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Recurring Gifts Able to be Applied to Pledge

Morgan Hansen

Hi, when will there be an option to apply a recurring gift to a pledge payment?

Currently is very inconvenient that there is no option for a recurring gift payment, and no way to apply a recurring gift to a pledge payment.

Does anyone know of a work around in order to do this?

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Comments

JoAnn Strommen

Welcome to the BB Community forums, @Morgan Hansen .

I don't know that there will ever be that option. Recurring gifts and pledges are two different things. Pulling a recurring gift payment to apply to a pledge or vice versa would mess up payment schedule for both.

I can understand your frustration. If it is an ongoing issue, perhaps you need to start over with a pledge for the record. You can have scheduled payments to a pledge.

Stacy Evans

Hi Morgan, I think the reason is because a recurring gift is sort of it's own pledge sort of speak. A person is committing to giving you revenue every month or whatever the cycle is. A pledge is essential the same thing. If it's really bothering you just take the recurring gift make it a pledge and set up the schedule to match the schedule of the recurring gift.

Barbara Kunkel

Hi Morgan, I have two recurring gifts that are pledge payments. My only workaround, for now, is to go into the pledge and write off the amount with a note that payment was received through the recurring gift. This way, the pledge balance reflects the proper pledge balance. It is not what I would like to do, but how we are handling these now.

Rachel Cavalier

Rather than putting a recurring gift in, we schedule the pledge instalments and then diarise for a couple of weeks before the last instalment is due for the colleague in charge or that pledge to contact our supporter to ask if they would like to continue to donate at the same amount/frequency.

If they want to continue, then we put in a recurring gift after we receive that last instalment.

John Mohnasky

@JoAnn Strommen in the case where you start over with a pledge and have scheduled payments to a pledge, is the donor automatically charged for those payments or do they have to go in manually every month (for a monthly payment cycle) and enter the gift? I think this is a big issue because a donor can set up a pledge and pay off that pledge with a recurring gift. Why would we make them go in every month and do it manually when they can do it automatically? Our pledges have benefits associated with them so we have to enter the pledge along with the recurring gift.

JoAnn Strommen

@John Mohnasky Welcome to the BB Community forums.

I'm think I'm now grasping your question. I'm not saying anything where a donor would need to go in monthly. There is always so much confusion when dealing with a ‘recurring gift’ vs a ‘recurring batch’ vs. a ‘recurring’ payment to a pledge.

A 'recurring gift' in RE language is a specific gift type different than a pledge. Folks can make a ‘recurring’ payment to both types: recurring gift and pledge. But you can not take gifts entered as payment to a recurring gift type and apply them to a pledge gift type or vise versa.

Pledges can be paid with monthly recurring payments without donor taking any monthly action.

Does that clarify?

John Mohnasky

@JoAnn Strommen thank you! When you say "Pledges can be paid with monthly recurring payments without donor taking any monthly action." how do you make this happen? What exactly are the “monthly recurring payments” that you reference?

JoAnn Strommen

@John Mohnasky BB has two platforms to process credit cards that I'm aware of BBPS and BBMS. If you have a partner vendor where folks make gifts, they may be your card processor.

This knowledge base article provides info and may answer some questions for you.

So I have a donor who pledges $600 and wants to make $50/mo payments on the first of each month. I enter the pledge on the record in RE, create a payment schedule and enter the credit card details.
If I use webview, I can have card automatically charged and I approve batch. If I use db view, I create a new gift batch on the first of the month, use options under tools to generate/pull in all the records with credit card payments due that date into my batch, use another tools option to create the actual transaction (charge the card). Donor has now made their monthly recurring payment without any effort on their part. There are a lot of details but that's the general porcess.

Christina Vandagriff

@Barbara Kunkel
I was just looking at this, and your solution seems to be the only way to reconcile the correct pledge balance when recurring gifts are set up this way.