Recurring Gift Partial Payment

Beth Halleck

We are trying to use Recurring Gifts to send pledge reminders to donors who give annually for an annual scholarship.  They pay $1,000 and we distribute $1,000 annually, for example.  They agreed to pay indefinitely.


We have a couple donors who make irregular payments throughout the year toward their annual amount (through external payroll deductions, fundraisers, and checks).


It appears that when I applied an amount less than the recurring gift amount, RE considered the payment complete rather than having a remaining balance.  So if I look at the installment schedule, my only option for the next partial payment is to apply it to the next year's installment.


We were hoping to not have to create annual pledges for these scholarships, or artificial large pledges to span 20 years with annual installments which would need long term maintenance.


Has anybody figured out a great process for this scenario?


Thanks,

Beth

Elizabeth Johnson

I'm trying to see the downside of using pledges. Do you count the money that was committed during the year for the bulk of your reporting or do you count the money that was received? Obviously you will do a little of both but working for an organization that really counts what was received there isn't a downside to have that large pledge out there with the annual installments. I find the cash flow report in the pledge and recurring gift report section really helpful and then the pledge reminders work.


I don't think this is the answer you are looking for and I totally get where you are going with it but I'm not coming up with a workaround for you.


Good luck Beth Halleck‍ 

Rachel Cavalier

I agree with Elizabeth about the pledges - if you're going to add the same pledges every year, maybe you can have a recurring batch that gets committed at the start of your financial year to add them all on each time or just an import.


Not sure if that would be worth it just for two people though!

Beth Halleck

Thank you for the ideas.  We have over 60 annual scholarships that need to be "invoiced" each year and any one of them may make a partial payment at any time.  If we create an artificially large pledge to cover say 100 years, that would affect our metrics because we have moved to using committed figures in addition to received figures.


I believe I've figured out a work-around that is sustainable for the partial payments.  When I enter the partial payment, and RE considers that installment complete, I will create a PLEDGE for the balance with the same due date as the installment due date.  So for the rest of that year we can apply partial payments to the pledge, AND if the pledge is not paid by the due date, we can send a balance due reminder.  Then I am only creating a pledge for those situations that need partial payments.


I've also discovered that RE will not let me apply a payment from a donor's business (third party) to the recurring gift.  For this, my work-around will be to "skip" the transaction so that it will no longer show as "due", and simply enter the payment with soft credits to the individual.


Our goal is to make our annual scholarship reminder process as automated as possible, but we also need a way to be consistent with how we handle the exceptions.


Thanks again for helping me think through this process.

 

Dariel Dixon 2

How is that it being determined that the pledge is complete?  What report are you running?  I can only assume that whatever report is being used is assuming that any payment = completed payment.  I don't know if there is a way to create a report that has a different logic of pledge balance of $0 = completed payment.