Annual Pledges Paid Early (2008 paid in 2007)

[scott]

Hello,
I'm a new user and am trying to get a feel for PC+, starting now to get a month's worth of "practice" before the new year. What I'm wondering is if anyone can share how they handle annual stewardship pledges that are paid early (ie. 2008 stewardship pledges that are paid in 2007).

Here are a couple of the issues I have:
(1) I have a budgeted stewardship amount for 2008 which I would like these early payments to apply to;

(2) I will need to report throughout the year where we are at with our stewardship. I applied the first 2008 stewardship payment last week, so I could expand the dates back to that date when running reports throughout 2008, but then I will be including 2007 stewardship payments.

Any suggestions will be very much appreciated. Also, if you would prefer to discuss this on the phone and not have to type it all out, I'd be more than happy to contact you.

Thank you,

Scott S.

[NeilZ]

Hello,
I'm a new user and am trying to get a feel for PC+, starting now to get a month's worth of "practice" before the new year. What I'm wondering is if anyone can share how they handle annual stewardship pledges that are paid early (ie. 2008 stewardship pledges that are paid in 2007).

Here are a couple of the issues I have:
(1) I have a budgeted stewardship amount for 2008 which I would like these early payments to apply to;

(2) I will need to report throughout the year where we are at with our stewardship. I applied the first 2008 stewardship payment last week, so I could expand the dates back to that date when running reports throughout 2008, but then I will be including 2007 stewardship payments.

Any suggestions will be very much appreciated. Also, if you would prefer to discuss this on the phone and not have to type it all out, I'd be more than happy to contact you.

Thank you,

Scott S.

From within Contributions, all you can do is make sure that the money contributed is assigned to the 2008 pledge upon contribution entry. Then when the reports are created in 2008, these previous contributions will show as applied to the 2008 pledge.

However, since the money was contributed in 2007, the contribution statement will not reflect any contribution in 2008, as they appeared on the 2007 end-of-year statement for tax purposes.

Now as for pledge amount progress, these early payments will also appear in the Pledged to Actual report that you can run which will show the 'year-to-date' pledged vs. actual contribution amounts. So you can run this report, and get the info you need.

Is this what you're looking for ?

[scott]

Thanks for your repsonse, Neil.

I think there are two issues I'm having:

(1) We have one amount budgeted for 2008 Stewardship, but we should have another income account with a separate budget line for "2008 Stewardship Paid in 2007".

Then I could break out a portion of that 2008 Stewardship amount and put it in the "2008 Stewardship Paid in 2007". But, that would have to be part of the 2007 budget.

(2) I am just switching over to PC+, starting 01/01/08. So, obviously I don't have a 2007 budget in PC+. I can track these early payments in our current system and handle them there for now.

Would it make sense to create one budget line item in PC+ for 2007 called "2008 Stewardship Paid in 2007" just to handle these payments?

Thanks,
Scott

[NeilZ]

Thanks for your repsonse, Neil.

I think there are two issues I'm having:

(1) We have one amount budgeted for 2008 Stewardship, but we should have another income account with a separate budget line for "2008 Stewardship Paid in 2007".

Then I could break out a portion of that 2008 Stewardship amount and put it in the "2008 Stewardship Paid in 2007". But, that would have to be part of the 2007 budget.

(2) I am just switching over to PC+, starting 01/01/08. So, obviously I don't have a 2007 budget in PC+. I can track these early payments in our current system and handle them there for now.

Would it make sense to create one budget line item in PC+ for 2007 called "2008 Stewardship Paid in 2007" just to handle these payments?

Thanks,
Scott

This sounds like more an accounting issue, than a contributions issue. Perhaps this question should be asked over in the Accounting are of the forums.

However, the issue comes into play when you're entering contributions as normally, all contributions to any pledge for say, Operations, would be tracked in Funds Accounting as a normal contribution to Operations. Depending on how you have funds accounting setup.

At my last church, we did not have a separate budget for 'income' from Pledges. We just based our entire operations budget on what the pledged amount was, divided into the various ministry budget amounts. At the end of the year the prepaid pledged amounts were subtracted, if there were anything left, then 10% of that remainder was donated to missions and the remainder moved to a capital/maintenance reserves.