Online Donations Crediting Pledge Incorrectly

Miki Martin
Miki Martin Community All-Star
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in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions
I have another question. I have not been able to find anything in Knowledgebase, although I may have just missed something.


I have found four Constituents who used our online form (OLX) to make a donation to our annual appeal. However, these four people have outstanding pledges for a different fund. While their payments are listed under the correct fund, they also have the campaign listed and the payment is marked Pay-Cash instead of Cash, which I cannot update. This is throwing off multiple reports and incorrectly showing their pledge amounts decreased. It seems their giving is automatically applying the donation to an outstanding pledge even though they're wanting it allocated elsewhere.


Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a way to correct these transactions without re-entering and deleting the original? We do not utilize FE or anything so we don't post to a ledger; we just use the Gifts to track all gifts. Is there anything we can do to prevent this in the future? I have no idea if they're even being prompted online when making the donation as to whether they want their donation applied to an outstanding pledge.


Thank you so much!
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Comments

  • Stacy Evans
    Stacy Evans
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Unfortunately, when there is an outstanding pledge it defaults to the first pledge that's outstanding. If you batch it you will be able to choose where to allocate the gift. However, your online forms should create it's own batch and you can edit them before committing them. Even if it doesn't create it's own batch, you don't have to delete it just go into the gift and make the changes. It you happen to do it as a batch and if it was ONLY those four in the batch you can delete the batch and just apply to record manually. However, if there others donors in the batch don't delete because it will delete everyone in the batch.

  • Karen Diener
    Karen Diener
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper
    I'm surprised at this, and don't think it is a function of OLX.


    My recommendation is to review the steps you take to process the donations in the OLX plug-in, and also how you handle gifts once they are in batches. There are settings to automatically apply gifts to open pledges, but you can change those. There is no reason that RE would be applying gifts to pledges without you "letting" it in some way.


    Karen
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 March 2026 Challenge: Answered Questions January 2026 Monthly Challenge
    I'm not 100% sure but don't think there's an option in OLX to "apply gift to pledge" but just like any incoming payment what happens is determined by batch processing.

    Stacy Evans‍ is correct in that RE will default a payment to the oldest outstanding pledge. If the fund of that pledge and the current gift are the same, checking both boxes on the batch commit screen will not prevent as the 'fund' matches. Here are two knowledgebase articles about this. They may help.

    ________________________________
    How to adjust a gift that should not have been entirely applied to a pledgeMay 18, 2015

    Open the record for the pledge payment Select Apply to . from the Gift menu at the top, then Pledge Change ... that should have been applied to the pledge (this should be the amount originally ...

    Raiser's Edge

    Article Number: 45674


    ______________________________
    KnowledgebaseArticle117307

    Batch commits gifts as Pay-Cash or Recurring Gift Pay-Cash instead of Cash or Apply incorrectly to specified Pledge or Recurring Gift

    After commiting a gift batch, the gifts are showing with the wrong type. They are Pay-Cash and/or Recurring Gift Pay-Cash in the batch commit report and on the donor's gift record. How can this happen when they are cash in the batch? How can this happen when I did not apply them to a pledge or a recurring gift from the batch?


    In the batch, I carefully applied the gifts to Pledges and Recurring Gifts. However, after committing the gift batch, they are applied to the wrong gift(s). How can this mess up when I specified each gift to each Pledge/Recurring Gift?

    Answer:

    The option to Automatically apply gifts to pledges and recurring gifts was marked in the Commit Gift Batch options. For more information, please refer to How does the Automatically apply gifts to pledges and recurring gifts feature work in Batch?


    NOTE: It is important to review Gift Batch Commit options at each commit. The options are user-specific being remembered from the last batch commitral that the user completed. They are not "saved" specifically to a batch.

  • Miki Martin
    Miki Martin Community All-Star
    Kudos 5 Fifth Anniversary January 2026 Monthly Challenge bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge
    Thank you all so much! I just started processing the OLX payments last week so that part is new to me. I will have to pay close attention now to whether any of them have outstanding pledges before I commit the batch to see exactly how it looks so I can show my supervisor for future reference. This is all really helpful and I'm going to definitely read those two articles, JoAnn Strommen‍ !
  • Heather MacKenzie
    Heather MacKenzie
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 August 2025 Monthly Challenge Badge bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge
    Also, in case they are actually pledge payments and not "should have been cash gifts," it is possible to change which pledge they are applied to by opening up the gift, pretending to apply the gift to a pledge, and then making changes and saving the new info.

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