We received a payment on a bequest pledge in Feb. 2017. It was received via wire transfer and recorded in the correct account in our accounting software. But for some reason it was not reported to development or recorded in Tessitura.
My finance director is concerned that updating the pledge now will mess up the books for this season because the pledge payment was received on 2/24/2017. My Director of Development is concerned that if Tessitura does not accurately reflect the payment, we won't have accurate records if we wanted to pull this information in the future.
What would your organization do in this case since the transaction date cannot be changed even though the contribution date can be back dated?
What we would probably do in this situation, is to record it in Tessitura on a separate batch. Then for accounting purposes, ignore the batch. (We'd keep it with the rest of our batches and write an explanation on the batch so that if it was pulled for an Audit, the auditor's would understand what was done.) This might create a reconciling item for the rest of the fiscal year, but if it's a one-time large payment, it would be easily tracked.
Also... if it was recorded properly in the accounting system for the last FY and not in Tessitura, there already would have been a reconciling issue in the previous fiscal year, so it shouldn't be that much of a problem to have one for this year that corrects last year.
Thank you. This is actually how I suggested we handle this situation, so I am happy to know I am in line with what someone else would do.
We'd do (and have done) the same thing.