Author Topic: Autoprocessing pledges (Read 483 times)

Ed van Velzen · October 05, 2012, 11:07:30 pm

Here at Amnesty we are using pledges as a place to store our SEPA Direct Debit mandates. These pledges eventually result in contribution payments in the real world in the sense that the financial instutions will perform the direct debits and as a result will transfer a certain amount of money to our organization's bank account. That's all fine.

What is less fortunate is that these financial transactions are not reported back by the banks. Auto processing pledges into contributions would make our process complete but I don't think CiviCRM works that way. In my ideal scenario, pledges that become current at some point should automatically trigger the creation of corresponding contribution entries. That is also the way that SEPA (Single Euro Payment Area) Direct Debits work: it is expected upfront that all payments will succeed, thet banks only report on exceptions. This leaves the initiating side (that would be us) to register all expected payments at the time of sending in the SEPA Direct Debit file to the bank.

Concrete question: can we autoprocess active pledges into registered contribution payments within CiviCRM?

Thanks,

Ed

Michael McAndrew · October 06, 2012, 01:40:37 am

The pledge API looks reasonably complete

http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/ajax/rest?json=1&sequential=1&debug=1&&entity=PledgePayment&action=get

I wouldn't have thought that it is too hard to write a simple script with dates today or in the past and sets them to complete.

you could then manually cancel pledges that fail and follow up with the contact when the bank notifies you of this.

if you are looking for a better / 'the proper' solution for this, it might be worth talking to Parvez at Veda consulting www.vedaconsulting.co.uk. At the recent Bristol sprints we chatted quite a lot about the direct debit model (including SEPA) and looked at the work that he has been doing for the UK direct debit set up.

Pretty sure that this uses recurring payments as the basis. It also has forms built into Civi to enable the creation of recurring payments etc.

Parvez · October 08, 2012, 05:24:53 am

Hey Ed

As Michael's said, we've been working on the UK Direct Debit processes for CiviCRM. SEPA has come up and will be catered for in the processes. Although the Direct Debit extension is in Beta, the SEPA elements have not yet been built. There are organisations that we've spoken to in Germany who follow the SEPA processing and we're looking to migrate their civicrm code into the Direct Debit extension.

On a separate I've done something similar to what you require for another organisation, its a pretty simple module that increments memberships, including creating the Direct Debit contribution, but could be modified to run on the Pledge alone.

Let me know if you're interested in either solution.

Thanks

Parvez

www.vedaconsulting.co.uk

pdelbar · October 23, 2012, 02:53:37 pm

We have some experience with Sepa Direct Debit -- I'm not sure using pledges is the best way to model them. In a sense, memberships would offer a much better and more logical approach, since the monthly recurrence could be used to generate the next payment to submit to the bank. And yes, you need to process the feedback from banks in the way you suggested ... but that's not the hardest part.

Let me know if you want to chat about this subject.

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Author Topic: Autoprocessing pledges (Read 483 times)

Ed van Velzen

Autoprocessing pledges

Michael McAndrew

Re: Autoprocessing pledges

Parvez

Re: Autoprocessing pledges

pdelbar

Re: Autoprocessing pledges