Disclaimer: We are still fairly new to the Blackbaud product(s). 

We are discovering that some of our programs are funded via "intentions to give" as opposed to "pledges" even though we use the pledge gift type (we also use RE) to manage them.  I am looking for help in planning for a change.  We do have a receivables balance; but moving forward, we want payments (pay-cash gift type) to Debit Cash and Credit Revenue.

What adjustment, JE, etc is required to prepare for this kind of change in procedure and reporting?

 Your comments and suggestions are very welcome.

Karen

I am also interested  in this question.  Currently we make the new pledge journal entries like this:

Contributions Receivable DR / Revenue CR (in RE on g/l dist tab)

then when the cash comes in, we have RE set-up to debit cash and credit revenue.  This requires second journal entry after the gifts are uploaded to FE that debits revenue and decreases receivables.  It's a real hassel.  I've been told that the reason we do this is so that the pledge doesn't show up as an spendable gift in the gift reports until its been collected. 

I guess I am concerned as to why you would want to book anything in your system that is not a legal gift. If you are not considering 'intentions to give' a legal gift like a pledge and you're using an accrual accounting system, I would not book it at all until the cash is received.In accrual accounting the pledge is the revenue generating gift and the payment of that gift is part of cash flow.

Can you be more specific about what 'intention to give ' means to you.. is it a grant that your fundraising office can't count in it's financials? Is it a planned gift like a build up annuity? Is it a pledge that you don't have any backup for so don't want it to count in your receivables, especially because you need to revalue all receivables for audit?

Thoughts - you could use a specific Fund, Campaign or Gift type of Other (which won't be like a pledge - you can't make a payment against it) to pull these gifts out of the normal standards and add them into your reports manually. Or, if the reason you are booking these 'intentions' is to drop them from the solicitation pool, then I would forgo entering a gift and using solicit codes to manage this.

Laurel, thanks for your response.

The gifts we book are legal gifts; that is they are a written promise to give over a specified period of time (FAS 116) we recognize an allowance each year and book a NPV adjustment.  We only book the pledges over a certain threshold.  When the cash payment comes in (generally an installment), it is entered into raiser's edge, and when we upload the gifts, it is booked as revenue, just as the pledge was originally.  Then we manually JE the revenue back out in FE to avoid double counting, and reduce the receivable account.   On the RE side, our pledges are not set-up to book automatically at the time of upload into FE.

 Does anyone have a separate GL account they use (when setting up a fund in RE) that automatically books pledges over a certain threshold? It seems that a specific gift type would need to be used when entering those gifts, or a gift subtype.  How about when the pledge payment comes in,  it would seem that the funds could be coded at set-up to debit cash when the pledge payments comes in and reduce the receivable that is set-up when the pledge is made.  Right now we only code the funds to debit cash and credit revenue.  Any other suggestions/examples on how to do this with large, recordable pledges and payments?

thanks-