Completing pledges

Ditto other replies - I've never found the active/completed field in RE to be of much use. As you said, it doesn't change and really isn't used to process mail/reminders etc.

Like was said above, we use it way more in our recurring gifts.  It helps us see, at a glance, if an employee changed their payroll deduction recurring gift of their own will or if it terminated because they terminated employment with our hospital.  We manually change that field as appropriate.

Very little in Raiser's Edge is "automatic".... This initially drove us nuts, but now we generally appreciate it.  We use the Gift Status field to give us a little more info about the pledge itself.  Here's how we read it:

Active: The pledge is still open and we still expect payments in the future.

Held: The pledge is still open but there's a chance we won't be able to collect on it.  We don't use this much, be have had some "financial hardship" cases where we've put pledges on hold for a year or two and then made them Active again.

Terminated: This pledge has NOT been paid in full, but has been written off.  The balance is $0, but it shows that the donor did NOT pay the pledge.  It's easier than looking for pledges with write-offs in many cases.  We use this a lot with Phonathon pledges.  If someone has TWO or more terminated pledges in the last 5 years we don't even bother calling them.  We nickname them "LIARBUNTS" because they pledge money over the phone with no intention to ever pay ?

Completed: We use this to mark pledges that were successfully paid off by the donor.  


Our gift processors simply run a query at the end of each day that looks for all Pledges with a Balance = $0 and a status of Active.  Those pledges have to be manually changed to Completed or Terminated.  It only takes them a few minutes to do most days.


When we do a Global Write Off of old Phonathon pledges we just create a query of changed records and then set all those pledge status to Terminated using the Global Change admin function.

I see the Status/Date fields for both gifts that have a Gift Type of Pledge as well as Recurring Gift.  Stock and Planned Gifts also have custom fields.  We've always had the Status field there and we've used it for years. 


Here's what I see in database view when I go to manually enter a new pledge:



 

Getting that field on a standard Pledge record must be tied to having the Planned Giving module.  I just did a test in the sample database, which has all optional modules active, and I did get the field:



 

Matthew Nareff:

I'm not sure if it automatically stops payments.  The only time we ever really use it is if someone tells us to stop or we're having credit card trouble and we haven't heard from the donor to update credit card information in a few months.  We'd mark those as terminated.  Just so it doesn't look like it's hanging out there and we haven't been missing payments.  I know in NXT we will have the ability to have recurring gifts done automatically so the active/terminated field might be needed then.