How to Export or Report on Soft Credits

Kate Hudson · July 2015

Hello,

I don't know what I'm missing, but I need to show a summary of all Gifts, including Soft Credits, for a certain constituent group. If I can't have a summary total it would be nice to at least show each gift and soft credit. I can't get it to work.

We participate in a region-wide giving day with a community foundation and our organization decided to process this check on the foundation's record in order to post to FE more easily, and soft credit the actual donor. I need this to show up and I'm totally at a loss.

Given this issue I want to change the way we credit this giving day check, and put it on the donor record and soft credit the foundation, but I still need the historical data from the past couple of years of this event.

Gina Gerhard · July 2015

Kate - Have you tried the Gift Detail and Summary Report (in Financial Reports)?

You create a query for the constituents you want to include in your group.
In the report, hit the Include button and select this query
You then specify all the criteria for the gifts you want to report on in the windows/tabs within the report format.
In Report Type, you can choose to show the Detail, Summary or both.
If you've included soft credits, they show up with a symbol next to them.
You can export this report out if you want to further manipulate the data.

Jen Claudy · July 2015

In a Gift Export, there is a section for Soft Credits fields. If it is one check per year, you can also open the Gift Record and right-click on the grid on the Soft Credits Tab, then export the grid from there. Reports can include soft credits, and you can mark them on the report, plus RE automatically includes a disclaimer statement that soft credits in the report may be affecting totals.

I would caution against changing everything to hard credit the individual and soft credit the org...in addition to being time-consuming, it could aversely affect other reports and processes. Unless, of course, what you receive are a bunch of individual gifts/checks via this organization, in which case, they should be HC to the individual and SC to the organization.

Kate Hudson · July 2015

Hi Gina,

Thank you so much for your response. I ran this report, but the soft credits showed as the total amount of the check from the foundation as opposed to the amount I input as the soft credit for the donor. So if the foundation issued $100,000.00, and Jane Doe gave $100.00, the report is showing she gave $100,000.00. On the General Tab of the report I selected to Soft Credit Gifts To the Soft credit receipient and to use the Distribution on gift. Is this incorrect?

I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I really appreciate your help.

Gina Gerhard:

Kate - Have you tried the Gift Detail and Summary Report (in Financial Reports)?

You create a query for the constituents you want to include in your group.

In the report, hit the Include button and select this query

You then specify all the criteria for the gifts you want to report on in the windows/tabs within the report format.

In Report Type, you can choose to show the Detail, Summary or both.

If you've included soft credits, they show up with a symbol next to them.

You can export this report out if you want to further manipulate the data.

Kate Hudson · July 2015

Jennifer,

Thank you for your response as well. I was able to export the soft credit grid and I think I will be able to maniuplate it how I need. I tried a Gift Export previously and again just now, but it's only pulling gifts posted to the records of individuals I want, and not soft credits that are HCed on other records. I think I messed something up in my query.

But, this gift is from individuals. The communities foundation hosts a giving day for thousands of non profits to participate in, and provide an online giving portal with percentage matching funds and a potential for bonus "prizes" provided by the foundation and/or other local foundations and companies etc. The donor chooses an organization to give to, and gives to them via this site, rather than writing a check to the foundation or something. The organizations get real-time downloadable data for who has given how much. I know other organizations in our area HC the foundation and SC individuals, but I don't really like it. The foundation issues a receipt and states the gift is to the organization the donor chose, not to the foundation. We cannot issue a receipt to donors because of this, either individually or on year-end statements. So, for purposes of running year-end tax statements it makes sense to only SC, but I run into problems like this where the gifts on their record aren't "right."

Jennifer Claudy:

In a Gift Export, there is a section for Soft Credits fields. If it is one check per year, you can also open the Gift Record and right-click on the grid on the Soft Credits Tab, then export the grid from there. Reports can include soft credits, and you can mark them on the report, plus RE automatically includes a disclaimer statement that soft credits in the report may be affecting totals.

I would caution against changing everything to hard credit the individual and soft credit the org...in addition to being time-consuming, it could aversely affect other reports and processes. Unless, of course, what you receive are a bunch of individual gifts/checks via this organization, in which case, they should be HC to the individual and SC to the organization.

Gina Gerhard · July 2015

Kate - I just created a gift on my own (test) record for $100 and soft credited someone else for $50.

In the Gift Detail report, I selected 'show both' and I see the $100 gift under me and the $50 soft credit under the someone else.
I then changed the setting to 'soft credit only' and only saw the $50 soft credit for the someone else.
So it seems to be working OK. Not sure why you were having an issue?

Aldera Chisholm · August 2015

This was an issue for us for a long time as well - 99% of the time, the reports will show with the correct soft-credited amount, but occassionally it will show the full amount, not the soft credited amount. (So if a gift was $100, $10 for each person, I would have ten people with $100 gifts.) I went through support for it, but we were unable to nail down why that exception happened, so I just work around it now.

So, for us, I do a gift export now, and I export both the gift amount, and the soft credit amount. That way I can skim quickly and see the ones where those two columns don't match up - make a few quick manual corrections, then I have my break-downs. Obviously this only works with reasonably small numbers of gifts, but I've found it to be a work-around that is effective to me.

Ray Polzin · August 2015

I have a similar issue as to what Aldera Chisholm described. A little bit about our configuration: We have a basic RE 7.93 platform along with the optional RE: Search and RE: Event modules. We do not use Financial Edge and have about 86,000 constituents in our database. We depend mostly on individual donations but have several donors who like to give through other organizations. We hard credit the organization cutting the check and soft credit the individual donor. The third party can and often represents dozens of donors. Because our development staff uses a number of criteria during their marketing campaigns, we mostly rely on queries to create our highly customized mail lists relevant to the market segments we're targeting. Since we have a trimmed down staff, we enlist the services of a mail house and printer for all our direct mail appeals, which is another reason we use queries and export the results to Excel, which is used by the mail house. We also utilize a third party email service organization for electronic appeal bulk emailing.

Our issue occurs when donors contribute through a third party, like Razoo, or their employer's charitable donation foundation. I've sliced and diced queries a number of ways and the results are always the same: The total hard credit by the third party organization shows as the donor's soft credit donation. In addition, when specifically querying for the donor's largest gift and last gift, the amounts are always the total amount of the third party's donation, not the soft credit amount actually given by the donor. This does not seem to be an isolated problem but is indicative of a bug.

I've tried the 'solutions' I've found in the Knowledgebase, and the ideas floated in this string of posts, but have not found anything that works. Hence my opinion that this is a bonafide bug that appears under certain conditions that not every organization encounters.

Your ideas are welcome!

Ray Polzin · August 2015

I forgot to mention in my previous post that the total donations made by the donor IS correct; it reports both hard and soft credits correctly. Only when we try to identify just the soft credit donations, or the largest or most recent donation amount, do we see the problem.

John Heizer · August 2015

Ray Polzin:

I have a similar issue as to what Aldera Chisholm described. A little bit about our configuration: We have a basic RE 7.93 platform along with the optional RE: Search and RE: Event modules. We do not use Financial Edge and have about 86,000 constituents in our database. We depend mostly on individual donations but have several donors who like to give through other organizations. We hard credit the organization cutting the check and soft credit the individual donor. The third party can and often represents dozens of donors. Because our development staff uses a number of criteria during their marketing campaigns, we mostly rely on queries to create our highly customized mail lists relevant to the market segments we're targeting. Since we have a trimmed down staff, we enlist the services of a mail house and printer for all our direct mail appeals, which is another reason we use queries and export the results to Excel, which is used by the mail house. We also utilize a third party email service organization for electronic appeal bulk emailing.

Our issue occurs when donors contribute through a third party, like Razoo, or their employer's charitable donation foundation. I've sliced and diced queries a number of ways and the results are always the same: The total hard credit by the third party organization shows as the donor's soft credit donation. In addition, when specifically querying for the donor's largest gift and last gift, the amounts are always the total amount of the third party's donation, not the soft credit amount actually given by the donor. This does not seem to be an isolated problem but is indicative of a bug.

I've tried the 'solutions' I've found in the Knowledgebase, and the ideas floated in this string of posts, but have not found anything that works. Hence my opinion that this is a bonafide bug that appears under certain conditions that not every organization encounters.

Your ideas are welcome!

In Query have you tried the "Amount to Credit To Constituent" field? For the Query how do you have Tools > Query Options ... > Gift Processing set up?

As far as I can tell it's all working consistently as designed (thus not a "bug"), but the design can be awkward.

A "gotcha" that I often run into is that First/Last/Largest work differently between Query and Export. If I ask for Last Gift > Campaigns > Campaign Description equals "Capital Campaign" AND Last Gift > Gift Amount greater than or equal to $1,000 then RE won't include someone who has given to our Annual Campaign after they gave their Capital Campaign gift.

Ray Polzin · August 2015

Thank you for your response. I've tried the query options - gift processing as either Recipients and Both with the same incorrect results. I've not tried the Amount to Credit to Constituent field, and am uncertain of its use or how it applies in my example. I haven't been able to pull anything out of the help system or knowledgebase about its use so could you provide some info?

John Heizer · September 2015

Ray Polzin:

Thank you for your response. I've tried the query options - gift processing as either Recipients and Both with the same incorrect results. I've not tried the Amount to Credit to Constituent field, and am uncertain of its use or how it applies in my example. I haven't been able to pull anything out of the help system or knowledgebase about its use so could you provide some info?

According to this KB article it should give you exactly what you're looking for: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/37474

How to Export or Report on Soft Credits

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