Processing Gifts from Engage

Engage gifts appear immediately in CDM+. There is no importing required, but gifts from guests need to be connected to giving units. Once the gift settles (is deposited) into the church or organization's bank account, the deposit can be processed into a ledger entry.

Process Pending Gifts

All gifts in CDM+ must link to a giving unit. When a guest makes a gift, it is recorded as a "pending gift." Pending gifts need to be linked to a giving unit before they will show in Contributions.

Processing time

As fund transfer from the giver's account to the church or organization's account, deposits will be made into the receiving bank account. These deposits do not necessarily represent gifts from a single day. The amount of time it takes a gift to settle varies based on the payment method and bank holidays.

For example, a settlement may contain credit card gifts from 2 days ago, bank transfers from 3 days ago, and gifts from a different type of credit card from 4 days ago.

Moreover, these deposits contain incoming funds from Engage Giving, Online Registrations, Engage Billing, Payment Administration, and any other source using the Stewardship Technology merchant account.

This mix of sources and processing time can make it difficult to determine what exactly the funds in a deposit should be credited towards. Fortunately, CDM+ and Engage track every transaction and make reconciling these deposits quite easy.

Deposit Processing

The Deposit Processing window shows deposits that have settled into the church or organization's bank account. Deposits can be selected for processing, then processed one at a time or in bulk. Processing a deposit has two effects:

1. A ledger entry is created showing the deposit, its income split, and fee expenses
2. Related contributions and payment records are marked as deposited

Viewing fees

Fees are calculated by the time a gift has settled. You can review each deposit in Deposit Processing to see the gifts and other activity comprising that deposit and their fees. You may wish to right-click the deposit breakdown and print the list to a PDF for future reference.

Once the deposit is processed, you can view the online fees and online net amount for a gift in Contributions. These columns can be added to Contribution Records or the Contributions Custom Listing/Export.

Schedule for processing gifts

Depending on the frequency of gifts and deposits, you may want to process pending gifts and deposits daily or weekly. You will need to process deposits before performing a bank reconciliation on the month containing deposits. Pending gifts can be processed before or after deposit processing, but should be processed before running any contribution reports or statements to ensure guest giving is included.