Rules for who can make payments on a pledge.

Bonnie West

We have a number of donors whose companies make pledges (so the pledge is set up on the company record) but they want to make the pledges with personal checks. Raiser's Edge allows a payment from any record to be applied to a pledge, but it makes reporting impossible except when you are using a canned RE report. I don't like the canned reports for some things because they only export as a PDF and can't be formatted…. We are considering a business rule to limit payments to the record where the pledge is set up. Anyone have experience or business rules around this? Thank you!

Dariel Dixon 2

What reporting issues are you having? I don't see how this is a sustainable solution, as you do need to have gifts on the record that is getting hard credit, and there are times where you'll have this situation come up.

JoAnn Strommen

Welcome to the BB Community, @Bonnie West.

I was wondering the same thing as @Dariel Dixon. What is impossible? I'm also wondering if the company does not plan to pay the pledge, “Why is the pledge on their record?”. If the pledge is unpaid, are you billing the company?

I'm also a bit unclear as to what your goal is with a business rule. What do you hope to limit/restrict? The rules can be beneficial but may not be doing what you are envisioning.

Bonnie West

I use Power BI as a reporting interface for Raiser's Edge. It works great for everything – except pledges and pledge payments when a pledge payment is hard credited to a record other than the record the pledge is set up on. Mostly this happens, as I said in my post, when a business owner wants the business to be a sponsor for an annual event, but makes the pledge payments with a personal check. We bill the company for the pledge payments. RE does a lot that is remarkable, I do not like the RE reports because 1) it's difficult to export them in a format that is useful and 2) I don't entirely trust them.

Bonnie West

The problem is that the company owner makes the pledge payments with a personal check. We wind up hard crediting the owner and applying the payment to the pledge on the company record. RE does a good job allowing for that, but if you are using another reporting interface (I use Power BI) it's a problem. I want to set up a policy for keeping pledges/payments on the same record to improve our ability to automate reporting, and to make things easier come audit time.

Karen Stuhlfeier

I think that reports in RE work well if you understand them - you can trust them. They're only pulling information you put into the database. If another entity makes a pledge payment and everyone is soft credited properly there aren't any issues.

Austen Brown

In this particular instance, why not move the pledge to the individual's record and put in the notes that it is to sponsor x event with the recognition name used “x company”. The only downside to this would be it may be in contradiction to what is written on the pledge agreement, and there is a possibility that in the future you would not know that a ‘business pledge’ is actually an ‘individual pledge’ (or vise versa) until payments start being received.

Faith Murray

We do what @Austen Brown does. If we know the payment will be coming from the business owner (or the owner's sister, as has happened), we apply the pledge to the personal record (with appropriate notes in the individual's gift reference), not the business'. This does at times require other tracking mechanisms, like Event registrations, gift codes, or solicit codes, to make sure the business continues to show up when pulling sponsor lists.

Dariel Dixon 2

Faith Murray:

We do what @Austen Brown does. If we know the payment will be coming from the business owner (or the owner's sister, as has happened), we apply the pledge to the personal record (with appropriate notes in the individual's gift reference), not the business'. This does at times require other tracking mechanisms, like Event registrations, gift codes, or solicit codes, to make sure the business continues to show up when pulling sponsor lists.

I think this relies heavily on you having that information beforehand. If there is no conversation about it, or the donor seems to change whimsically, then I don't know if there is much that can be done. I think soft credits can help explain the story, but it is difficult to determine if this will be an issue when the pledge is first entered.