Pledge with uncertain amount

Joellen Barak

For our employee giving campaign, people can donate some of their PTO hours in lieu of cash or payroll deduction.  What would be a good way to record these pledges? I won't know the dollar amount until I get the checks from our accounting department at the end of the year. I'd like to send acknowledgements to the people who donate PTO, as well as include their gifts in my employee campaign reporting.

Christine Cooke 2

Joellen Barak:

For our employee giving campaign, people can donate some of their PTO hours in lieu of cash or payroll deduction.  What would be a good way to record these pledges? I won't know the dollar amount until I get the checks from our accounting department at the end of the year. I'd like to send acknowledgements to the people who donate PTO, as well as include their gifts in my employee campaign reporting.

With things like that, and folks that tell you they are going to give within the next few months or at the end of the calendar year, I always enter it as a pledge with a dollar amount of $0.01 and that way I know exactly what's up when they show up on a report -- and it does not signficantly impact reporting in a way that could potentially be not fun.

Debra Perkins

Joellen Barak:

For our employee giving campaign, people can donate some of their PTO hours in lieu of cash or payroll deduction.  What would be a good way to record these pledges? I won't know the dollar amount until I get the checks from our accounting department at the end of the year. I'd like to send acknowledgements to the people who donate PTO, as well as include their gifts in my employee campaign reporting.

Joellen, our organization does this as well.  We set a certain amount as the per hour rate for everyone, then use that amount to enter a total as the pledge amount (i.e. 10 hours at $15 per hour would be a $150 pledge).  Obviously there are some employees who make significantly more than that, and some who make less, so once the final amount comes to us via Payroll, we enter the amount received and then either do a cash gift for the remaining amount over the pledge, or a write off if the amount was less than the pledge.  We asked our Payroll department to assist with setting the per hour rate, and I believe that we under-estimated the pledge for the majority of our PTO gifts last year, so we may up the rate with this year's campaign.  Last year was the first year the we offered this option to employees so we really didn't know what to expect!

Mercedes McCayRead

Joellen Barak:

For our employee giving campaign, people can donate some of their PTO hours in lieu of cash or payroll deduction.  What would be a good way to record these pledges? I won't know the dollar amount until I get the checks from our accounting department at the end of the year. I'd like to send acknowledgements to the people who donate PTO, as well as include their gifts in my employee campaign reporting.

So, our organization does this too during our employee campaign and this year we implemented a new system for these which seemed to work really well for us.  Instead of waiting for accounting to give me the PTO values at the end of the year, we decided to do weekly imports.  I set up the import template which included the number of PTO hours donated and weekly our payroll department would go through the list and add in the actual PTO values for those employees and I would then be able to do an import into RE so that the pledges were actual dollars instead of waiting until the end of the year.  This meant that all of our fundraising reports were up to date and there will be less work for accounting at the end of the year (since our first payroll deduct for this campaign comes out in January.)  The only slight downside (which I don't really consider a problem) is if someone who pledged PTO gets a raise between now and then end of the year or they are no longer working here when that first payroll deduction comes along.  But both of those are easy to deal with, in my opinion.  My accounting department loved the way this worked and I just had a bit more extra work to do in setting up the import templates at the beginning, but for the most part it was a very smooth process and we will do it again next year.