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Is there a field for exporting "pending" gifts?

  • October 16, 2025
  • 4 replies
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L
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We use EA’s recurring gift tool for donors who want to set up a payment monthly, quarterly, or annually. Our practice is to begin soliciting donors 11 months after their last gift, so that they’re giving around the same gift date or a little earlier each year. 

That’s led us to an odd scenario where we sometimes begin solicitation with a donor, not realizing that they have an annual scheduled gift set to process the month after. While we can export the source code for their last gift (i.e. “recurring gift club”), that alone doesn’t always alert us to a pending gift for various reasons. 

All this to say: what is an easy way to export an indicator of whether a gift is pending from an account? It seems EA has that information, since the “financial” tab shows the green button to mark it pending. How can we pull that for cross reference without creating a bunch of extra work each month?

Best answer by peter ritcheson

A way to do this might be to create an Automation in EveryAction based on a Saved Search of contacts with a Recurring Commitment with a Next Payment Date that is within the next two months. The action in the automation would be to apply an Activist Code that indicates an upcoming payment. You’d also want to add a step to remove that Activist Code if the Next Payment Date is more than 2 months from now.

You could either export the AC or else use it as a removal step when pulling your list. 

4 replies

peter ritcheson
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A way to do this might be to create an Automation in EveryAction based on a Saved Search of contacts with a Recurring Commitment with a Next Payment Date that is within the next two months. The action in the automation would be to apply an Activist Code that indicates an upcoming payment. You’d also want to add a step to remove that Activist Code if the Next Payment Date is more than 2 months from now.

You could either export the AC or else use it as a removal step when pulling your list. 

    J
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    • jeff
    • First Timer
    • October 17, 2025

    Two related questions that I’ll piggyback in this thread -

    1) do others have a good monthly report template that includes both contributions and pledges?

    I currently send our accountant two separate reports: a pledge report and a contribution report. While the contribution report does include pledge date for gifts that were received this month, new pledges aren’t included since there is no contribution associated with them yet. 

    Is there a better report type that others are using?

    2) How do others handle recurring gifts that aren’t initiated through an EA online form? We have a monthly giving revenue stream that includes all the ways people send us monthly gifts, but those don’t get included in a recurring commitment report. 

      L
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      • Lark Valente
      • Author
      • First Timer
      • October 20, 2025

      Thank you ​@peter ritcheson! That’s exactly what I was looking for!

        peter ritcheson
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        ​@jeff 

        1. Unfortunately, you’re doing it the right way. You can’t have them together
        2. This could either be done via Source Codes (making sure that source codes indicate Recurring gifts regardless of their source) which would allow you to report on them, although still not via the Recurring Commitment Report. The other way would be to treat recurring gifts as a pledge for however long the commitment is and then pay that pledge down. Since recurring commitments don’t necessarily have an end date, this could lead to some administrative overhead so the first option is probably the easiest one. 
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