Best Practice to record pledges

Shoukat Qumruddin

Hello members,

I hope you are well.
Our organization prepares monthly financials on Excel Sheet. For the preparation of monthly financials, we take gift amounts from Gift Tab and Proposal Tab.

Now I explain to you why we record gifts on the proposal tab:
We record all verbal pledges on the proposals tab. We only record written and multiyear pledges on the gift tab.

Do you see any problem in our practice, please also mention the best practice if you know?


Thank you very much in advance for your assistance.

Angela Tuttle

On our financials we only count pledges that we have signed agreements for. Auditors may ask to see the backup for a pledge and this would be hard to show for a verbal pledge.

Tim Bilger

I'm sorry this may be a bit of a divergence off the topic but in the spirit of sharing, would anyone be willing to share examples of pledge reminder letters and email communications they use?

Corinne Shannon

Angela Tuttle:

On our financials we only count pledges that we have signed agreements for. Auditors may ask to see the backup for a pledge and this would be hard to show for a verbal pledge.

Same here. Our financial reports only include pledges with signed agreements. We do use the proposal tab to record solicitations and those numbers are used to report on staff activity, but not for financial purposes. We find it also motivates staff to obtain a signed gift agreement as then it can be recorded on the gift tab (and then subsequently included in reports to our board).

Jonathan Angell

Hi Shoukat


Your solution sounds like it works for you, so it's good!


Our method is slightly different - we record verbal pledges on the Gift tab, with a subtype of "verbal", to give more immediate "visibility" for someone viewing a record. The verbal subtype is then excluded from all our external reporting, but we can keep a track of them for our internal reporting. They tend to arise from proposals on the Proposals tab, which is the way our fundraisers will track and move the gifts forward to written agreement.


Hope that's helpful

Jon

Shoukat Qumruddin

Thank you Jon, I also have the same view. It should be routed through Gift Tab instead of Proposal Tab.


Thanks agasin.

Shoukat Qumruddin

Thank you Corinne for your input. Much appreciated.

Shoukat Qumruddin

Thank you Angela for your input. Yes, I agree with your point.

Judy Spigarelli

We also use a gift subtype of Verbal Pledge, for similar reasons as shared by others. These gifts are not recorded in Finance, nor included in reports. If you have FE integration, I would think this system would not work.


There's so much data to take in, that it's most typical to look at Bio 1 (contact info) and Gifts. I want it to be very obvious there is a pledge, even if it's verbal.