Applying recurring gifts towards a pledge

Sierra Good · April 2023

Has anyone found a way to apply a recurring monthly gift towards a pledge. We are embarking on a capital campaign and we would like to be able to keep track of pledges and the payments that come in. We have people that are paying monthly towards their pledge for the campaign but I have found that you cannot apply recurring to pledges… has anyone found a way around it?

JoAnn Strommen · April 2023

@Sierra Good Welcome to the BB Community forums.

If a gift is set up as a recurring gift, the payments received can only be applied against the recurring gift. They cannot be applied to a pledge.
You can create a pledge and have monthly payments (a recurring payment) toward it by any of the pay methods.

Not knowing all the specifics, you may want to consider putting the recurring gift on hold or cancel and create a new pledge if you feel you have to for reporting.

You might find this KB article helpful to explain the difference between a recurring gift and a pledge.

Dan HoutReilly · April 2023

@Sierra Good For recurring pledge payments, we use recurring batches in database view. Consituents provide the credit card or bank account information on an internal form including if they want the payments drawn on the first business day that is or follows the first of the month or the first business day that is or follows the fifteenth or both, the amount, etc. We then created four batches that we run on the respective dates (1 of each type for the 1st, and 1 of each type for the 15th). This method seems to work for us. Once the batches are set up we find that it runs smoothly. Blackbaud's solutions (writing off pledges as recurring gifts were received or adjusting the recurring gift to $0 and entering a new pledge payment) were too cumbersome and time consuming.

Karen Diener 2 · April 2023

@Sierra Good
Just to add some clarity to the previous comments:

Raiser's Edge has Recurring Gifts and Pledges. While they are similar, they are not the same and you cannot apply recurring payments to pledges, nor can you apply pledge payments to recurring gifts. The knowledgebase article JoAnn linked to is a good one. And if you have time or are super interested, this free, online webinar from Blackbaud also explains the difference.

In addition to those Gift Types, there is a way to add gifts through a Recurring Batch. Using the same language confuses a lot of people, but Recurring batches have nothing to do with recurring gifts. They are simply batches that you can use over and over again, and this knowledgebase article explains them in more detail.

Karen

Marie Stark · April 2023

@Sierra Good We had a situation with one donor where we were manually adjusting the pledge balance. That is really very cumbersome.

Robyn Smith · April 2023

@Sierra Good
At my org, we run the pledge payments as part of the recurring gift batch in the database view. This would be for instances where the donor says they are pledging X amount and asks us to charge their credit card for a certain amount on a certain set schedule. These gifts are still pledges, not recurring gifts, and the payments are just processed with the recurring gifts.

Chandra Oliphant 2 · April 2023

@Sierra Good Recurring gifts and payments are quite a pain and are not exactly the same. RE does not allow recurring gift payments to be changed to pledge payment. If you have already set up the pledge(s), it is best if constituent(s) set up automatic payment through their financial institution and not through RE recurring gift option. Else, you would have to manually adjust the recurring gift payment, enter detailed note on why the adjustment and where payment was applied, enter new gift and apply to pledge with detailed notes. It is not ideal and reporting pain as well.

Tara Cain · April 2023

@Sierra Good Blackbaud refuses to grasp the notion that many donors--especially with churches--who set up recurring gifts do so precisely to fulfill their pledge (the committed amount they wish to donate). The workaround I employ is to run a query on recurring gift payments each quarter, export it to Excel, total up recurring payment amounts for each donor, and then manually write off their pledges for that amount with the note “2023 Q3 (or whichever quarter it is) recurring gift payments”. It is several hours worth of work, but we do not want to to discourage donors from setting up recurring gifts. As we are being forced out of Church Management and therefore will not be using RENXT/Raiser's Edge, you can bet that our next system will handle this priority task more efficiently and intuitively.

Jennifer Kluh · June 2023

@Tara Cain
That does sound like an incredible amount of work.

Applying recurring gifts towards a pledge

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