Question for Accounting Users - (Raiser’s Edge / Financial Edge Reconciliation):

Sarah Kozinn

How are you reconciling A/R pledge balances between Raiser’s Edge and your General Ledger or Financial Edge in a way that is accurate and audit-ready?

Specifically:

• What reports are you generating to tie out pledge balances between the two systems?
• Also - how are you generating an A/R Aging report for outstanding pledge payments by donor so that your Gift Officers can review and follow-up with those donors for payment?

I’ve run the RE Pledge Status Report, but I’m running into issues with duplicate lines and difficulty filtering it down without reviewing donors individually. As a result, I’m struggling to produce a reliable report that can function as a true subledger for accounting purposes.

Would appreciate any best practices, report setups, or workarounds that have worked well for your accounting team. Or if it's simply not feasible - please also share this!

Alex Wong

Even though we do have RE and FE integrated, posting from RE to FE, we do not use FE's AR capabilities. I am not in the finance team, so I am not aware if FE is lacking in functionalities or just our staff in finance isn't aware of the functionalities.

That said, we do Pledge Aging report via custom reporting through data warehouse, using SKY API to bring in all pledges, each installment details of all pledges, each payment/writeoff against the installment and its specific gift details. Then using Power BI to create: Pledge Invoicing report, Pledge Aging, and overdue reporting.

Sarah Kozinn

Hi Alex, thank you, this is helpful context and I appreciate the suggestions. I'm curious if anyone else has found a work around pulling a report from RE and filtering it in Excel? Not ideal, but looking for any other ideas or solutions to help with our month-end reconciliation. Thanks!

Tatyana Leifman

We are integrated with FE and I run the Pledge Status Report for our Finance team as well as the Pledge Activity report when Finance needs to project future income.

I export both reports into Excel as Finance found it easier to sort/filter by what they need.

I am not clear on where you run into duplicate lines. The only time I have duplicates is if a donor has several pledges on the books.

That said, we do not have that many pledges on the books so the reports are small enough for Finance to be able to do more manual work on, if they need to—like Alex I am not aware of what is done in FE with pledges and pledge reports.

Roberta A. Gilbert

I'm coming from the FE side of things, and like others, we have integrated RE and FE. I post gifts from RE to FE, but I do not post pledges unless they are restricted in some way, with a donor-signed form. Our auditors remind us every year that because unrestricted pledges (e.g. to our Annual Fund) are conditional and can be revoked by the donor at any time, those pledges are not considered revenue until we receive them. So they are put into RE as "do not post". The development staff can provide an RE report of outstanding unrestricted pledges for the auditors, but they don't get recorded to FE unless it is determined that any of them should be restricted.

Pledges to a capital campaign or an endowment or other restriction category, which would require a signed promise to pay, are usually recorded as revenue in the year the pledge was made, so I do post those from RE. I have a rolling Excel AR report that we update every year, to remove received (restricted) pledges and add any new ones. I compare the ending balance with our restricted AR accounts in the GL, and with a list of restricted pledges from RE. We don't have many restricted pledges most years, so finding any discrepancies is pretty easy.

Bill Connors

The Pledge Status Report is the right tool for balancing RE pledge balances with FE AR balances. However, the settings for it are tricky because you either get old paid off pledges or miss out on pledges paid off the previous month. The attached document explains how to solve this.

Query for the Pledge Status Report.pdf

Bill Connors

To this question: "Also - how are you generating an A/R Aging report for outstanding pledge payments by donor so that your Gift Officers can review and follow-up with those donors for payment?"

You should not be tracking pledges by donor in the AR — this what RE is for. If the fundraisers will use the RE web view Work Center, they will have plenty of ways to see gifts with past due pledges without needing a report. If you want them to see due pledges, that is what the Reminders feature of RE is for. If they really need a report, the RE PSR is the tool.

Pledge activity IMHO should be tracked in summary in FE/AR/ the accounting software — pledges, payments, write offs — allowing RE to be the system of record for donors and their pledges and not duplicating that work in Finance.

Roberta A. Gilbert

Thank you for your comments, Bill, I totally agree.

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/315011#Comment_315011