Allow Recurring Gift Payments for Pledges to Count In the Pledge Outstanding Calculation
When a constituent makes a pledge payment, the "pledge outstanding" balance goes down by that amount. If a constituent sets up a recurring donation for their pledge payments, each time the recurring pledge payment is made, it is not calculated into the "pledge outstanding" balance, so the constituent appears to be far behind in their payments when they are not.
Right now, the only option is to go into each constituent record that is showing a pledge outstanding balance and check to see if they have any recurring pledge payments. If they do, then you have to manually apply them to the outstanding balance to determine if they are truly behind in their payments. I'm a small church and this is a pain, I can't imagine a large church.
Especially with the COVID 19 restrictions on gathering, we are highly encouraging our members to create recurring donations so that our cash flow continues to be steady. Not having these payments calculate in automatically creates quite a workload and headache.
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Janis Worley
- May 21 2020
- Reviewed: Voting Open
Related ideas
I'm Julianne McKeel, the "guest" that commented 22 Aug 07:19pm
Luckily when we first joined BB in 2017 the questions we asked made it apparent that the BBMS handling of recurring pledge payments wasn't going to work for us so we've been entering them manually as pledge payments when we enter in batches. As tedious as that still is, at least we don't have to go back through each record seeing who has a pledge balance due to an unapplied recurring payment. I echo everyone's concern and frustration!! As well as frustration with the idea board and voting - it's cumbersome and getting consistently longer with unsolved issues.
I also don't understand why I had to sign up to get into this post since I've been a BB user since day one - or is this to be a member of a small group of people addressing this one issue in particular so we don't have to slog thru the idea board to find when it was first brought up? - if so, that's a positive. I know I've voted on the issue a long time ago.
Actually in the comment below, Blackbaud was aware of this situation in May 2020. Amazing that nobody has figured out how to fix it. It needs to be done now. We can't be sending out statements that are wrong to our parishioners!
So this issue was originally brought to the attention of the developers in May 2021. It is now August 2022 and we're looking at another fiscal year in 2023 where we cannot apply recurring payments to pledges--the number one reason that constituents set up recurring payments. Being forced to "write" off funds we have actually received renders our accounting completely inaccurate. This isn't a small issue and it isn't optional. We need to be able to apply payments correctly and accurately.
We really need this to be fixed as soon as possible. We just ran pledge statement updates and none of them are accurate because the recurring payments since they are manually entered aren't showing up on the statement and we have just under 300 statements to now check and figure out if they are accurate or not.
This is huge! We need this to be a fix. Accepting the manual process is not ok. We all have invested resources into this software and Blackbaud acting like it can't be done is NOT ok. If our old software can do it they should be able to figure it out.
We hear you loud and clear that this is currently a sub-par process. Currently you will need to commit the batches that are created in the webview so that they show in the database view. Once they show in the database view, you will then need to go line item by line item to make sure none of the items that were added in the webview count against a pledge that is stored in the database view.
I know this is a manual process right now, but it is where we are at, so this is the best process we have.