Hello All!
Our organization is currently revamping a lot of our development procedures and one of them is the way that we do pledge billing.
At some point before the current Development Director and I came into our positions, a report was built for us, however because it was created in SmartTools, the formatting is BAD. The main issue lies in the Normal Billing Schedule table that shows up underneath the polite text requesting the donation payment. In the bill created for us in Tess, there is a limit to how many lines can go into the table, so in the case of anybody who has more than about 8 payments on a schedule (monthly payments and such), the lines crunch together and overlap.
My solution was to export the data as an excel file and make a simple merge document in Word using the data fields in the report for the merge. Everything is perfect except for the issue of the billing schedule. I see that the no_days column has the number of days since the last payment was made, and I also see the actual initial contribution date as well, however I do not see the end date for the payment schedule or the number of payments on the schedule anywhere on the report. If I had those two pieces of data, I could probably "Macgyver" some sort of conditional formatted data field to fill in a table. Yucky, but it should work.
I thought I'd be clever and look for a report that could show normal billing schedules, however I did not find anything that appeared to show me this information. At this point, it seems my only option is to look into each constituent file and make record of their payment schedules, and merge a second time with the payment information. Obviously this is problematic because this information is clearly dynamic, and I'd love to not have to update a spreadsheet every time that a payment goes through.
Anyway, my quandary:
1. Is there any way that I could merge the billing schedule into a Word Document?
2. If there is no simple way, is there a report that shows the end date of a bill schedule and the number of payments in the schedule?
3. If none of the above is possible, is there a report that could show me payment schedules against a list of constituents?
I know this is grossly long, but it has plagued me for weeks.
My best,
Angela