Blackbaud Connector and Write Offs

Nate Laning
Nate Laning
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in SKY Developer General Discussions

I know I must be overlooking something simple here... but what?

I have built a revenue report in Power BI using the Blackbaud connector. This revenue report includes gifts of many types, including matching gift pledges. Unfortunately, my totals are including 4 written off MG pledges. Write offs are not a specific gift type provided in the connector's tables. How can I exclude these from my counts and revenue totals in Power BI? Is it possible?

I've seen some discussion surrounding adding a secondary CSV export via RE Queue to add to my data set in Power BI, or using gift attributes to identify and exclude written off pledges, or using a BB partner's solution, etc. If you've been down this road, how'd you solve this problem?

Comments

  • Atsuko Umeki
    Atsuko Umeki
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge

    @Nathan Laning, Your write-off post was from a year ago. There has been no response to your posting, but have you discovered how to exclude write-offs? If so, would you please share it with me?

  • Lucien Piekut
    Lucien Piekut
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    Either the field is going to be available in the connector – so we'd filter it out in PBI itself.

    If not available in the connector, you can always check if the API endpoint has it accessible, get some code to bring those items in as a separate table, and filter out any matches entries to the written off pledges.

    If not available from the API at all, would result in a manual export. Which is OK too! But you'd still need to import to your PBI and filter out the entries.

    Sometimes what I do is give the user a place to input the offending entries (Google Sheets, etc.), then pull down those entries into the PBI and filter them out there manually. Not my favourite, but some clients like the control.

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    If I'm undestanding the original post's issue, he has a revenue report in PBI and it has Matching Gift Pledge's gift record amount included in the revenue total, even though some of the Matching Gift Pledge is written off, which he seems to not want to include in the report.

    The BB connector is using Gift List API, which does not return Write off gift record. However, EVEN if it did, it would still not help with Nathan's situation. (I can assume, he is likely asking for write off gift so he can reduce the revenue report total by the write off amount). This is OK, if the revenue report is for ALL time revenue. so the write off amount being reduced will be ok. However, usually, one is trying to run revenue report in particular time period (say 2021 revenue report). While the MG Pledge amount is in the 2021 revenue report if it is dated 2021, the write off likely happen in a future year. The write off in 2022 will not help reduce the revenue total of 2021.

    What needs to be done is to identify pledge with write off and reduce the original pledge amount by the write off (don't exclude the pledge totally, as a $10K pledge may have only $2K written off, not fully $10K written off). That requires the need to know which write off gift record is writing off which pledge. Here's another post where I mention about getting write off info.

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