Unboxing a Reporting Xpress Custom Past Due Pledges Report

The Raiser's Edge Past Due Report lists pledge payments past due as of a specific date. The standard built-in Raiser's Edge report can be run as a summary or detail report and has a fair amount of flexibility in how it can be configured.   For example, the report can be filtered by appeals, campaigns, constituent codes, or funds and any combination of include Pledge, MG Pledge, and Recurring Gift types.  It can also be run for up to five past-due periods and offers some flexibility in how addresses are handled.  

However, we have found that many organizations end up taking this report and exporting it to Excel so they can apply additional rules and logic to the report before final distribution, and this is exactly the type of manual massaging of data that can be eliminated by a reporting as a service platform like Reporting Xpress.  Some of the more common adjustments to the standard report that we see include:

• Pledges are considered past due if a payment is more than X (often 90)  days late.  However, if the donor is a board member or organization leader the pledge is not considered past due until the payment is X+90 (often 180) days late.
• Pledges by employees of the organization that are more than 30 days past due may need immediate attention because they could indicate a problem with automatic paycheck withholding.  If these problems extend too long it is often difficult to get employees to make up the donations from the lost periods where money was not automatically deducted.  A subset of the report that shows employee pledges more than 30 days past due should be sent to HR for investigation.
• If the donor is a major donor with an assigned solicitor, the names are often removed from the report and a separate report is prepared for each solicitor with donors in their portfolio with past due pledges.

Custom reports automated on the Reporting Xpress reporting as a service platform can be formatted however the customer likes.  We like to say: "if you can draw it on a piece of paper, we can probably give it to you". 

The logic behind these reports that changes the data displayed is not always apparent in the visual appearance of the report but that is the real power.  There is also the opportunity for significant time savings for the staff responsible for the reports' preparation and the elimination of the potential for errors induced when manually changing data.  Once automated, a report can be updated daily, which you would never do if you have to manually make adjustments each run.

Lastly, this is another opportunity to leverage Reporting Xpress' powerful alerting engine.  Consider a Past Due Pledge report that can automatically send out texts and emails to the development or finance team when the balance of past due pledges more than a defined number of days exceeds a certain dollar amount, or when a large past due pledge first exceeds the threshold to make the report.  These enhancements are possible when the report is customized on the Reporting Xpress platform.  

It doesn't make sense to automate all of your reporting, but most organizations can gain significant benefits by using a reporting as a service platform to automate select reports where there is the most upside to be gained through automation and enhanced report capabilities.