I am a few months into this development job at a small non-profit and pretty new to Raiser's Edge. I have recently been in the process of reconciling annual contributions with our bookkeeper and we've come across a problem with pledge payments that I'd appreciate some feedback on.
     We were having a hard time getting our numbers to match because my RE report totals were including pledge payments that were applied to a pledge made the previous year. I know for accounting purposes the pledge amount is reported as income in the year the pledge was made, but oftentimes payments to that pledge are made in a different year! We don't want to be reporting the income twice.  I've thought of a couple different solutions, but wondered how you all have done things?
     We record the gift date as the date the gift was received, but we also have fiscal year listed as an attribute. My initial thought was that when entering a pledge payment I should assign it the fiscal year in which the pledge was made instead of the fiscal year that the payment was received. That way when pulling reports, I can exclude gifts that are assigned to a different fiscal year.
     Is there an easier or better way to do this? Or do you see any snags that I might run into later? Thanks!

At the end of a fiscal year, we write-off any pledges that are left unpaid.  If a payment arrives after the close of the fiscal year, we enter it as a single gift and use a late pledge payment appeal code to note that it was a pledge payment from the previous year.  With applying the appeal code, we can filter the late payments from reports or queries.   If using the appeal code doesn't work for your organization, perhaps a notation in the gift notes will work.  I hope that helps! 

We run many of our reports looking for Cash, Pledge, Stock (sold) and Matching Gift Pledge.   that way payments in a different fiscal year from the pledge do not show.  we do carry pledges from Board Members, Corporations and Foundations over the Fiscal Year.  However, we also have many pledges from our phone campaign.   We have a separate fund ( Annual Fund Pledges not booked) that allows us to track these pledges.  The finance department only books these as cash upon receipt.  On June 30th I write off all unpaid pledges to this fund.  If a payment comes in later than that, we book it as cash to the new fiscal year but to the old appeal.

Hello!  I'm a very new user to RE and a lot of things make sense and at the same time they don't make sense. 

Reading the previous discussions, there are many different ways that people input their data.  At my org, when we recieve the payment, they are dated the day the payment was recieved regardless of when the pledge was made.  I'm actually trying to run a report or a query/export on the payments applied this year to last year pledges.  Can anyone help?

You can use a Reports/Financial Reports/Gift Detail and Summary report.  Pull a query of all of last year's pledges and put that query in the Include ____ on tab one of the report.   Have the Gift Detail and summary report then search on the dates for this year for gfit type of Pay-Cash.   This should give you what you are looking for.