Hi all! We currently have a handful of donors who make monthly recurring gifts, and are looking to encourage more recurring gifts going forward. Right now our recurring gifts are entered one at a time manually each month, but as we (hopefully) get more I was wondering if anyone had a method for streamlining the entry of recurring gifts? I know there is the pledge billing utility, but as the donors of these recurring gifts have the option to stop payments at any time we'd like to avoid creating pledges for these gifts (as we'd then need to write-off the pledge if the donor does need to stop payments). Any thoughts would be helpful!
Many thanks,Colleen
At my former org, we used a combination of attributes and the contribution import utility to semi-automate this. We stored the monthly amount and the billing date as attributes, and would export that data for everyone who had paid the previous month, and then import it back in as a pledge for that month's amount. We did have to go in and assign the credit card for billing to each pledge, and I know there was work being done on a custom utility that would take the CC assigned to the previous month's pledge and assign it to the new one, but there were a lot of considerations in that process to make sure we were handling it correctly.