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Hello. I’m new to Tessitura, only in my second month, and have encountered a reporting problem I’m not sure how to solve.
I have been using the “pledge gift” report to get information on who gave how much on what date. Last month this worked fine, but now that I have pledge payments in their second month, I realize that the report will not pull pledge payments received. (For example, if someone makes a $60 pledge in July and pays $10 of it, that shows on the July report. When they pay another $10 in August, I don’t see it on the August report because Tessitura counts it as a July transaction—when in fact that second $10 payment arrived in August.)
This is unacceptable for our financial reporting because I need to know the “who/how much/what date” for every gift, regardless of whether it’s part of a pledge. It’s also important that the report pull the date the payment was made (not the “transaction date,” i.e., whatever day I’m working in the computer, and not a posting date).
I would appreciate hearing how other people get around this problem. If you have created a custom report, would you be willing to share code that I could pass on to one of our more IT-knowledgeable staff? Any advice or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks!
For all group by modes (Fund; Payment; Campaign & Fund; or Campaign, Fund & Designation), you can show constituent detail, which will list gifts by contribution. While the detail level will not show individual payments, it does allow you to click and open a contribution detail window to view individual transactions.
I wouldn’t call this a problem of the report, per say. It’s just the way the report was designed, not to show payment/transaction level detail, but more aggregate summaries of the financial data over a period of time. That being said, I think everyone will find this report much more usable in v10.0.
If you are looking for more detail, I would suggest looking at Transactions by Posting, which provides more detail than the Fund Activity Report.
-Ryan
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Alaina Smith Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 3:22 PM To: Ryan Creps Subject: RE: [Tessitura Development Forum] Pledge payment reporting help needed
Thanks to everyone who weighed in. I appreciate it!
Ryan, will the new version of the fund activity report show the dates on the individual lines with the payments? As it stands now, if you ask to see a month's worth of data, dates are not showing next to individual money lines. To find out what date is associated with a pledge payment, you'd have to run a fund activity report for each day (report range 8/1 to 8/1, then report range 8/2 to 8/2, then report range 8/3 to 8/3, etc.). Is that problem fixed in v. 10?
Thanks. Alaina
From: Ryan Creps <bounce-ryancreps9649@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 8/31/2010 7:05:45 PM
Just a quick post in here to highlight a great enhancement to the upcoming v10.0:
The Fund Activity Report will allow you to filter by either Posting Date, Transaction Dates, or Contribution Dates (or any combination of therein), along with a bevy of other features. I tried to culminate a number of enhancement requests, frustrations, ad hoc requests, and issues reported at the conference and over the past few years into a concise rewrite of this report. I hope this will go a long way in helping both finance and development with some common reconciliation issues.
Anyhow, here’s the release note:
The Fund Activity Report has been completely rewritten. New parameters FYears, Campaigns, Designations, Contribution Start/End Date, Posting Start/End Date allow many more options for filtering. The Group By parameter has been altered slightly. The Constituent option has now been moved to a new parameter, Show Constituent Detail. To run this report using the old "Group By Constituent" option, the report can be now run using Group By set to Fund and Show Constituent Detail set to Yes. All existing report schedules are converted to use this if they were previously set to group by Constituent. The Group By parameter has new options for grouping by "Campaign, Fund" and "Campaign, Fund, Designation". The Group By Payment option works as before, but the Show Constituent Detail parameter will be disabled as it is not possible to show the results in an meaningful manner. The old report objects (datawindows, window, and stored procedures) are now obsolete. New report objects d_fund_activity, RP_FUND_ACTIVITY_REPORT replace all old report objects using a single datawindow, single procedure and the standard reports window. This makes this report slightly easier to customize if desired. If using the Posting Start/End Date parameters, only posted transactions will be reported in the results. The datawindow has been updated to more standard modern formatting. More information is provided in the updated report documentation. 2008 Enhancement #3236.
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Leslie McKinley Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 2:47 PM To: Ryan Creps Subject: RE: [Tessitura Development Forum] Pledge payment reporting help needed
Alaina
Based on what you are saying the system would never have the date you consider the received date. I’m also not certain how you are doing receipts etc., A payment will never have a contribution date. It seems the system will not be able to do nearly a fraction of what it could be doing given this different definition. Are you changing the contribution dates – using your example--- from 8/1 to 7/31 when you enter them in the system?
Your financial folks might for the sake of having accurate data in the system and deposits – change the way deposits are done. CASH FLOW IS IMPORTANT – I truly understand that but for being able to track things it might be worth it.
Here for our major gifts we have a 2PM cut off for getting things to our Cashier. Any checks we give her are what are entered/posted AND deposited that day. If we receive a check after the deposit run, it is held until the next day.
Are ticketing and smaller gifts are entered/posted in a different building and have to go through a different quality control check each morning before the prior day’s batches are posted. These items are entered in the system the day before they are deposited and posted. Our Cashier is able to track adequately this way. But I understand everyone has their style of doing things.
The other thing is if you are consistent that deposits are all done the day before the they are entered then wouldn’t you be able to run your reports with this in mind. So that if you want your deposits for the month of July you would run the Fund Activity 7/2 thru 8/1.
Seems you are looking for a third date – I just saw Dale pop up and he makes a suggestion. I think your best bet is talk with the financial folks about the dates the systems has and determine how to interpret them for your site.
Leslie
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Alaina Smith Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 5:12 PM To: McKinley, Leslie Subject: RE: [Tessitura Development Forum] Pledge payment reporting help needed
Thanks both to Leslie and Dale.
The fund activity report may have potential, but if it pulls on transaction date, then that's a concern because for us, transaction date (date working in computer) is not necessarily gift date. (In fact, the gift date received is more often than not a different date from today's date.)
Say a pledge payment comes in during summer for a pledge made in January. The check for the pledge payment is deposited to the bank on 7/31. The data entry occurs on 8/1. While doing data entry, we consider the gift date to be 7/31 (date of deposit). So, the "contribution date" is 7/31 and the "transaction date" is 8/1. Since the fund activity report only pulls transaction dates, it would a sweep for certain contribution dates. I'm wondering how to capture "contribution dates" even though I know Tessitura's technical definition for "contribution" doesn't include pledge payments.
How would I find the above-style transaction? Thanks again!
From: Dale Aucoin <bounce-daleaucoin4707@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 8/31/2010 3:53:45 PM
Alaina,
I don't think the New Contributions report will work for your situation since it doesn't show pledge payments. It only shows new pledges and new gifts. Dale
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