Tracking Expected Cash for Non-Bookable Pledges

Erica,

This might be something you could track in Plans; you'd create a new Plan for the constituent you're expecting to receive cash from (tied to the appropriate Campaign and Fund), and you can enter the amount expected under the Ask or Goal fields. Then, as the cash actually comes in, you could associate the contributions to the plan and then you won't even have to delete anything once the final cash contribution amount is received.

Thank you,

Brian

Hi Brian, 

Thanks for your response! What I'm actually looking for is tracking expected cash by month. Especially for donors with multiple payments coming in. Any suggestions?

Thanks, 

Erica

Erica,

Hmm... I know that there's the Yearly Cash Planning Report which would probably give you exactly what you're looking for, but it's going to function off of what's been entered into Tessitura as a formal pledge. I don't *think* there's a way to do it without actually putting the pledge with a payment schedule in through contributions.

If money wasn't received, you could always zero out or write-off the pledge, but I imagine such a recommendation might not go over too swimmingly with your Finance Department if they're not necessarily on board with the pledge entry.

Thank you,

Brian

Hi Erica,

It sounds like you may be trying to deal with verbal commitments for DAF gifts. A couple ideas:

-We've created a non-FY DAF campaign that allows us to book "pledges" that track to a dummy GL/no correlation to finance. That is so we can put in real payment dates so staff can properly follow up on those pledges, and presumably could be used for cash flow considerations. There are considerations to this: the pledge needs to be adjusted out after the actual gift is received (double work not so great) and I suggest that you would not include this campaign in your revenue reporting since it's not dependable until the monies are received. It's nice b/c these can show up in the yearly cash planning report as well as outstanding pledge reports. We've done a similar thing to track revocable planned gifts - booked in Tess so we can properly track and steward the gift, but the fund GLs are all zeros and our finance office does not book these.

-If you are talking about DAFs, it is possible to get the Fidelity/Schwab/etc to provide a written pledge that actually allows you to book the patron's pledge. This wouldn't be useful all the time, but if you're dealing with significant commitments you may look into it.

Megan
Seattle Symphony

Hi everyone, 

Does anyone else have best practices or suggestions on this? We're currently trying to figure out the best way to track these "pledges" as well. Anyone want to share their system and experiences with that system?

Thanks, 

Stephanie

At BAM we had a set of custom reports that looked at both Plans (at the time we created this suite of reports Plans were called solicitations) and real contributions.  We were thinking about these as a continuation of booked money in the past and expected money in the future with a variety of levels of certainty.  This was highly custom and took a good deal of effort to setup and maintain.  So, I get your point.  But I know of no out of the box way to do this quick and easy.

I'm wondering if Brian Ramos has any approach for this in his data analytic views.

I think using Plans would be a solid approach for this. If you also have the requirement to track when you expect the money by month, you can use the goal by date for that. If you need to do different type of reporting on these than you would with other plans, if you use a specific Plan Type (or Plan Status or both) just for these "not a pledge" expected monies, then you could pretty easily report on when you expect what, using the Plans cube in T-Stats. You'd want to use some combination of Goal By Date (treat it like a "due" date) and Plan Type and Plan Status. If it'd be a multi-payment "not a pledge", you might end up with more than one plan per person (so they can have their own Goal By Dates), but I do think it could work and is in the spirit of what Plans are for.