CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In this thread http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,4358.msg19043.html#msg19043 from quite some time ago, David Greenberg mentioned "We had gotten mixed feedback on open-ended pledges. Several people said that due to accounting rules they needed the pledge to have a fixed total amount / end date. We're open to revisiting this / making it configurable in the future - although I'd like to understand how open-ended pledges are handled from an accounting point of view."

By default, for recurring pledges you must enter a number of installments. Can this requirement easily be overridden to allow an indefinite number of installments? (I would like to use that for this case: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,11707.0.html).
The first thread linked above offers as solution to extend the pledge with custom renewal fields. I would like to avoid this because of the extra administrative work involved in this. Also, I would have to provide a default for the number of installments and then hide the field from the user. (Since I'm not a programmer, and am working on this as a volunteer, this is not quite ideal...)
Or I could of course not use Pledges at all, but I like how it almost solves my case...

I hope someone can advise how to proceed, either on
1) How to allow indefnite installments and hide the field alltogether (preferred); OR
2) How to provide defaults and hide the installments field. (I suppose the answer to this will be hooks. If 1) is not possible, any pointers to the solution for 2) would be very welcome...)

+1 vote for open-ended pledges, removal of the "[ # ] installments" area.

Our application support people just asked me to look into removing that.

I also have a customer interested in open-ended pledges. Although the recurring payments meet some of the requirement they want all their records to be pledges so they have a consistant tracking (and also because a single person can have 100 contributions over time and they want to be able to see a page with individual commitments to pay. )

I suspect that the customer may be able to make a contribution of some sort but in time for 4.1 or 4.2 not at this stage

Under Configure Contribution Page > Contribution Amounts, check the Recurring Contributions box. The end-user then has the option (as the text on the online contrib form says): "You can leave the number of installments blank if you want to make an open-ended commitment." This is existing functionality. The main changes in 3.3.2 are:

* Support for this w/ Authorize.net
* Fixed a bunch of bug for PP Pro and PP Std implementation
* Added 'auto-renew membership' option. If you're interested in this option... I just added doc for it about half-way down on this wiki page:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC33/Membership+Types