Rollback and/or skipping mis-aligned transactions so they're accurate?

Henry Gray
Henry Gray
Third Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hi all. Long time user of Raiser's Edge over the years in different capacities. In a new organisation and looking for advice about how best to ‘tidy’ some transactions. Over the years some recurring gift transactions that should have been skipped haven't been, instead the next payments sitting against the date that should have been skipped. This means that now there are recurring gifts with very skewed dates for next transactions coming in. If we ever wanted to accurately do recurring gift batches, this would surely be a problem (most gift entry here is manually added at present).

Before I mess with financial data (some very old!), I wanted advice on how to ‘re-align’ these? Essentially, in the example below, I'd want to skip/miss out November entirely as the gift was skipped/didn't appear. And because December's gift is now attached to Nov, it's thrown off everything since. You can see similar continues to happen down the line with this gift.

b6e42aef452e5acbe621615e547ac346-huge-ja

I worry by messing with this I'll skew the data further. Just treading carefully. Any hand-holding steps here much appreciated!

Tagged:

Comments

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge: Product Update Briefing Feedback Task 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Hi @Henry Gray - Welcome to BB Community! I second what @Kylea Johnson has said. Updating anything having to with a recurring gift schedule is difficult, especially when payments are already applied. Unless there is a specific need to make these match, I recommend you keep it as is and make it a policy that if a transaction is ‘skipped’ it needs to be updated on new recurring gifts, moving forward.

  • Henry Gray
    Henry Gray
    Third Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks - good to know. This is the exact reason I was definitely going to ask here before doing anything. I think that makes most sense.

  • Henry Gray
    Henry Gray
    Third Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks! I think this just makes it clear that going forward there should be simple steps taken to ensure things stay in line in my organisation. Most of the issues are from many years ago to be fair.

  • Elizabeth Johnson
    Elizabeth Johnson Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply All-Star Challenge: End of Year Fundraising Toolkit

    A few things to add to this thread

    • I have had success with rolling back and skipping transactions
      • When creating our recurring gift batches I like the gift reference to reflect the date I expect it to otherwise the gift entry person needs to look into this further to see what the issue is.
    • If you don't have their current credit card number (and we never hold on to those outside the BBMS transaction) I don't believe there is a way to cancel one transaction and simply start a new one without the donor initiating it.
      • I would advise contacting support before taking a step like this.
    • Whenever you make an amendment to a recurring gift - take a screenshot of the transaction tab before starting and make sure the next transaction is when you expect it to be.
      • I learned this the hard way when I was changing an appeal on a handful of recurring gifts. Would never have dreamed that would change the transaction date but it did.
    • When you do terminate or complete a gift if the status date isn't right compared to the next transaction the payments will still show up in your cash flow reports. I haven't mapped this out perfectly - more of trial and error, in the moment. I think it is that if the next transaction due is after the status date they still show up. If someone has a nice concise way for me to remember that - I'm all ears.

    Great thread and great answers - looking forward to more.

Categories