How to Process Pledges
In your Sumac console, expand Fundraising, and choose Pledges.
Search to find the pledges that you want to process. You might do this by searching for payments on a specific date or by searching to find all the pledges that are due this month.
Note the three search criteria that are preceded by three asterisks. These criteria represent searches that must be done monthly and followed up with an appropriate action.
“***Due this month” finds pledges that have payments due in the current month. This search is normally done at the beginning or middle of each month when preparing to process those pledges.
“***Last Payment Soon” finds pledges whose last payment date is approaching. This search helps you identify pledges that are going to expire soon so you can contact the donors to request a renewal.
“***Credit Card Expires Soon” finds pledges with credit cards that will expire soon so that you can contact the donors in advance and update their credit card details.
In this example, we'll process all the pledges due this month that have not already been processed.
Click Search, and Sumac finds all the pledges due this month that have not already been processed.
To ensure that you're only processing pledges that have payments due today, sort this list by the “Day of Month” column.
Select all the pledges that have payments due today. Then expand Special Editing and click Process Pledges.
Click to indicate that you want to process only the selected pledges, then choose the date that Sumac should use for the donation and payment records.
Sumac opens a new window to confirm it will:
• Create donation records
• Create payment records
• And will automatically process the payments.
Click OK, and Sumac will process all the selected pledges.
Once done, Sumac presents a summary window that confirms what has occurred for each pledge you processed. This window lists:
• the donors' names
• the payment type used
• confirms that the payment was recorded
• confirms the donation was recorded
• and that the payment was processed successfully.
Notice that in the “Payment Processed” column, Sumac has a “Yes” indicated for each of these pledges. This means that the payments for all of these pledges were processed successfully!
However, if any of these payments were not processed successfully, Sumac will say “NO” in this column, and will include the error message it receives from your payment processor. If this occurs, you should review the error message to determine why the payment was not processed, make the necessary corrections, and try processing that payment again.
Since all of these payments were successfully processed, we can close this window now.
If you want to see the donations that are linked to any of these pledges, select the pledge you're interested in and click the Show Donations button. You will be able to see the donations you've received and the donations you are expected to receive towards this pledge.
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