Pledges and pledge payments counting double

Liz Horvath

Hi Community,

My org is new to Raiser's Edge and we are having some issues with pledges and pledge payments in exports. I've been trying to pull an export of all giving from a select group of donors for the past 5 fiscal years, and for each donor that had a pledge/MG pledge that was later paid off, that gift is showing up doubled in my export (ex, X had a pledge for $15,000 on 6/14/21 which he paid off on 6/17/21 - his total giving is coming through as $30,000 for FY21). What's weird is that the pledge payments appear to have all been recorded correctly - they all appear to be tied to the correct gift in the gift record, and the Giving Summary in web view doesn't show them as being doubled.

I've tried excluding pledge payments by gift type (ie excluding ‘Pay-Cash’ and ‘MG Pay-Cash’), and it fixes the issue, but that also removes all soft credits, which I guess are also being recorded with the ‘Pay-Cash' gift type as a default. The export needs to include pledges, so I can't exclude those. I'm totally perplexed. Anyone else dealt with this? There has to be some difference in how soft credits and pledge payments are categorized, right? I'd appreciate any ideas! Especially if it's an easy fix that I'm missing as a year-one RE user!

JoAnn Strommen

As a org new to RE I strongly encourage staff to take training on using Data entry, query, reports and Export. Even when you think you are pulling what you expect, there are many intricacies with RE and you may not be.

For your export, assuming you are using Export and not exporting on query window, when you set the gift types to include and select pledge it opens a check box at the bottom to “use gift balance instead of gift amount.” So if you are including your pay-cash gift types, this will pull any remaining amount on the pledge but not reflect the amount already paid. I believe that will fix your issue.

If you are including SC, you will still have inflated totals if that is what you need. If it's a list of ‘donors’ then you have the names. If you're looking for $ figures only credit gifts to donor and MG to MG company.

JoAnn Strommen

? And welcome to the BB community, @Liz Horvath . It is a great place to get help with questions and just learn more by reading posts.

Liz Horvath

JoAnn, thanks for your response. I appreciate your recommendation - I've take all of the fundamentals trainings, but it was nearly a year ago - we have had a lot of staff turnover (including losing our primary database administrator) since then, so I haven't really had someone on staff to ask when things go awry. I'm very excited to have access to this forum!

I tried your suggestion and no dice. I am using Export, not exporting from the query.

We're not reporting for anything finance-related - just trying to get an idea of what we can expect from our major donors this year based on past numbers, hence the need for SCs.

And thank you for your welcome! ?

JoAnn Strommen

Checking that box will exclude RE using the full pledge amount. The gift criteria needs to be set in the Export output, not the Query. Is that possibly the problem.

Liz Horvath

I just went to try again, and it looks like my change didn't save the first time - so your suggestion actually worked, sorry about the confusion. Thanks again for your help!