CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all, anyone ideas about what would be the best way to implement a 'standing order' form for (both recurring and one-time) contributions? The way this works (in the Netherlands) is: people can authorize an organization to collect an amount from their bank account, by providing their name, adress etc. and their bank account number.
No payment processor would be required, collecting happens through a separate interface provided by the bank. CiviPledge seems to offer more or less the needed functionality: choosing an amount and the interval (one-time, each month, each quarter), but the goal is different. People don't need a reminder, the ammount is simply collected like a recurring contribution. So the page would contain forms for:
- Name
- Adress
- Zip code, city
- Phone number
* Amount to donate
* Interval:
  - one-time
  - every month
  - every 3 months

Do you think CiviPledge would be a good way to let people make this commitment, together with a custom 'bank account number' field or so? Or should I make a separate form to collect this information?

And with CiviPledge, how to disable the reminder e-mails in general? (there is no configurable option?)

Related: Monthly donors http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,10660.0.html; Are "pledges" automatic recurring donations? http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,7810.0.html.
I imagine people have had similar use cases. I'm very interested...

I think an Online Contribution page with Pledges enabled would potentially work for you. A couple of things you may have to tweak / think about:

1. If all payments are going to happen via bank transfer, then the contributors (both one time and recurring) should be using the online contribution page in 'Pay Later' mode. This will set the contribution status to Pending. Then you can update batches of Pending contributions to Completed once the transfers are made using the 'Find Contribuions' -> Update Pending Contributions batch edit function (or via Import Contributions -> Update mode).

Out of the box, the Pay Later 'checkbox' is an option for donors when enabled. If you want ALL payments to be in this mode, then you'll probably need to customize the template to change the checkbox to a hidden field with 'checked' value and make some changes to the Javascript.

2. Question of where to store the Account Number information... You could create a custom field extending Pledges - but you can't currently include that in a Profile - and so you can't include it on your online contribution / pledge page w/o some custom code / using some hooks. The easiest approach is probably to make a custom field extending Contacts - since then you CAN include it in a proflle on the contribution page (and also allow folks to update it via a separate profile (self service). However if folks use different accounts for different donations / pledges - this could get a bit messy. Third option is to make it a custom field extending Contributions. Profile input is supported - but if you're recording pledge payments manually (vs. via import) - it will be a bit awkward to get the account number for the previous contribution so you can enter it in the current one. (This may or may not be a problem depending on how you're going to mark the recurring pledge payments as 'complete'. I'm actually thinking this last option is best, especially if your bank can give you a CSV file with completed contributions that you can use to import/update contribution / pledge payments in CiviCRM.

I would spend some time playing with this scenario on the demo or on a local install, as well as figuring out what your options are for updating contribution / pledge payment status using info from your bank (including trying the import process if data is available from the bank).