Importing recurring gift instalments with matched giving

Hi all,



Butting my head against a problem here. I'm setting up an Excel template to allow us to semi-automatically import donations from Charities Trust. Some donations are regular and some are one-off. Some donations have matched giving from the donor's employer.



Ideally the process will create three import files: a file for importing one-off Gifts from donors, a file for importing Recurring Gift Payments from donors, and a file for importing Matching Gift Pledges from both.



However, the Matching Gift Pledge import requires the GFLink attribute, which is the Import ID of the gift it's linked to. For matched one-off gifts, I can generate an ID, use it in the GFImpID field for the one-off Gift import, and then use that same value as the GFLink field for the Matching Gift pledge. However, the Recurring Gift Payments import does not allow the use of the GFImpID field - so I cannot specify the import ID for the new RG payments - so RE automatically generates that ID instead - which means it's a major pfaff to get those IDs back out of RE to give to the MG Pledge import!



My workaround is to forget about the Recurring Gift Payments import. I'll import all the donor's gifts using the plain Gift import, specifying my own import IDs, use those same import IDs as the MG Pledge GFLink where necessary, and then manually link the imported gifts to RGs where applicable somewhere down the line.



Another bugbear is the GFPayMeth field is inaccessible for MG Pledge imports - so it defaults to 'cash'.



I started writing this post to ask for help and came up with the workaround while trying to phrase the question - maybe it can help others, but if anyone has any insights I'd be glad to hear it!