Recurring Gifts Able to be Applied to Pledge

Morgan Hansen
Morgan Hansen
Fourth Anniversary
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hi, when will there be an option to apply a recurring gift to a pledge payment?

Currently is very inconvenient that there is no option for a recurring gift payment, and no way to apply a recurring gift to a pledge payment.

Does anyone know of a work around in order to do this?

Comments

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    Welcome to the BB Community forums, @Morgan Hansen .

    I don't know that there will ever be that option. Recurring gifts and pledges are two different things. Pulling a recurring gift payment to apply to a pledge or vice versa would mess up payment schedule for both.

    I can understand your frustration. If it is an ongoing issue, perhaps you need to start over with a pledge for the record. You can have scheduled payments to a pledge.

  • Rachel Cavalier
    Rachel Cavalier Community All-Star
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    Rather than putting a recurring gift in, we schedule the pledge instalments and then diarise for a couple of weeks before the last instalment is due for the colleague in charge or that pledge to contact our supporter to ask if they would like to continue to donate at the same amount/frequency.

    If they want to continue, then we put in a recurring gift after we receive that last instalment.

  • John Mohnasky
    John Mohnasky
    Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @JoAnn Strommen in the case where you start over with a pledge and have scheduled payments to a pledge, is the donor automatically charged for those payments or do they have to go in manually every month (for a monthly payment cycle) and enter the gift? I think this is a big issue because a donor can set up a pledge and pay off that pledge with a recurring gift. Why would we make them go in every month and do it manually when they can do it automatically? Our pledges have benefits associated with them so we have to enter the pledge along with the recurring gift.

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    @John Mohnasky Welcome to the BB Community forums.

    I'm think I'm now grasping your question. I'm not saying anything where a donor would need to go in monthly. There is always so much confusion when dealing with a ‘recurring gift’ vs a ‘recurring batch’ vs. a ‘recurring’ payment to a pledge.

    A 'recurring gift' in RE language is a specific gift type different than a pledge. Folks can make a ‘recurring’ payment to both types: recurring gift and pledge. But you can not take gifts entered as payment to a recurring gift type and apply them to a pledge gift type or vise versa.

    Pledges can be paid with monthly recurring payments without donor taking any monthly action.

    Does that clarify?

  • John Mohnasky
    John Mohnasky
    Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @JoAnn Strommen thank you! When you say "Pledges can be paid with monthly recurring payments without donor taking any monthly action." how do you make this happen? What exactly are the “monthly recurring payments” that you reference?

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge

    @John Mohnasky BB has two platforms to process credit cards that I'm aware of BBPS and BBMS. If you have a partner vendor where folks make gifts, they may be your card processor.

    This knowledge base article provides info and may answer some questions for you.

    So I have a donor who pledges $600 and wants to make $50/mo payments on the first of each month. I enter the pledge on the record in RE, create a payment schedule and enter the credit card details.
    If I use webview, I can have card automatically charged and I approve batch. If I use db view, I create a new gift batch on the first of the month, use options under tools to generate/pull in all the records with credit card payments due that date into my batch, use another tools option to create the actual transaction (charge the card). Donor has now made their monthly recurring payment without any effort on their part. There are a lot of details but that's the general porcess.

  • Christina Vandagriff
    Christina Vandagriff
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Barbara Kunkel
    I was just looking at this, and your solution seems to be the only way to reconcile the correct pledge balance when recurring gifts are set up this way.

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