and adjust to $0 the recurring and not even sure where to start in applying past payments. I  If you need a way to compare apples to apples add a gift code or gift attribute to past recurring gifts that you can report on. In the strictest since a recurring gift made in January is only a commit for as long as donor says. It's not committed money for the rest of the year. IMO. If you change to pledges and end up writing them off is that a factor for your org. For some the percent/$ written off is a number they want to keep very low.

Jen Claudy

I would think long and hard about converting Recurring Gifts to Pledges...for all the reasons others have already mentioned.


If you want a way to forecast what you think you will receive in Recurring Gift Payments for the year, then I would suggest an Attribute where you can (assuming the donor doesn't alter the gift in any way) enter either the total dollar amount or the number of payments expected which can then be calculated with the Recurring Gift Record's Gift Amount.  I did this with payroll giving (from our employees) at my last org.  Although, instead of a Gift Attribute, I used the Payment Type "Other" and put the number of payrolls in the Reference Number field in the Pay Method section.  Once exported, I could calculate the total expected.

Amanda Downes 2

Thank you all for the feedback. I should have used correct terminology --accrual based method is what I'm referring to. We do enter pledges as you describe, JoAnn.  A lot of good points have been made about the cons of converting recurring gifts to pledges and possible write-offs. So I'm guessing in my monthly reporting I could just pull pledges (instead of pay-cash) along with recurring gift pay-cash to account for what has come in for that thus far. I guess I was thinking the two go hand in hand but now I see the differences about the recurring gifts not necessarily being committed for an entire year.


JoAnn Strommen:

Before getting to recurring gifts, when you say "record full pledge in year made" I'm confused.  Pledge is entered with date this year, it may or may not have payments extending into future years. In accounting those are accounts receivable.  In RE, that's just a difference in selecting which gift types you use for your reports (pledge, vs pay-cash) to report as they request.


I agree with previous two posts. Recurring gifts show as pay-cash.


Changing the recurring gifts to pledges would be tons of manual work for past records. You would need to make a pledge on each records and adjust to $0 the recurring and not even sure where to start in applying past payments. I  If you need a way to compare apples to apples add a gift code or gift attribute to past recurring gifts that you can report on. In the strictest since a recurring gift made in January is only a commit for as long as donor says. It's not committed money for the rest of the year. IMO. If you change to pledges and end up writing them off is that a factor for your org. For some the percent/$ written off is a number they want to keep very low.

 

Heather MacKenzie

I am only a little familiar with it, but have used the cash flow report, under the pledge and recurring gift reports area, for forecasting recurring gifts before.  Maybe play around with that a little to see what it could do for you as well?