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
We are about to implement something similar to what Maery described.
When someone opts in to monthly giving we will be adding attributes for the gift amount and the ID of credit card that they used for the original gift (this is the ID number you see at the top of the window if you double-click on a credit card in the Transactions-Credit Card screen). We state that all monthly gifts will be billed on the fifteenth of the month, so we don't need to keep track of the billing date like Maery did. I have written a stored procedure that adds these attributes automatically when someone opts in to monthly giving online.
We also add a Monthly Donor constituency to the account. If someone wants to cancel their monthly donations we will put an end date on the constituency (it's also an option to do this from their online account if they log in to our website).
Then every month there will be a 3 step process for people with an active Monthly Donor constituency: first use the contribution import utility to create a pledge with a billing schedule for everyone's monthly amount; they run a custom utility I have written that takes the credit card ID from the attribute and associates it with the pledge billing schedule; then run the pledge billing utility.
We are still in testing phases and I wish it was a bit more automated, but we are working on a quick timeline to turn it around. I would love to see this made easier in future versions of Tess!