Write Off vs. Adjustment

Sarah Harrington:

Good Afternoon, 


I was wondering what different policies other organizations use for write-offs in Raiser's Edge.  We currently are using the "Write-Off" method but when a gift officer is looking in the gift tab it still looks like someone has a $100 pledge.  We do put write-off in the reference but sometimes gift officers miss it.


Has anyone used an adjustment down to zero instead and put write-off as the adjustment reason?  If so are their any downsides to using this method?


In case it matters we are not using Financial Edge.


Thank you!

An adjustment is for correcting an error.  A write-off should be used when the pledge is legitimate, but simply won't be fulfilled.  A write-off is particularly important if the pledge crosses fiscal years because that income was declared in financial reports for some previous fiscal year and is now a "bad debt expense" on your books.


To help your gift officers, be sure to include the Pledge Balance column in your Gifts tab and you can add a suffix to your Gift Type column to indicate that there is a write-off associated with the Gift.

Alan French:

We don't see a separate line for write-offs either, but if you add the suffix to the "pledge with write-offs" option instead (at the bottom of John's screenshot) then the suffix will appear on the pledge.

Alan French:

We don't see a separate line for write-offs either, but if you add the suffix to the "pledge with write-offs" option instead (at the bottom of John's screenshot) then the suffix will appear on the pledge.

Aaron Rothberg:

I switched from Write Offs to Adjustments a year ago. My biggest complaint with Write Offs was reporting pledges using the Gift Detail and Summary Report. If you need to look at a total summary of commitments, you wouldn't click the "Use gift balance instead of gift amount" checkbox because you need to see full pledge amounts. Unfortunately, because of that Write Offs will show up in the report as Pledges with the full pledge amount. If you forget to include the Write Offs column in that report you'll never know those pledges were written off. Furthermore, if you do include Write Offs in a Gift Detail and Summary report and co-mingle them in the same column with your Pledges, you'd hope the report would subtract the Write Offs from the pledge totals. Nope. Instead it will do the opposite and add the Write Offs to the pledge totals.


The caveat to Adjustments being successful at our organization is that we don't report on Annual Campaign commitments to show our fund raising progress. We report on cash in the door.


John, what's your strategy for overcoming the issue I described above? How do you report on total commitments using the Gift Detail and Summary report and ensure you're accounting for Write Offs? Do you simply report on Pledge Balance as opposed to total Pledges?

John Heizer:

JoAnn Strommen:

 

Alan French:

We don't see a separate line for write-offs either, but if you add the suffix to the "pledge with write-offs" option instead (at the bottom of John's screenshot) then the suffix will appear on the pledge.

Thanks, Alan. Hadn't scrolled down the list far enough to catch the needed category: pledge with write-off. Added it now!

 

OH!  When creating that screenshot I'd missed that category in the list (been ages since I've bothered looking at any of this).  Now I'm wondering what difference there is, if any, between "Write-Off" and "Pledge with write-offs" since you can't have a WO without a pledge??