I was wondering if anyone else had found RE apparently generating errors in the schedule for a pledge or recurring gift?

I recently had the situation with a missed Direct Debit collection for an annual recurring gift.  The gifts should be collected every February, starting in 2006.  The first two payments (2006 and 2007) were collected correctly, but this year's (February 2008) was missed.  On checking to find out why, I noticed that the payment schedule did not have another collection scheduled until February 2010.  It appears to have generated a recurring annual schedule with the payments for 2008 and 2009 missing.

I spoke to Blackbaud's support about this, and apparently it's something that can happen, and I'm expected to manually check all the gift schedules.

Our finance department have just had a training session with Direct Debit and a possible answer to your posting came to light.

It seems that the banks have what is referred to as a ‘Dormancy Period’ regarding each DD transaction and if your DD claim is outside this period, it will not be fulfilled.  Example, if you have an annual DD and the bank has a 13 month dormancy period applied, a claim being made within the 14^th month will not be accepted.

The DD trainer suggested that to prevent this happening, you ask your bank to extend the dormancy period to perhaps 15 or more months.

I didn’t attend the training session so sorry I can’t go into further details.

Regards

Alan