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Recurring payments added as one-time gifts historically

Sarah Jones

Hi everyone. Historically recurring gift payments have been added as one-time gifts in my institution. Going forward I would like to record them as payments against a recurring gift.

I know how to import the master recurring gifts and then can batch import payments against it. But is there a way for me to re-code all those older one-off payments as recurring gift payments?

The only options I can think of are to either re-import all historic payments and delete the old one-offs, or just ignore them and go with new recurring gifts going forward. Any other options?

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Comments

Christine Robertson

@Sarah Jones Technically, you can apply a cash/one time gift to a recurring gift (it has to be unposted to do so and I believe unadjusted as well) directly from the gift. Depending upon how many you are looking at, this can be done on a gift by gift basis and would maintain all of your history while also cleaning up your history. If your gifts are posted, it can still be done this way so long as your finance team is okay with you unposting, changing the gifts and then re-posting.

I also believe that it might be possible to do this via an import, but I would have to verify that to be sure. If it is possible, you would need the Constituent Import ID, the Recurring Gift Import ID and the One Time Gift Import ID all in the same row of your .csv.

All of that said, before you do any of this, make sure you double check the schedules on your Recurring Gifts to ensure that they line up with the payments that you have. When schedules get out of whack, the whole process becomes much more complicated.

Alex Wong

@Sarah Jones
The way our recurring gifts come in is Cash (one time gift) through all the multiple platform we had used, and we reporting on them through having a gift attribute that signify the gift is recurring, and on what platform. So reporting is pretty easy for us.

So I guess my question is, why would you want to make the change in the old gift? Whatever you decided to do, it will be a very manual effort and esp true if you post to FE as well. So it really comes to why, and if it has a benefits that cannot be satisfied without doing it.

Faith Murray

@Sarah Jones
We used to have donors who renewed an annual pledge every year - basically a recurring gift structured as pledges. We also have several donors who send a “one-time gift” every single month by check. When we switched to using recurring gift templates to record these donors, we left the old gifts in as they were. I get wanting to be able to track longevity for donor statistics and recognition, but if this is a society or club, perhaps an easier way to record their tenure would be through Memberships?

Dariel Dixon

@Sarah Jones I don't know what is gained from changing the historical gifts. I don't know if it's worth the time TBH. Make the change, document it, and move on.

Alan French

@Sarah Jones we did this a while back with some of our old payments that hadn't been linked to the recurring gifts (I think we did most of it via imports though it was 8 years ago and we no longer have RE so I'm afraid can't give you the exact steps we followed).

It was quite a lot of effort but we were making more complex changes than it sounds like you need to do - in some cases we were also moving payments from one recurring gift to another which was where most of the difficulty was. As Christine suggested, we did end up with the schedule dates being wildly off in some cases but again that was probably because we were trying to link payments to recurring gifts that already had newer payments applied to them - if you're importing them in chronological order that might not be an issue for you.

For us it was important because we're very analysis-driven and we wanted to be able to see who our regular donors were and the length of their gift, but your mileage may vary.

Sarah Jones

@Dariel Dixon Thinking about it more, I agree!

Sarah Jones

@Alex Wong That makes sense, thank you.

thanks everyone for the advice, I think I'm going to leave the old gifts as they. Changing them is a lot more trouble than it's worth!