Has anybody found a good solution to the problem that soft credits can't be linked to Plans? I know that you can manually set the "Recorded" amount to reflect the fact that there's a gift out there that corresponds to the Plan, but I really need to be able to see which gift it is, and don't want to have to rely on having my report make an educated guess based on campaign and amount.
I've created a way to use one of the custom data fields on the Contribution to link Contributions to Planned Giving records, and I suppose I could do that again, but Planned Giving records don't have a way to link to Contributions at all. Since there's existing functionality for linking Contributions to Plans, I don't want to settle for that inferior method if I don't have to.
Has anybody created a utility for forcing the linking on the back end? Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Any other clever ideas?
Galen,
You can link Soft Credits to Plans, you just need to do it after the Contribution has been processed and saved. Go to the Constituent who has been soft-credited - Contributions Tab, then double click on the soft-credited Contribution and in the window that opens you'll see a Plan field. Click on the Chicklet to select the appropriate Plan for this Constituent, click OK and close.Dale
Thanks, Dale!
Is that in the documentation somewhere and I just missed it? If not, it should probably be added to the section on "Linking Contributions to Plans."
We have a lot of soft credits that weren't automatically linked to Plans during the conversion from Solicitations, and I want to get them linked up. Rather than doing it one by one on the front end, can I safely just write a script that figures out which gifts should be linked to which plans and write the plan_no to the plan_no column on the contribution record?
I will see if we can make that a bit more clear in the documentation.
We generally do not recommend making SQL updates to data when there is functionality to do the same job via the client. That said you are correct, the plan_no field in T_CONTRIBUTION is what links a Contribution to a Plan.
Dale