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