Quick question for the hivemind about the contribution data model in Tessitura. I am building an integration with a system (Banner) that has two different objects for gifts and pledges. This means that each pledge payment is just another gift, and there's a join table somewhere that joins pledge payments (as gifts) to pledges. I'm going to be importing a bunch of data from this system into Tessitura and want to store references to the Banner IDs. So far, for regular gifts, I am doing this by having a custom data field on the contribution that can be used to store the gift no from Banner, creating a mapping between Tessitura ref_no and banner gift_no.
The question is how can I build a suitable mapping for pledges and pledge payments. My working model has me add a second custom field to Tessitura contributions for Banner pledge_no, and then maintaining a separate table in Tessitura to link tessitura pledge payments to Banner gift_no's. So, any given ref_no in Tessitura will have either the gift_no or pledge_no custom field populated, and the gift_nos from Banner that represent pledge payments will be stored in a separate local table.
Does this seem sound? What would be the appropriate key in Tessitura to link pledge payments on? T_Transaction.sequence_no, perhaps?
We do a similar-ish thing, and sequence is the best thing for tracking pledge payments. You may need to also figure out how to enter in and manipulate "Current to Present" and "Future to Perfect" or whatever that weird stuff is in order to keep Tessitura happy with the pledge payment structure...fortunately I just have to maintain a custom table on our gifts/pledges/pledge payments in order to _export_ data.