User Support Forum

I am trying to understand how the pledge information works.
1. I'm concerned because I am not able to enter the "period" information as weekly, monthly, etc. b/c when I pull up the "Pledged to Actual" report my "Total pledged" is wrong. It's only correct if I enter all pledges as one time gifts. Shouldn't I be able to enter the specific information from the pledge cards?
2. When I pull up the "Pledged to Actual" report, it doesn't seem to matter what dates I enter, I get the same results at the end of the report. How can I
know how much money has been given for a specific period of time during the pledge drive?
3. If it's a 3 year pledge drive, will I have to reenter each contributors information every year? Or does it carry over at the end of this year if I've entered the whole 3 years in the information screen?
Any help with this will be appreciated. Thanks...
Melissa[/list]

mhudson5419 wrote:I am trying to understand how the pledge information works.
1. I'm concerned because I am not able to enter the "period" information as weekly, monthly, etc. b/c when I pull up the "Pledged to Actual" report my "Total pledged" is wrong. It's only correct if I enter all pledges as one time gifts. Shouldn't I be able to enter the specific information from the pledge cards?
2. When I pull up the "Pledged to Actual" report, it doesn't seem to matter what dates I enter, I get the same results at the end of the report. How can I
know how much money has been given for a specific period of time during the pledge drive?
3. If it's a 3 year pledge drive, will I have to reenter each contributors information every year? Or does it carry over at the end of this year if I've entered the whole 3 years in the information screen?
Any help with this will be appreciated. Thanks...
Melissa[/list]

Melissa,

I'll try to answer each question separately, but as you'll see they all are releated.


1. If I remember right, the pledged to actual report is based on two dates.

A. The active pledge period which is the range of the two dates entered on the first line of the report dialog, and
B. The report as of date.

The active pledge period will only include pledges that fall into the range of dates listed.

So if you have a pledge period of Jan thru Dec 2007, and an as of date of 1 Jul 07, you'll get the to date pledge amount of the pledge. That is, the amount that should have been given (pledged amount) and the actual amount given as of 1 Jun 07.

So the pledge amount should be about half of the total amount pledged for the year. If you want to see what the entire pledged amount is you must enter the end-date for the pledge period (whether it be 1 or 3 years) as the as-of date.

So , enter the pledges as weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. There is no need to enter as 'one time. If you want to see the entire pledged amount, you can do as I recommended for the Pledged to actual report, or use the active pledges report using the full range dates for the pledge period.

2. I'm not sure what you're trying to do here. Some additional info would help. However, I'm assuming that you're trying to figure out how much was recevied to a campaign during a year. Since a multi-year campaign usually totals up how much was given over the campaign, you really can't do that via this report.

3. No you can enter the pledge period for as long as the campaign lasts. No need to reenter data for a 3 year building fund campaign. That said however, if someone changes the amount of their pledge in the middle of the campaign, you need to end the previous pledge at the date they wish to start the new amount, and enter a new pledge for the new amount starting from that date. This makes sure that your pledged amount does not get artificially inflated or deflated by the amount over the whole pledge period, and not just added or subtracted for the new pledged period.

I hope this is not confusing.

I'm using custom reports in Contributions and when it asks for values to match "pledge period", it only allows a 1 character entry (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.) So the date range in your answer doesn't work. This is where I'm stuck. I want to know of people that have pledged to our church, say for all of 2008, who gave in February and how much? I assume the Pledge Period would allow me to do that (i.e. 2 for February). But it doesn't return any data.

When I looked in HELP, there was no reference at all to Pledge Period...

The pledge period is numbered 1 through 5 (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly, One Time)

The fields you should be querying on are "Pledge Start Date" and "Pledge End Date".

It is important to remember that when running Custom Reports for Pledge information, you will only get information relating to pledges. There is no detailed contributions information available. Only the total pledged, amount received, and the difference.

soozr1 wrote:I'm using custom reports in Contributions and when it asks for values to match "pledge period", it only allows a 1 character entry (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.) So the date range in your answer doesn't work. This is where I'm stuck. I want to know of people that have pledged to our church, say for all of 2008, who gave in February and how much? I assume the Pledge Period would allow me to do that (i.e. 2 for February). But it doesn't return any data.

When I looked in HELP, there was no reference at all to Pledge Period...

Since you're using a custom report, the info I posted above was for a standard report and would not apply to your situation. FWIW ... the pledge period refers to the frequency of the pledge (monthly, weekly, yearly, etc) that was made.

The other problem you're seeing is that in custom reports you cannot access the actual contributions database when you select PLEDGES from the initial Posted, Unposted, Pledges dialog that appears when you select Contributions Custom Reports.

You can find out who pledged, how much was pledged, and how much they have given toward the pledge to date, but you won't be able to get how much they pledged during a single month toward the pledge.

There is probably a way to do this, but not without assistance from the Powerchurch staff who may need to create a special report, or create one to add to the standard reports already in the system.

NeilZ wrote:There is probably a way to do this, but not without assistance from the Powerchurch staff who may need to create a special report, or create one to add to the standard reports already in the system.

Unfortunately, none of these options are possible.

Zorak wrote:

NeilZ wrote:There is probably a way to do this, but not without assistance from the Powerchurch staff who may need to create a special report, or create one to add to the standard reports already in the system.

Unfortunately, none of these options are possible.

Hmmm ... and I always thought that the hard stuff you guys did immediately, the impossible stuff took a few days longer ???