pledge procedural question

I would vote for holding off recording the pledge unless you are VERY sure that you will raise the matching funds – which could certainly be the case.  For example, we had a donor who gave a nice gift and agreed (after we suggested) that it be presented as a match.  We already had a certain number of dollars that would qualify, and the purpose of the match was to bring in an additional amount.  In that case we did book the pledge before the other money came in.

But if it really is a “new” match to raise “new funds,”  I would wait.  Heaven forbid you would have to write off the match if it didn’t work.

_______________

Julie P. Hamre

Strathmore Hall Foundation, Inc.

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301.581.5136; fax 301.581.5201

www.strathmore.org

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This is more of a general Devo question than a Tessitura question but...

I'm wondering if any of you Devo people have a policy in place for entering pledges when there are conditions attached.  Most specifically I'm interested in Matching grants.

Here's the situation.  We have received notification of a pledge for a specific amount from a Foundation however they are requiring that we raise the same amount from other sources before they pay us.  Does your finance department allow you to book the pledge in Tessitura now or do you have to wait until you have met the conditions and received notification that the money from the Foundation is on its way.

Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

thanks,
Dale

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Here at the Public we do wait until the match conditions had been met for grants such as these, and then pledge them when we receive confirmation that it is going to be paid out.

One tip, though, for our most recent grant like this not all gifts qualified for the matching amount. What we ended up doing to track the gifts that did is create a dummy account (XYZ Foundation Challenge Grant) and then soft credited all the appropriate gifts to that record. At any point any staff member could then look up that account and see how close we were to the goal just by clicking on the Contributions Tab. We were also able to easily pull a report of all the attached contributions by printing out the Credited Contributions section of the Full Bio report without having to worry about appeal, source, or what have you.

Rey

--

A. Rey Pamatmat

Tessitura Manager

The Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street

New York, NY 10003

(212) 539-8739

rpamatmat@publictheater.org

Dale

It depends (isn’t that always the answer).   For small matching grants we didn’t do it.  Then we got a big one and Development wanted to be able to see it in Tessitura – mainly because it was a match over several years and we needed to track the payments for year the conditions were met.    So the pledge went in with payment and temp restricted schedules.   Our auditors have not allowed us to carry either on the books so at the end of each year we do journal entries to correct the GLs.    We are in the last year of this particular one.    It is just a matter of having to do adjustments on the GL each year.

We have a second one about to start and am lobbying that it not be entered until conditions are met.    While monitoring the GL adjustments is not a burden, there is the issue of personnel changes and reflecting accurately what is valid within Tessitura.

Leslie

This is more of a general Devo question than a Tessitura question but...

I'm wondering if any of you Devo people have a policy in place for entering pledges when there are conditions attached.  Most specifically I'm interested in Matching grants.

Here's the situation.  We have received notification of a pledge for a specific amount from a Foundation however they are requiring that we raise the same amount from other sources before they pay us.  Does your finance department allow you to book the pledge in Tessitura now or do you have to wait until you have met the conditions and received notification that the money from the Foundation is on its way.

Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

thanks,
Dale

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!