Dealing with Write-Offs When Reporting or Exporting

Alex Bruder

I was wondering how everyone else is dealing with this problem as I have never seen a good answer:

How do you account for pledges with write-offs in the same year when you can't account for payments/pay cash because the pay cash could have come from a previous years pledge and you can't account for payments from previous years pledges for financial accounting? This comes up when doing canned financial/campaign reports or when you are doing summary giving for specific years in an export.

Example:

Gifts total in 2021 is $100,000
1 gift was a $30,000 pledge
It gets written off in the same year
When I include Gift Balance, it messes with any pledges that were paid off that year already
You can't use Gift Range either because of the Pay Cash issue I stated above (pledge from 2020 getting paid in 2021, but we want to keep the $ as 2020 for revenue purposes through the pledge)

How would you remove the $30,000 in Reporting or Export Total Summary without removing other pledges that were paid off in the same timeframe?

Thank you for all your suggestions!

Joe Moretti

@Alex Bruder Don't include write-off types when doing your reports, queries. etc.

Alex Bruder

@Joe Moretti This doesn't work for the reason I state above. When you include pledges (and not the balance) in whole, it will give you the total value even if it was written off. You can't then include gift balance because you would need to include pay cash which may include payments for previous year payments when you are trying to just show that one year.

Joe Moretti

@Alex Bruder Since you are not using the pledge balance, in a Gift Detail & Summary Report you can have a column that is Write offs, then subtract that from the total Cash & Pledge Column.

Austen Brown

@Alex Bruder - I recommend you track this through a gift attribute/custom field to tag pledges written off in their entirely so they can be removed from reporting. You should have the ability to filter on custom field within canned gift reports, which will enable you to remove just these pledges from your calculations.

Alex Bruder

@Joe Moretti I thought about this after I called BB and they didn't come up with an option. The way you suggested is what I came to as well as the best way to handle the situation. I just need to adjust the WriteOff date to the same date as the Pledge but keep the GL Post Date as when we did the writeoff. That way depending on who I need to report to I can account for writeoffs. Not great but a better solution then nothing. Thanks for bouncing the ideas back!