RE Canned Reports - Pledge Activity Report - Glitch with split Pledges by Fund

Rolston Cyril Watts 2 · January 2018

Hello all,

I'm wondering if anyone has a work around the glitch on the Pledge Activity Report where the payments are not applied correctly in the canned report by applicable fund, yet the pledge Balance for each fund is correct. Please see Blackbaud's response to the glitch and their suggestion to reach out to the community.

Rolston Cyril Watts

NJPAC

rcwatts@njpac.org

Good Afternoon, Rolston!

I am contacting you to assist with case number 13981009, regarding Pledge Activity Report showing the wrong information for pledge payments when split.

Thank you for reaching out to support. Unfortunately this is a known bug with that report and split gifts. I apologize for the inconvenience this causes and I can link this case to that bug and let you know when/if the report ever get's updated to read splits correctly. Here is some more information about that: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/38445 It seems to have the same problem with the Pledge Status report in which all the splits need to be the same (there is a paragraph on https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/40171 (2nd paragraph) that discusses it more).

One recommendation, since this is a known issue, is to pose the question the to community board to see how other organizations handle multiple splits on pledges and if they have tricks to help track them. I know organizations have a variety of ways of reporting on items. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience and as I said I'll link it to the bug and will follow up if/when they tell me it's been resolved.

JoAnn Strommen · January 2018

One of the reasons we don't use split gifts. This has been an issue for as long as we've used RE (10 years). Doubt it will ever be addressed. Sorry, but I don't know of any work around other than manually adjusting report. That's what I had to do the first year when we didn't know it would cause errors on reports for the auditors.

Hope someone else has a better work-around.

Joan Bell · January 2018

This is one instance
of several where split gifts cause reporting problems. I enter
every gift individually.

Joan (Jo)
Bell

GSA
Foundation

Database
Coordinator

Work:
303.357.1067

jbell@geosociety.org

Ryan Hyde · January 2018

Just to pile on, the only solution is to stop splitting gifts. It may be RE's worst feature. It does nothing but cause problems.

Jen Claudy · January 2018

The problem with not using split gifts is that you can't accurately look at Largest Gift data. Or something like: if someone gives $5k split between two funds, and you query for donors with gifts of $5k+, a single gift with a split should appear in that query but if entered as two separate gifts, one for each fund's portion, this donor won't appear in your query. At my last org, I needed to pull reports like this occasionally, including for the auditors, so I had to use split gifts. But we generally avoided canned reports, so our custom reports were designed to handle split gifts.

Gracie Schild · January 2018

Hi - that's a good point to remember, Jen, but I'd personally alter the way I queried and continue the practice of not splitting gifts. I'd probably first look at cumulative giving and then sort by date. At my last organization, we rarely looked at largest gift so that wouldn't have made any waves. Whenever we were reporting on donors' giving levels, it was cumulative giving that counted, usually over a time period, but occassionaly for a particular fund or campaign. For the latter case, splitting gifts makes it harder to report, not easier. If Mrs. Donor gives $10,000 and splits it between a capital campaign and some fund in the annual campaign, you can only put it under one campaign when you do a split gift - you'd have to do two gifts to make the campaign reporting come out right.

If largest gift was a recurring reporting issue, I'd probably make a gift attribute called something like "Part of Larger Gift", add it to each of the separate gifts that made up the total gift, and then put in the total amount as the data. If you included that as output in your "largest gift" query, you'd see that flag with the total amount and could alter your report accordingly. I guess it depends on how many large split gifts you get in a cycle, and how important "largest gift" is in your reporting.

RE Canned Reports - Pledge Activity Report - Glitch with split Pledges by Fund

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