I've had this situation arise a few times in the last couple months.
Development enters a gift under a donor advised fund account (these are listed as foundations). The gift is then soft credited to the patron and membership is assigned to the patron on the basis of the soft credit.
Then the devo person realizes the wrong patron was soft credited. They delete the membership and zero out the gift assuming that the soft credit will be wiped away as well. Unfortunately, the soft credit remains untouched. So now we have a $0 gift with a soft credit for the original gift amount still in place.
The membership is gone but I can't delete the soft credit because it is technically still tied to the now vanished membership.
2 questions: 1)What is the right sequence of operations to undo the initial action (i.e. how do I remove the soft credit, the associated membership and the original gift) and 2) Should the fact that a soft credit can be orphaned in this way be considered a bug?
So far, I've gotten around this by deleting the offending record from t_creditee directly in the database. But that feels kind of icky.
They just need to remove the soft credit before zeroing out the gift. It does seem icky because this is an easy step to forget and I still sometimes have to go in and delete a soft credit from t_creditee when someone forgets.
Thanks Andrea that was the confirmation I needed. Good to know I'm not alone in this :)
- Levi
To your second question, I've run into this issue multiple times and though I don't think it's technically a bug I definitely wish it behaved differently. The way soft credits are designed it seems like they're basically independent of the contributions they link to. It's possible to set up multiple creditees for each contribution, and in amounts different from (and greater than) the amount of the actual gift. And that's without adjusting the gift or doing anything too unusual. In our test system I was able to enter a single $1,000 gift with three different soft credits totaling $4,000. So, I think the design is deliberate, but I'm not sure when/why you would need that capability. It's definitely not something we would ever do deliberately. But the issue you're describing, where a gift gets adjusted and the soft credit doesn't, that we encounter a lot.
Out of curiosity, I just pulled a quick list to see how many accounts have a soft credit where the credit_amt in t_creditee is not equal to the cont_amt in t_contribution and found 216(!) people. So that may be a new fun project.