Hi, we are on V15.2.33. We are looking at setting up Recurring Giving. We are looking at setting up a Faux Fund to handle Recurring giving and then making a TNEW page and using CSI's to have the donor select their schedule (Monthly, bi-weekly, etc.) When the first gift comes in do you Create Recurring Giving as a Pledge with a Billing schedule (through the end of the fiscal year and use the first gift as a payment towards it via an adjustment). Will this then allow you to Create a New Pledge at the beginning of the next fiscal year and use their stored card to process that first payment? Thank you so much for your help.
Tagging along to this: how are folks accounting for recurring donations with no end date in Tess? My gut is to do the above with a pledge through the end of the fiscal year, but I can't find any real best practices or proof in practice to share with my Finance department.
Yeah, I just set up new pledges each FY for recurring donations and set up the pledge billing utility to auto-charge their cards. Right now there are only about 5-6 recurring gifts, so it's not a huge inconvenience, but I would LOOOOOOOOVE better capabilities for that in Tesstiura.
I have one tedious day a year where I set up everything for the next fiscal year. We currently have around 100 sustaining monthly donors, but are planning to boost that program this year and I anticipate the number growing a lot. We receive recurring donations through CC auto-charges in Tessitura (my personal favorite because I only have to touch them once per year), EFT donations through our bank which allows folks to give through their checking account, and we use Donate2 for online donors to sign up and that money goes on account. I set them all up the same way though, to prep for the new fiscal year. Everyone gets a new pledge each fiscal year with their installments setup for each month, and for the credit card ones I setup the Pledge Billing Schedule for them. I do this about one week before the end of the fiscal year so that the first of the month donors run smoothly. We don't use faux funds, it's all real, the only bummer about that is if people's cards fail and we can't get their updated info - we adjust the pledge balance to $0 then. I also find that gift officers can be confused about the difference between a true pledge and these sustaining pledges - because the monthly donors didn't pledge $300, they signed up for $25 per month for forever. But I have to set up that donor a $300 pledge each year to schedule those payments. Gift officers have said things like "Thanks for your $300 pledge!" which then confuses the donor. To help with this, I make sure I can put "Sustainer" everywhere I can, from a Constituency code to the Designation to the Appeal/Source, in the notes and in the annual ack we send them. I believe v16 is promising some increased capacity in rolling over pledges like these, so hopefully in the future we won't have to manually set them up every year.
This is exactly how we set ours up, but we didn't use a faux fund. We use the same fund as our annual giving so we can track all revenue together, but use a separate payment method to track (along with a CSI) which is a standard online gift versus one that was filled out through our monthly giving form.
We also setup by fiscal year and do a big roll-over "day" (takes more than a day unfortunately) with close to 600 new pledges for the next fiscal. Tessitura does have improvements on their short-term roadmap, so this will be an exciting enhancement to improve our efficiency.