If your organization tracks pledges in financial reporting, you may need to record any pledges which go unfulfilled as write offs. 

  • As you learned in the last section, you are able to edit pledges and delete the entire pledge or payments as needed, however this could affect reporting.
  • A write off means that the pledge was committed but the donor did not complete some or all of the payments and you are “writing off” the amount that is due. 
  • Pledge write offs allow you to keep the record of the original pledges, while also adding a new transaction for the write off.
  • The benefit of using the write-off feature is consistency in reporting. 
    • If your organization is reporting pledges as receivables, or money owed to your organization, deleting the pledge can upset balances from month to month. 
    • Using the write-off feature allows your organization to account for money that was expected, but not paid.
  • Be sure to check with your finance team about whether pledge write offs are appropriate for your organization.


Entering Pledge Write Offs

1. Go to the constituent's Gifts Tab.


2. Click on the Add button, then Gift.



 3. On the gift entry page, select Pledge Write-Off under Type.



4. The page will refresh to show you a new field to select the pledge to write off. Use the drop down arrow on the right side of the grid of the Pledges fields to select the pledge you wish to write off.



5.  Once you have select the correct pledge, you can see the remaining balance. 


6. In the Amount field, enter the amount you would like to write off. It can be a partial write off, or you can write off the entire balance.



7. Once you enter the amount to write off, you will see the pledge schedule update. 


8. Even though the check box under Paid is marked, the payments will be shown as a write off, not paid.


9. You will also see the remaining balance adjusted based on how much of the pledge is written off.


10. Click Save at the top or bottom of the page to save the changes and enter the write off.



11. After you have saved the transaction, you will see new transactions on the constituent's Gifts tab and on the Gifts grid.


12. Each pledge payment that was included in the write off amount will have a row with the Total Gift and Pledge Amount being shown as negative numbers. The Amount field will be $0.00 since there was no actual money removed from the account.


13. The Pledges grid updates only once per day, so the next morning the grids will also be updated to reflect the new balance.