Misapplied Pledge Payments

Amber Ivey

Greetings everyone! I am a new employee at my company but the others are not aware of a solution to this problem either so I wanted to reach out to you and see if you possibly have a solution. Also, I have asked a representative in the chat and they are not aware of a solution. This is the problem: we have pledge payments that were either not applied to the pledge at the time of posting or it was applied to the wrong constituent at the time of posting. These payments have been done in years past and we are now wanting to correct the issue so that the balance in the system will match the in house created spreadsheet that our auditors will use. Essentially the problem is that the donor pledge balance is not reflecting correctly in Blackbaud. Any suggestions?

Alex Wong

@Amber Ivey
Hi, welcome to the community and RE.

You mentioned 2 issues:

• pledge payment that's not applied to a pledge
  • meaning the gift is “Cash” type gift not “Pay-Cash”?
  • if so, the issue is going to be with finance.
  • a “Cash” type gift is very different from “Pay-Cash” and would likely be counted as “revenue”, “contribution” or whatever naming given, the implication is going to mean there will be LESS of this.
    • Assuming your org counts cash and pledge as revenue (and payment is not revenue). when you apply cash to pledge, you have less cash and therefore less revenue in the year this was done to.
  • depending on what your finance team is ok with, you can either:
    1. 1) write off the pledge in the same amount as the cash that was meant to be payment
    2. 2) adjust the cash gift to $0 and create a new cash gift of the same amount and apply to the pledge
• pledge payment applied to wrong constituent at the time of posting
  • are you saying the pledge payment was applied to wrong pledge or wrong constituent right pledge?
  • if it's the right pledge, just the pledge payment is recorded on the wrong constituent record, RE NXT webview has the ability to move a gift record from 1 constituent to another (even though it can only do individual to individual and org to org, but there's easy way around that)
  • if it's the wrong pledge, then adjust the gift record and apply to the right pledge.

JoAnn Strommen

@Amber Ivey Welcome to the BB community forums. @Alex presented your best options. The significance in the difference between cash and pay-cash to your org really depends upon your accounting system. And, if your pledges are posted to your accounting.

I will throw out one more option. Our accounting team has approved this process for me to use at times for similar situations. Our pledges are not posted to accounting so the cash vs. receivable is not a major accounting issue.
There is a plug-in to unpost gifts. It does require caution to not unpost all your gifts so I would work with someone who has more experience to do this. One creates a gift query based on gift ID for the gifts to change. I output relevant gift info in the output just to be sure I have the correct gifts. Use that query with the unpost plug in. Do not click to run until you have it linked to query. From that query screen I click into each gift and apply to pledge/correct misinfo. Change gift status to posted. Save record.
Our process is that I do a screen shot of the query output showing the gift details and I send that to accounting FYI should they run into any questions.

Just another work around but definitely use caution or you can accidentally unpost every gift in your db. As a new user, I would use one of the methods Alex suggested unless you have some experienced co-workers who know a bit more on using RE.

Amber Ivey

@Alex Wong thank you so much for your response. We assumed we would need to do the write off but I wanted to double check to see if there were any other options first. As far as the misapplied pledge payment. It was posted to a fathers account instead of the son's account so I will try your solution through RE NXT. I really appreciate your help!

Karen Diener 2

Once you correct, the issue of cleaning up the pledges and payments, I would definitely dig in to this:

correct the issue so that the balance in the system will match the in house created spreadsheet that our auditors will use

Keeping an in-house created spreadsheet and making sure RE matches it seems unnecessary. Not to mention that if you need a separate spreadsheet, it should match RE and not the other way around.

You absolutely may have valid reasons for keeping it, but from someone who does a lot of business process review work, this is a big red flag for me.

Karen