Split Gift and posting to correct fiscal year

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Mary Dunning
Mary Dunning
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in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We have a few split gifts that include designations for both the last and current fiscal year.  I don't post gifts to the GL, but do change the gift post date to the current fiscal year for gifts received prior to July 1 (helps with reporting).  Any suggestions on how to adjust these split gifts?  
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  • Jen Claudy
    Jen Claudy
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    We use the postmark date to indicate which fiscal year (same with calendar year for tax receipt purposes), so a single gift, split or not, would be in the same FY.  You could enter as two separate gifts.  And even edit the Gift ID to be 55555a and 55555b so you know they go together.
  • Jen Claudy
    Jen Claudy
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    I posted too soon...



    Depending on your reporting needs and how you use Appeals, this would be how we would track a gift that is, for example, from a board member and covering both their FY15 & FY16 giving.  Our Appeal reports don't use dates, because the Appeals themselves are set up with a specific date range.  (And RE will let you save a gift with dates outside the Appeal range...you just have to click [OK] when you save it.)



    The other thing you could do, depending on your reporting process, is to use an Attribute.  We do this for multi-year pledges, but we don't use RE canned reports.  For a multi-year pledge, the amount expected in each year is listed on an attribute with a date in that year (similar to scheduling the payments on the pledge, but much easier to pull in an export).  I have used this same attribute on a gift that was not a pledge, because there was a very specific reason for which we needed it to be reported in a year other than when it was actually received.  Our reports then pull the Attribute Date (and Attribute Amount) if there is one, and the Post Date if there isn't.
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    Before you jump into appeals / attributes etc. can you give some more specifics?  This was a single gift?  Not a pledge?  You say it's a split gift so you have applied it to two funds?



    I'm not exactly following why you'd need two post dates - but then we post to FE so don't have option to play with post dates.  Reports related to two fiscal years are based on fund not the date.



    Appeals is an option for reporting but if it's one gift it doesn't change your options available.  Adding an appeal or attribute to one or two records seems like a reporting error waiting to happen when it's forgotten and adding to all gifts seems like unneccessary work, IMHO.



    (Just another thing - we don't use split gifts.  Way to messy for reporting and applying pledge payments.)
  • Ryan Hyde
    Ryan Hyde
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    I would to second JoAnn's final statement: we almost never use split gifts because they cause a lot of confusion. If they're split across appeals, it seems that the full amount of the gift is applied to each appeal when running an appeal performance analysis report, or when pulling simliar info for a dashboard. If someone knows how to stop this from occurring, let me know, please! And I would certainly never split a gift across different fiscal years - that doesn't make sense to me since the post date should be the same for both.



    Anyway, when I do need to split a gift up, I just create two separate gifts. It's cleaner and easier to understand. It's not a perfect solution because it can impact a "largest gift" report, but I find this less bothersome than messing up appeal or fund performance analysis information.
  • Jen Claudy
    Jen Claudy
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    Ryan Hyde:

    I would to second JoAnn's final statement: we almost never use split gifts because they cause a lot of confusion. If they're split across appeals, it seems that the full amount of the gift is applied to each appeal when running an appeal performance analysis report, or when pulling simliar info for a dashboard. If someone knows how to stop this from occurring, let me know, please! And I would certainly never split a gift across different fiscal years - that doesn't make sense to me since the post date should be the same for both.



    Anyway, when I do need to split a gift up, I just create two separate gifts. It's cleaner and easier to understand. It's not a perfect solution because it can impact a "largest gift" report, but I find this less bothersome than messing up appeal or fund performance analysis information.

    Ryan, when you are including a Split Gift in a QUERY, you use the Split Gift Amount field (under Campaign, Fund, or Appeal) instead of the regular Gift Amount field.  However you've split the gift, any of these three Split Gift Amount fields will give you the amounts as they are entered on the gift.  I believe RE canned reports handle this automatically (but we don't use them, so I am not sure).  Query will put 1 gift on 3 rows if the gift is split into 3 amounts.  Export is trickier, because it's a one-to-many deal.  Even though generally Export should be used over Query, I export Query results all the time (but I test to be sure I'm getting what I need & want and I use it when I can't get what I want from Export).

  • Mary Dunning
    Mary Dunning
    Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Comment Facilitator Level 1

    JoAnn Strommen:

    Before you jump into appeals / attributes etc. can you give some more specifics?  This was a single gift?  Not a pledge?  You say it's a split gift so you have applied it to two funds?



    I'm not exactly following why you'd need two post dates - but then we post to FE so don't have option to play with post dates.  Reports related to two fiscal years are based on fund not the date.



    Appeals is an option for reporting but if it's one gift it doesn't change your options available.  Adding an appeal or attribute to one or two records seems like a reporting error waiting to happen when it's forgotten and adding to all gifts seems like unneccessary work, IMHO.



    (Just another thing - we don't use split gifts.  Way to messy for reporting and applying pledge payments.)

    Thanks JoAnn.  This is a single pledge split between three funds and appeals, two are for FY 14-15 and one for 15-16.  We have 20 funds and 50 appeals which I use to pull reports (gift detail and summary).  Toward the end of last FY, I started entering gifts and pledges for the new FY.  When July 1 arrived, I queried all appeals for new FY and changed the post date to July 1 2015.  Reconciling today I discovered I missed some that were included in split gifts and pledges.  I would prefer not to use split gifts (gift count is not important only total amount of gifts for the year).  I sometimes have pledges for $50,000 with 7 different fund designations, and 6 installments.  Pledge reminders would be a bear if we stop using split gifts, but again I would prefer to do away with it.  Any suggestions?  

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