How best to deal with partial payment for a pledge

[pkeogan]

I'm looking for some help on how best to deal with this situation.  Thanks in advance.

Here is the case:

A contact has a pledge for $100 due on October 01.

This contact sent a check for $75 on September 30.

I processed the check by going to the contact's pledge "Record Payment".  However there wasn't an option to take a partial payment. The only option was to take a $100 payment.
 
Am I doing this incorrectly or is partial payment not an option?

So I processed the payment and changed the status to "In Progress".  After saving, the pledge payment page is displayed and in the status field is  "In Progress", but there are no longer any links to the left of the status.  So it seems that I can no longer edit this pledge payment.

It seems using the status "In Progress" disables the ability to view or further edit the pledge payment.

So now, the payment entered was $100 not $75.  The pledge can not be edited and the "total paid amount" column is blank (I'm guessing because the status is not "complete")

Next, I went to the contacts contribution screen and edited the transaction.  I updated the contribution to $75 and set the status to complete.  Now the contribution looks correct, BUT, the pledge didn't change.  So now the transaction is different on the contribution page and the pledge page AND the contact still only paid $75 of the $100 pledge.

The next day the contact sends another check for $25. 

How can I take this $25 check for the pledge that already has a partial payment?

Thanks again!

[Dave Greenberg]

Unfortunately there is no way to record partial pledge payments in the current versions. This is definitely needed - but not currently on the short term roadmap. If important to you, you might consider sponsoring are providing resources / patch.

The behavior you're seeing when you set pledge payment status to "In Progress" is a bug. This is not a valid status for pledge payments and shouldn't be offered in the status drop-down. I've filed an issue to fix this in the next release.

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5169

The only way I know to fix your current situation with the "invalid status" on the pledge payment is to update the pledge payment status to Complete via direct SQL update query. (Not sure it's worth fixing though ??). If you want to do that ping back or catch one of us on IRC.

You'll still need either live with the fact that the pledge payment amt displays differently OR basically redo the contribution edit so you have one contribution record for 100 with a "Note" indicating that it came in via two checks - I'd probably do the second and do that for other cases like this until partial payments are supported).

[pkeogan]

Thanks David.  Looking at the DB I thought those would be your answers.  Although I don't like to, I'll update the data directly.

I'm new to Civi, but most of the modules seem to compare very favorably to many expensive non-open source applications with the exception of payment processing (dealing with non-straight forward payment scenarios)  and events (registering and paying for breakout sessions and dealing with more complex pricing structures).

For the work that we do the event issues are livable, but the payment processing is a bigger deal.  We need to consider whether we should write something ourselves or sponsor someone to write to for or with us.  I believe I know exactly what needs to be written, but it would not be a small undertaking and something I wouldn't want to start with consulting with the core team.

Can you provide me more info on sponsoring / providing resources / working with the core team?

Thanks

[Dave Greenberg]

For anyone following this thread, I've asked Paul to review the recent blog posts on Finance and Accounting - and will be discussing sponsorship and working with the core team with him next week.

http://civicrm.org/taxonomy/term/25

[FatherShawn]

pkeogan:

This is an area of Civi that really needs development.   Please have a look at the recently revised CiviPledge Roadmap and offer your support or discuss shortcomings here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,8360.msg43678.html#msg43678