Credit Card Recurring Gift to pay off pledge

Debra Calderon Morales

How do you report outstanding balance when a pledge is being paid through a credit card recurring gift?

We have a donor who signed a pledge agreement for a significant amount to be paid over five years, and we later learned that she would like us to charge her credit card monthly, to pay down the pledge. We converted the pledge to a recurring gift in Raiser's Edge, which means that the outstanding balance was, in a sense, written off. How does your organization report this out to finance? Does the expected amount (per fiscal year) get calculated for reporting?

Appreciate your help.

Thank you,

Debra

(1st post here; just went live in RE about six months ago)

Faith Murray

Debra, the difficulty here was in the original conversion to a recurring gift. The pledge could have been processed automatically on credit card even in its original "pledge" form, by clicking the EFT button at the bottom, just like a recurring gift, and then auto-generating on batches. Once it has been converted to a recurring gift, there is no pledge balance left in the system to export, although you may be able to export the termination date (if it has one) and monthly installment amounts. Otherwise, it would need to be calculated manually by your team and also kept track manually by your finance department.

Faith Murray

I forgot to say -- there is one report that may help you. Try looking under the Reports - Cash Flow Reports, and then restrict the report to the single donor record in question. That will, at least, output a report of anticipated monthly revenue to your finance department.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

We have annual pledges which are paid in a variety of ways, including with existing recurring gifts. The only way I have found to do this but also keep the pledge for tracking is to write off the pledge on a regular basis and fully document why we are doing so. This is not the best method and might not work for everyone.