Changing past one-time gifts to recurring gift payments

Patrick KelleherCalnan

I have a number of donors who send in monthly or semi-monthly gifts via check. Most of these have been entered in RE as one-time cash gifts. This practice doesn't cause much in the way of problems, but I would prefer to have these checks coded as payments towards recurring gifts. My question is: is there any way to apply these existing gift records to recurring gifts in bulk, perhaps using Global Change or an Import? So far, the only way I've found to do it would be to go through the records one by one and apply them to the new recurring gifts I've created. This would not be worth the effort.

Thanks for your insight!

Christine Robertson 4

@Patrick KelleherCalnan You can add the Recurring Gifts via an Import, but I'm not sure that you can apply the existing payments to those Recurring Gifts through that import or not.

Alex Wong

@Patrick KelleherCalnan
if there are a lot of existing cash that you want to change to recurring gift pay-cash, unfortunately you cannot do global change or import to achieve, as it is not just simply changing a gift type, it is the underlying “link” to a recurring gift that needs to be established.

If you want to track and report recurring giving for reporting purpose, I suggest you use a Recurring attribute on the gift.

For my org, we used to use Recurring Gift and Recurring Gift Pay-cash, but it is too manual and too error prone. So when we decided to use another donation platform (luminate online), we decided not to bring in the recurring gift as recurring gift/recurring gift pay-cash, instead, they come in as normal Cash, and receive a gift attribute for being a recurring gift. This way we can easily run report to know who is our recurring donor and how much is recurring each month.