nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Rollback and/or skipping mis-aligned transactions so they're accurate?

Henry Gray

Hi all. Long time user of Raiser's Edge over the years in different capacities. In a new organisation and looking for advice about how best to ‘tidy’ some transactions. Over the years some recurring gift transactions that should have been skipped haven't been, instead the next payments sitting against the date that should have been skipped. This means that now there are recurring gifts with very skewed dates for next transactions coming in. If we ever wanted to accurately do recurring gift batches, this would surely be a problem (most gift entry here is manually added at present).

Before I mess with financial data (some very old!), I wanted advice on how to ‘re-align’ these? Essentially, in the example below, I'd want to skip/miss out November entirely as the gift was skipped/didn't appear. And because December's gift is now attached to Nov, it's thrown off everything since. You can see similar continues to happen down the line with this gift.

b6e42aef452e5acbe621615e547ac346-huge-ja

I worry by messing with this I'll skew the data further. Just treading carefully. Any hand-holding steps here much appreciated!

Find more posts tagged with

Data Entry

Comments

Kylea Johnson

Maybe someone else has more mastery of recurring gifts but in my experience they are too difficult to change to make the effort worth it, ESPECIALLY if they're posted to Financial Edge. Lots of things get quite wonky with them once you start going in and messing around. When I did this kind of cleanup, I'd just mark the old recurring gift completed and make a new one that's ‘back on track’.

Austen Brown

Hi @Henry Gray - Welcome to BB Community! I second what @Kylea Johnson has said. Updating anything having to with a recurring gift schedule is difficult, especially when payments are already applied. Unless there is a specific need to make these match, I recommend you keep it as is and make it a policy that if a transaction is ‘skipped’ it needs to be updated on new recurring gifts, moving forward.

Henry Gray

Thanks - good to know. This is the exact reason I was definitely going to ask here before doing anything. I think that makes most sense.

Henry Gray

Thanks! I think this just makes it clear that going forward there should be simple steps taken to ensure things stay in line in my organisation. Most of the issues are from many years ago to be fair.

Elizabeth Johnson

A few things to add to this thread

I have had success with rolling back and skipping transactions
- When creating our recurring gift batches I like the gift reference to reflect the date I expect it to otherwise the gift entry person needs to look into this further to see what the issue is.
If you don't have their current credit card number (and we never hold on to those outside the BBMS transaction) I don't believe there is a way to cancel one transaction and simply start a new one without the donor initiating it.
- I would advise contacting support before taking a step like this.
Whenever you make an amendment to a recurring gift - take a screenshot of the transaction tab before starting and make sure the next transaction is when you expect it to be.
- I learned this the hard way when I was changing an appeal on a handful of recurring gifts. Would never have dreamed that would change the transaction date but it did.
When you do terminate or complete a gift if the status date isn't right compared to the next transaction the payments will still show up in your cash flow reports. I haven't mapped this out perfectly - more of trial and error, in the moment. I think it is that if the next transaction due is after the status date they still show up. If someone has a nice concise way for me to remember that - I'm all ears.

Great thread and great answers - looking forward to more.

David Zeidman

This is a really interesting thread. I agree that recurring gifts are very powerful but also annoying if they get out of synch.

If you are importing payments then this is particularly difficult because you typically do not have insight into each and every payment that is going in.

This was one of the issues that we tried to resolve with Importacular (sorry for the plug and happy to remove but I think it is relevant).

It can be set up so that if the incoming transaction is not within a date range of the expected payment date on the recurring gift schedule, it can be set up to skip older transactions to catch up and ensure that the incoming payment is in correct alignment. (There are other options too for handling it).

For me this is one of the most difficult aspects of recurring gifts. They are used a lot in the UK so this is a very common use case and one which users struggle with (the other one is membership transactions but don't get me started on that one!)