When to enter a matching gift

I enter the MG Pledge when I receive paperwork from the donor or paperwork from the company asking that I confirm the gift.  For reporting, we count MG Payments rather than Pledges, as there's always a chance that the donor sends in paperwork but for some reason the company doesn't fulfill the MG (some companies have a cap on the amount matched per year or per employee).  Plus, our Finance team is not particularly wanting to record MG Pledges on the books, and this keeps us in sync with them.  Because of this, we do not use the MG features in RE so that RE never "helps" by automatically adding a MG Pledge to a record when the donor's gift is entered.  (However, this means that when you do add a MG, and you search for the MG company, you have to uncheck the box that restricts that search to only Orgs with the MG box checked...and that checkbox is not sticky, so you must uncheck it every time.)

We do not use the MG Pledge function in RE. Recently we have found many of our donor's companies are moving to internal campaigns that deduct from the employee's paycheck, and then a third party company processes it and includes the matching gift altogether in one check/ACH that they send to us. Waiting until the matching gift arrives even if it is not in this form is easy enough for us to track internally on a spreadsheet. I don't want a system where some are pledges and some are not - when both the emmployee/our donor's gift arrives with the company's match, we just split it between them when entering the gift in batch. In this case we manually split and don't use the split gift function.

 

We wait until we receive the actual matching gift payment.  We've been burned enough times with matches not arriving for various reasons (including the donor having left the company before the payment was made and the company then not paying us) which left upaid pledges on the books that eventually had to be written off.  Also, sometimes the matching gift arrives 12 or more months after the gift it matches and our finance department prefers to minimize the number of open pledges being carried for that long (on which no payments are being made).