Pledge vs. Recurring Gift for employees

Kim Kimball · August 2015

Good morning! We made the change to Raiser's Edge almost three years ago and I'm starting to question how we are entering employee "pledges". Historically we entered new pledges each year for employees, however, I'm wondering if a recurring payment would be a better option for us as we don't have to enter it annually and it would continue until they requested to stop.

Does anyone else have experience with doing this for their employee campaigns and is there a way to run a report to forecast the total received for a calendar year? We are getting ready for our campaign kick-off the last week in September and I'm wondering if we should make the switch to recurring, but need to be able to provide an estimated total raised through the campaign.

Thank you for your help!

Dalton Funkhouser · August 2015

How are you collecting the employee pledges currently?

We were debating a similar question at my organization. We currently receive employee payroll deductions as pledges. Most of these are yearly commitments with 26 separate payments, although some are one-time deductions.

We ultimately decided to stay with the pledge method vs. recurring gifts. This allows us to book the pledge as an asset, but it also means any canceled pledges (if an employee asks to stop the deduction, or if the employee is terminated) must be recorded as bad debt expense. We have done it this way for a while and it gives us continuity in reporting. I would recommend talking to your accounting/finance department as this decision will have an impact on how you will be reporting your income.

As for providing an estimate of what you raised, I believe you could do this by setting up a Cash Flow Report which can be found under the Pledge and Recurring Gifts Reports. You can then filter to only that campaign and get an idea of what you will receive that year through recurring gifts.

Kim Kimball · August 2015

Thanks for your reply Dalton!

We currently do payroll deductions over the 26 pay periods (and a few one-time deductions), however, we record the payments on a quarterly basis when our finance department cuts us a check. We are set up seperately from the medical center and receive a physical check.

I will talk with our finance director and see what he says. Thanks for the tip on the cash flow report. We have a few recurring gifts already and I will run it on those and see what it looks like. We currently have close to 500 employees who do payroll deduction.

Kim

Jen Claudy · August 2015

Check out this post as well...Employee Payroll Deduction

JoAnn Strommen · August 2015

Dalton gave you some good things to consider. There was a lenghthy thread on this topic earlier this summer - am guessing that's where Jennifer's link will take you.

You'll find org that do it both ways. We have both types of gifts recorded in RE. Our procedure is if we have a set amount it's a pledge. For us it makes reporting a lot easier. As we have a number of part-time employees with a number of 'no paycheck this pay period' every pay period. I find pledges handle this easier than having to skip recurrnig transactions. (Employees have option to pay unpaid deductions at year end - many do. Those who don't have gift adjusted. If an employee leaves, either way it requires either an amendment or adjustment/write off.

Kim Kimball · September 2015

Thank you for the link to the other topic, it was very helpful. I think we will continue with pledges for reporting purposes. We receive our employee pledge payment check on a quarterly basis, so the payment amounts aren't always the same depending on the number of pay periods and it seems like that can be an issue with recurring gifts. Thank you everyone for your feedback. It is much appreciated!

Joanie Rogers · September 2015

Hello! I find it's easiest (and cleaner) to set the pledges up annually. In my opinion, t makes audit work much easier.

Jennifer Borlinghaus · January 2016

@Kim Kimball. I'm curious what your Finance department said. We are in a similar situation and are trying to move from pledges to recurring gifts for our Employee Giving Campaign. Our finance department isn't too thrilled with this move. We just changed our giving to be on going until the employee asks us to stop the payroll deduction. I've got to figure this out soon since the hospital cuts us a check monthly!

Pledge vs. Recurring Gift for employees

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