Annual Employee Giving - Payroll Deductions

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Margaret Whitaker
Margaret Whitaker ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
 “employee giving” - I would like to know how shops that use Raisers Edge set up your in-house annual employee payroll deductions?  Recurring Gifts or Pledges?  I work at a healthcare system which conducts an annual employee campaign for team members.  I started to use Recurring gift last year and I’m getting pushback because development team members cannot easily identify a total anywhere on the gift record as you would if a pledge is set up.  However, Finance does not want them recorded as pledges as they do not book those payroll deductions.  I'm looking for pros and cons to both approaches.  Thanks!

 
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  • Jen Claudy
    Jen Claudy ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I use Recurring Gifts.  The Gift Amount is the amount per pay period.  The Receipt Amount is the total expected for the calendar year (or whatever timeframe you're using).  And the Receipt Number is the number of pay periods.  Then I have a recurring Batch to use for entering payroll data every two weeks.  It works well, and the Receipt fields do not pull forward on the Recurring Gift Pay-Cash records, so I can also use those fields and the Gift Type to determine how much total we're expecting, how much is already in, and how much is yet to come.  If someone leaves the org before completing the intended amount, I add a Gift Note and adjust the Receipt fields accordingly.  If you aren't using it for anything else, I'd also suggest putting the final pay period date in the Receipt Date field...helpful when adjusting the Batch for those who give for less than the 26 pay periods in the year.


    You could also keep this data on Gift Attributes.  We don't use the Receipt Fields for their intended purpose, so I repurposed them for this, as it makes more sense for me/us.
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Margaret, you'll find both are used. 


    We use pledges.  Our reasoning is that we want to be able to pull a total expected from staff (we actually have contest related to total and prizes for solicitors) without having to deal with multiplying out number of installments.  That's a lot of manual work I don't need.  While most staff are 26 installments, school year staff is different number, other staff do a variety of installments  and we also have staff who make cash payments.  I'm  not big on re-purposing RE fields from their intended purpose as Jen does.  Like to keep it simple.  We use a gift code of "Staff" for all staff gifts so can report on them regardless of payment plan.   For payroll gifts I enter a gift-subtype of "Payroll deduction" on the pledge which then carries over to all the payments.  This was at request of business office so that they could easily group/report on them.  For batch entry, I used to use a recurring batch to edit each payperiod- changed that several years ago.  Now have a query of all staff with payroll deductions and use the Tools >Automatically generate transaction option.  Pulls in all those with expected deduction.  For those leaving employment with a pledge balance you can either do a pledge adjustment or write off, depending on your procedures.


    If finance does not want to book them as pledges you could mark pledges as 'do not post' if you are integrated with your accounting software.  If integrated, the issue will be if you enter payments in RE as 'pay-cash' when it goes over to accounting they will be looking for an account receiveable. If not integrated, it might work.


    I have to wonder how finance reports reflect the payroll deduction funds if they aren't 'booking' them.  For us that's over $10K - and we're small. I would think your auditors would even want them entered.


    For us definition of recurring gift is open-ended, no set amount.  We do have some payroll gifts that are recurring but not for annual giving fund. 


    This has worked well for us for years.  You'll have to decide what will work best for you. 
  • Gracie Schild
    Gracie Schild ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Hi - we have both kinds, recurring gifts and pledges.  It is entirely a question of what the employee is doing.  Those who give a set amount every pay period until they leave or tell us to stop are (by definition) recurring givers, and those who have a total assigned to the gift (usually for a specific project, like a capital campaign) have made a pledge.  The recurring gift and the pledge are marked as "Do Not Post", but it's not really necessary.  We're integrated with FE, but we have the Foundation and the college gifts in the same RE database, divided by Fund numbers, thus Finance has nothing to do with those pledges/recurring gifts. They have to wait for the transfer of funds from the Foundation, and that's strictly a cash transaction.  I was interested to read that someone with $10,000 in employee giving annualy considers themselves small - we have about 10 people on payroll deduction! Partly because there are so few, we don't worry about the projected revenue.  It's counted in with all other gifts and we can estimate and goal set for the next year based on that.  I liked Jen's workaround, though. We do use the Receipt field for it's intended purpose (or rather for our purpose - no idea what the "Framers" intended to do with it!), but I'm big on gift and constituent attributes, so I'd probably put it there. We also use a recurring batch to enter them - change the date and in it goes, the fastest batches of the month!

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