Writing off a Pledge

[mkavodah]

Hi,

Our fiscal year just wrapped up and we need to write off some pledges. How do we do that in C&P?

Thanks as always!
Mk

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

I am not quite sure I understand what you mean.

Would you please elaborate what you mean by "pledges"

[mkavodah]

For accounting purposes, "a pledge is defined as an unconditional promise to give cash or other assets. GASB 33 requires that promises of private donations should be recognized as receivables and revenue in the accounting period in which they are verifiable, measurable, probable of collection, and all applicable eligibility requirements have been met." In SalesForce, we manually enter a C&P Pledge when we have a promise that meets this criteria. When it is determined that a pledge is erroneous or a Bad Debt, we reverse the balance in our accounting system. This process is considered a Write-Off. In SalesForce, we edit an existing pledge by entering a date in the Write Off field and the amount in the Write Off Amount field. This is not changing the balance of the pledge.

Are we going about this the correct way? If not, what should we be doing?

Thanks!

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

We have been discussing this issue internally and trying to figure out what we need to do to address your question.

When a pledge is added to C&P Pledge the total is added manually



Based on what you are saying - when the pledge is considered as "bad debt" then it needs to be written off. Can the Pledge Amount be changed to $0 then?

As we are not sure what you wish to see happen please explain under the best of conditions what you think should be available as an option. Each payment, once made, creates an opportunity and in case of no payments no opportunities are created so those can't be reversed as they don't exist.

The only entry for pledge is the entry in the C&P Pledge and as such the amount may be set to $0 or deleted.

Any other ideas?

[mkavodah]

No, the Pledge Amount can not simply be changed to zero. That violates the basic rules of Accounting. If the write off occurs in a different month/year, that transaction needs to be recorded as a new reduction to revenue, a separate transaction. Otherwise the change may never be captured/recorded by the accounting department and the customers assets will be shown differently between the SalesForce program and their accounting program.

What we need to happen.

1) When the Write Off Amount Field is filled in with the dollar amount to be written off, upon saving the transaction it should affect the Remaining/Excess Balance field. In essence, the write off should pay down the pledge amount by the entered amount. Not all write-offs are for the full amount of the original pledge.

2) When the Write Off Date field is entered and saved, that date is the date of the adjustment entry. One should be able to run change reports which capture that date and show the write-offs.

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

We have discussed this internally and for now we can only think of one way to do this.

- Can you make a payment and set its stage to Write Off so the balance goes to $0 and your reports with Opportunity should show the stage as to which one is written off.

Will this work?

If you can think of a better way of doing this let us know and we can add the feature.

[usamahali]

Building on this topic, I want to import my pledges into SalesForce C&P, how can I include the write-off amount in the import itself?

[CnP.Support]

Good day @usamahali,

I am not sure I understand your question. Would you please elaborate about exactly what you are trying to do.

[usamahali]

For example, if I have a pledge for $5,000, and the constituent has made a payment of $3,000 towards the pledge, now his balance is $2,000. I want to write-off the remaining $2,000 because he does not want to pay anymore. So now his balance should be $0. When I am importing pledges into C&P Pledge from an excel sheet using Apex Data Loader on Salesforce how can I indicate the write-off? There is no field for it. Also, if I have multiple payments for a pledge, how do I import the payments and apply them towards those pledges?