Old, Inactive Pledges - Write off or Adjust?

Daniel Wallach

The school I work for was, at one point, using RE to track Tuition. That's thankfully long in the past, however all those records are still there. This was handled using a separate “Tuition” Campaign and associated funds. Hundreds of pledges were created with tuition balance, etc.

This skews reporting unless you know how to query properly (and even then, it comes up), and since pledges are all still active, they trigger prompts for applying gifts to pledges in gift entry, batch, etc.

The funds are all inactive, which we'll be doing for the campaign too, but I'm wondering how to handle the pledges - either writing off or terminating. Anyone see any potential issues with either approach?

Plenty of discussion on this post, but it's from 2019, so I think it's worth it to get more current feedback.

#pledges #writeoff #datacleanup

Dariel Dixon

@Daniel Wallach I don't know if it matters in this case. Which ever is faster now, as the funds are inactive, and the gifts probably shouldn't have been entered in the first place.

TBH, I think you have a good case to consider deleting them altogether.

Daniel Wallach

@Dariel Dixon
I'm hesitant to delete these must historical data, although yes RE shouldn't have been used for this to begin with. I believe the school didn't have a robust tuition system at that point.

Since the pledges are functionally inactive (they're not really “pledges” at all…), I think you're right that it doesn't matter much either way I go, but writing off technically creates write off records against the balance of those pledges, which isn't really needed or accurate. I guess terminating is the way to go.

Joe Moretti

@Daniel Wallach I would just delete those (you can always run an export for these and give them to the tuition department. And who was the fool that approved putting tuition in a Raiser's Edge Database. They should not be making any decisions concering a database or go anywhere near one. I have heard and dealt with some really bad issues, but I put this up there with the “dumbest thing ever done to a database”. People need to be called out for disatrous decisions like this.

Daniel Wallach

@Joe Moretti
It's a decision I never understood, and frankly made and discontinued before my time so I'm just glad it's not part of our process now.

Austen Brown

@Daniel Wallach - If these pledges are posted or communicated to a financial system, you may not have a choice in how it's handled. I recommend checking in with your finance team. If they were posted, you'll likely need to write them off. Either way, I do not recommend deleting these - even though they should never have been entered into RE.

Daniel Wallach

@Austen Brown
Not posted to any financial system, but regardless not planning on deleting them - I'm always wary of deleting data, especially this much historical data. Practically I just needed it to be inactive - not skewing reports, not prompting to apply gifts to these pledges, etc. I decided to terminate them. Along with inactivating the relevant Funds & Campaigns, that worked fine.