Recurring Monthly doanations

Hi Kristin,

I handle monthly donations in a similar fashion, and I do think using pledges is the best method.  If a donor signs up for a monthly donation of $15, I will manually change their membership level to reflect the amount they have pledged for a year ($180 = "Principal" member).  I take off the expiration date for these donors so that their membership level stays constant.

You can manually alter membership levels by clicking the history tab.

I have a related question re: monthly contributions.  How do you handle tax receipting for your monthly donors?  Do you select tax receipt acknowledgement for each monthly contribution and send them with a letter once a month?  I am hoping that it is possible to issue a tax receipt twice a year (end of tax year and end of fiscal year) without just manually changing the amount of the actual receipt.

Thank you!

Dana

We are also looking in to starting a monthly donation program.  We do currently have some larger level donors who make monthly payments, however now our Development Director would like to offer this to the lower level donors, i.e. $5 a month.

My question is, is Tessitura capable of doing payment plans as direct debits from checking accounts?  Or are credit cards the only option?

Thanks!

Hey Dana, I take it that you are in Victoria, BC, right? Which would mean you need to have tax receipt numbers issued in order in accordance with CRA as opposed to what they do in the USA. I handle the mothly tax receipting here at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra for the monthly donors. It was quite a long process to figure out how to receipt our donors without making it the most manual process ever. We have to receipt them twice a year as you suggested above. Our end of fiscal is June 30th and the end of the tax year as well. We combine whatever the donor gave in the first six months of the year on to one receipt sent in July and the second receipt is a combination of whatever the donor gave in the last six months of the year on one receipt usually sent in January. How we do it is that in January, Feb, March, April, May we use a 'Dummy Pledge Receipt' Acknowledgement type that does NOT pull a tax receipt number from the back end when you run the Print Ack Report, but still registers within their contribution when we pull the pledge billing utility. We also use the dummy receipt type for July, Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov. This means that in the month's of June and December we have set up another receipt type called "Consolidated Pledge Receipt" that actually pulls a tax receipt number from the back end when we pull Print Ack Report. You just have to remember to use this ack type when pulling your monthly pledge billing in the month's of June and December. This process allows us not to have 12 tax receipt numbers assigned for every month of the year to every donor, which would be a crazy amount of work! We then set-up a back end report here that pulls all of this information out into excel. This leaves you with one line per month (which could be six lines per patron). Using some excel formulas we pull the six lines into one line per patron so you can see exactly what month they gave and how much they gave. I can hopefully ask my Tessitura Guru here at the ESO if they might share this with you? Anyways, I would be happy to help if you need more info and I hope this made some sense. Thanks, Erin Mulcair

Hey Gina, You can use direct debit as a payment type, but as of now I don't believe Tessitura is set-up to actually pull straight from bank accounts unless you are in Australia. Anyone feel free to chime in if I am wrong. The way that we do it here at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is that we have them all set-up as Direct Debit biling types but to actually process the money we use our online banking system. (TD Bank in our case). We enter all of the patrons account information from their void cheques into the TD Bank system. Once per month we pull out who we have donating from TD Bank and what we have in Tessitura and make sure the numbers match. We then authorize payments and put the money through on the TD website. After that we enter our direct debit donors(who already have pledges set up from before) one by one with the Direct Debit payment type so that we show this money as paid off. Our Finance department knows that we have this process and that they will see the money in the bank via TD and that this 'debit' payment type is more of a 'dummy' payment type. This seems to work well for us because we only have around 50 or 60 debit monthly donors and someone dedicated to this process. Let me know if I can help you with anything else. Thanks, Erin