
Importing Pledge and Installment Information in The Raiser’s Edge
If you have a big campaign effort going on, you may have a file of new pledges, or recurring gifts, that need to be entered in The Raiser’s Edge. These can quickly and easily be imported into The Raiser’s Edge using ImportOmatic (IOM).
Importing Pledges and Recurring Gifts
When importing these types of gifts, their schedules need to be imported as well.
Specifically which payment schedule fields you need to include during your import will depend on the frequency of the payments the donor designates. For example, a monthly schedule uses different fields from an annual schedule.
The types of questions to ask yourself as you set up your data file include: Is this a one-time gift or a multi-year commitment? If there are multiple installments, are the installments due on a specific day every month, a specific point in the month (the 2nd Friday), or just anywhere in the year?
The fields used when importing payment schedules are explained below. This grid can also be found in the IOM User’s Guide:
Importing Pledge Payments
When you make a payment to a pledge or a recurring gift, The Raiser’s Edge will automatically change the gift type from Cash to Pay-Cash once it is applied to the pledge. The Gift Type provided in your data file should say Cash, rather than Pay-Cash.
When importing payments directly to the record, either the Gift ID, or the Gift Import ID, of the original pledge or recurring gift must be included in the data file to apply the payments.
When including the Gift ID/Import ID, the option to use the default values on the pledge can be selected as well (see below). This option is helpful if you don’t have the campaign, fund, or appeal for the original pledge in your data file, but want those same values to be reflected on the payment. The same option exists for Recurring Gifts.
Do I always need the Gift ID/Import ID? No – it is okay if you don’t have the Gift ID/Import ID. Depending on where your data file is coming from, you simply may not have access to those IDs to include in your data file.
In this case, you will need to import your payments into a RE Gift Batch. You have two options, in Batch, for applying the payments to their respective pledges/recurring gifts:
1. Apply the payments to the correct pledges/recurring gifts line-by-line, in Batch. With your cursor on a row in the Batch, go to the word Gift on the menu bar, down to Apply To, and then choose the appropriate gift type.
2. When in the “Commit Gift Batch” screen, you can choose to Automatically apply gifts to pledges and recurring gifts, as shown below.
While it may look tricky to import pledges, recurring gifts, and their payments, it just takes a little work to set up the import, and then they will process with ease!
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