Our website allows donors to set up recurring gifts, however, we require the first payment at that time.  Is it possible to import the recurring gift and the payment in the same profile?  Does it require two profiles? 

Thanks, Tiffany!! That was very helpful. Luckily we can proceed with option 1.....

Hi Kathy,

The process for importing Recurring Gifts and their payments is identical to importing Pledges and pledge payments. The Recurring Gift must first exist (be saved) in RE because you need the Recurring Gift's ID in order to apply a payment to it.

If the new Recurring Gift and its first payment are on the same row in your data file, then you can run a two pass import with the same file, using two profiles.

To do this, you would set up your first pass ImportOmatic (IOM) profile with all of the information for the Constituent mapped as usual, the information for the new Recurring Gift mapped to the Gift Fields, and all of the information about the first payment set to Ignore.

You would select in the Output--->Files section of your profile to "Include the Import ID of all gifts in the output file."If you do not have IDs for the Constituents in the first pass, I would also recommend selecting the option to "Include the Import ID of all matched or added Constituents in the output file." These options will create an output file in the same location as your error and exceptions files, and the path to this location can be seen on this same screen in your IOM profile. The file will be named in this fashion: YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_Updates.csv. This is the file you will use in your second pass import.

For the second pass IOM profile, you may simply COPY your first pass profile, and give it a new name that indicates this is the payment portion of your website Recurring Gift import. The Copy button is at the bottom of the box where your profiles are listed, in IOM Configuration.

Once you have the profile copy made, you will need to make a few modifications. For the second pass, you will want to set all of the information about the new Recurring Gift to Ignore, and map all of the information for the payment to Gift Fields. You will also need to ADD one or two columns to your Field Map (one if you only chose to output Gift Import IDs in the first pass, two if you also chose to output Constituent Import IDs in the first pass). These will be added in the first position(s) in the Field Map (Columns A and B) and mapped to their corresponding IDs. To add a column, right click on the Field Map and you will be presented with the options to add columns.

The Recurring Gift Import ID field mapping will be Gift Field--->Apply to Recurring Gift Import ID. Please double check your new columns' mapping against the Updates file before you attempt the second pass for the first time.

If you have any Constituent information (biographical,address, relationship, etc) mapped in your first pass, you will also set all of those fields to Ignore, except for your constituent identifier (an ID or name information) as this was all imported during the first pass. If you have IDs to match to your Constituents, the import will run more quickly and you won't have to interact with it, hence my suggestion to consider having IOM output the Constituent Import IDs in the first pass.

If you wish for the payment to use the same values for Campaign,Fund, Appeal, Package, and Pay Method information that are on the Recurring Gift, you can choose this option in the Gifts section of your IOM profile,rather than mapping those fields in the profile: "When using a recurring gift ID to apply a gift to a recurring gift, use default recurring gift values."

When you run your second pass, the incoming payments should link to the Recurring Gift.

If the Recurring Gifts and their payments are on separate rows, the process can become far more complicated. You can import them all at once to Batch, but you will then have to go to each record, after you commit the Batch, and apply the payments manually because the Recurring Gift won't exist until you committed the batch, and therefore you can't apply the payments to it in that Batch. In this situation, we would recommend you split the file between the Recurring Gifts and the Payments, and import them separately. Depending on the format of your particular file, you may still have to import the payments to Batch and then apply them to the Recurring Gift row by row before you commit the batch. Please let me know if this is how your file is formatted and I will be happy to help you find the best way to import the payments, based on your specific data file.

Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance!

Thanks,

Tiffany