Soft Credit and Pledges: Inflating Donation Totals

Lily Shaddick

Hi all,


How do you deal with soft credit when pulling exports for total donations of a given year? My total number always come out skewed in comparison to our accounting records because of soft credit and pledges. If I want to know the names of donors and their gift totals for a given year, I must include soft credit to see donors who give through donation portals (like CanadaHelps, an associated non-profit or fund) or who are soft-credited for a spouse's gift.


My totals will be inflated because the query/export will also pull the spouse's hard gift and the organization's hard gift. But I need to be knowing the name of both spouses who gave and the names of individuals who are soft credited for gifts given through CanadaHelps and other funds (and in my RE, these other non-profits are the hard recipient of the gifts). Furthermore, some spouses give individually but receive soft credit for all their spouses' gifts. Example: Spouse A gifts $50, Spouse B gifts $75. Spouse A is soft credited for $75 and Spouse B for $50. In the export Spouse A is shown as given $125 and Spouse B has also given $125. The result: my numbers are falsely inflated.

Pledges: Even when I exclude them in a query (gift type) and exports, they are still pulled, even if their balance is $0.00 on Raiser's Edge. For example, Jane pledges $50. She then donates $50 which is applied to her pledge. The export will have both her gift of $50 AND her pledge of $50 seperately, even though the pledge balance is $0.00. This also inflates my totals.


What are your methods for working around these two issues?

Alan French

When exporting gifts, there is a tick box on the third tab of the Gift Criteria screen labelled "use gift balance instead of gift amount" which may help you avoid double-counting pledges that have payments (or write-offs) applied to them.

JoAnn Strommen

I'll comment on the pledge questions.  You say it's excluded in gift type - try formating query to be is "one of" and used the types you need: cash, pay cash. 

When you say both are in the export are you using export icon on query page to export or are you using the Export module (listed like Mail/Batch/Reports) in RE. Group your records using Query and use your query as recods to include and select all the fields you need here. 

Shanna Chandler

I am assuming that you are using the Export module and not exporting from the query.  In that case, you can do a constituent export as a household.  In the Export options for gift criteria as an output, you can select filters for gifts to include the gift types and how they are credited as well as how you want to credit soft credits and matching gifts.  If you want to see multiple totals, you can do multiple gift outputs. For example you could do one output for total cash gifts, another for total stock gifts, another total for matched gifts, another total for pledges and so on and even a total of all giving (you would want to use "gift balance" checked if you are including pledges and pledge payments or it double count).  

Houosehold or individual donor totals that include certain gift types or apply gift credit to donors that did not make the actual gift are not going to match up with your accounting records or there could be a lot of room for errors or confusion.  If you are going to compare accounting totals, you may want more of a gift export and the actual donor should be the one listed with no soft or matching gift credits applied. 

I feel like a donor listing for stewardship is different from a donor listing to match accounting/finance records.