Hi everyone,
Here at The Australian Ballet we are hoping to adopt the payment option of allowing donors to give on a monthly basis. Right now, however, I am manually banking these pledge donations one by one seeing that we have only a handful of people on board (they have agreed to be my test bunnies). I have tested running the Pledge Billing Report in the Foreground without a problem however now I’m a little stuck on setting the parameters for Scheduling the report. What I am trying to do is schedule this report to run on the 15th of every month so that a batch will open, credit cards will be billed for all scheduled pledge donations, the batch will then close and be posted (all on its own!).
Can someone please advise me of what parameters to use for the following?
Start Date/Begin Current Period:
End Date/End Current Period:
Cut Off Date/Prev Billing Cutoff Date:
I have read all the Tessitura documentation but am still I’m very confused about the Tessitura lingo i.e Report run date, Beginning of report run month, End of report run month, Beginning of: report run date +/- n months, End of: report run date +/- n months etc, etc.
I've tried different set ups but none of them did what I wanted so I thought I'd seek some advice. What I would like to do is schedule this report to run on the 15th of every month for 12 months so that it bills those credit cards on the billing schedule.
Your help is most greatly appreciated!!!
Thanking everyone in advance,
Katherine
Hi Katherine,
I think generally it's a good idea to keep a little padding on your dates.If you only are running a billing on the 15th I would probably recommend the following.
Begin Current PeriodReport Run Date -5
End Current PeriodReport Run Date +5
This way if someone hit a wrong date when setting up the schedule they would be caught and processed as long as they are within 5 days of the 15th.We actually do ours plus and minus 10 days.Cutoff date we actually have as Report Run Date +10.Not 100% sure what the best policy is for that but we've been doing these for a while now and have had no problems that I am aware of.
Also one thing to note is that the batches wont "post" themselves, you will still need to post them on the 15th, unless that limitation has changed recently.
Cheers!
I have ours run on the last Thursday of every month & keep the dates wide open for the entire month.
Start Date:BgRunMonth
End Date: EnRunMonth
Cut Off Date:BgRunMonth
Schedule: Monthly by day (you would want to use monthly by date)
For my October 29th billing this translates to...
Start Date:October 1
End Date: October 31
Cut Off Date:October 1
Hope this helps, it does make life a little easier to have these auto-run. We did run into an issue where having the report emailed was causing errors, but it seems to work fine without the email. (I have the Pledge Billing Summary Report run and emailed to me as a reminder to post the batch.)
~Sadie
Hi Sadie and Ryan,
Thanks so much for your advice and suggestions - your methods make total sense to me. So I tested your parameters in Tessitura Test and am still having trouble (surprise surprise)!
I have three test bunnies (A, B, C - all with the same pledge date set ups) and out of the three only one pledge payment credit card was charged. Account 'A' contribution was listed as 'Billed with Payment' and 'Payment Received' in the contribution detail screen however 'B' and 'C' accounts have their transactions listed as 'Billed without Payment' with no batch and posting number.
I don't think it has anything to do with the type of credit card used either because 'A' and 'B' both have MasterCards.
My question is, why would the Pledge Billing report bill one credit card and not the other two although they have the same set ups?
I'm completely stumped! Have you guys come across this?
Thanks so much for your help,
This sounds a lot like the problem we were having and attributed to the email set-up, but maybe it was something else. I think you should set up a help ticket with the network. Good Luck!
Hey, Katherine!
This is an excellent thread, thanks for starting it. I was curious to know if you ever found out what was going on with test bunnies B and C? How does the story end?
Thanks!
Hi Cate,
To be honest, my testing was done quite a while ago so it's all a bit fuzzy for me now. I do recall however that I went against scheduling the Pledge Billing Report on a monthly basis (due to the problems I was experiencing) and just ran it manually on the 15th of every month so that if there were any discrepancy with billing credit cards, they can be charged manually in another batch. This way, you can keep an eye on the process.
Unfortunately, I never investigated any further as to why my parameters were not working. If you come across a solution, I would be most happy if you let me know!
Thanks,
(I'm no longer with The Australian Ballet so am replying with my new user account. Haven't figured out how to delete avatars off the network yet!)
If you, or anyone at your organization is attending the conference, there is a training session on pledge and order billing.