Please note: You'll find a Recurring Payments Report cheat sheet attached to the end of this article.

This article covers recurring gift management, including pausing and cancelling recurring payments, enabling and disabling recurring notifications, and pulling recurring gift reports. 

Contents:

• Updating a Recurring Payment
• Pausing/Unpausing and Cancelling Recurring Payments
• Enabling/Disabling the Recurring Donation Billed Receipt
• Pulling Reports and Filtering Recurring Payments
• Group Edit 
• What Happens If Recurring Payments Are Declined?

Navigate to Recurring Payments under Reporting in your left-hand navigation to access your list of recurring donors. 

In this interface you're able to update, pause, unpause, or cancel recurring payments. You can also pull recurring reports.

Updating a Recurring Payment

The search feature will allow you to quickly find a recurring donor who has updates that need to be made. If you need to find several recurring transactions, you can search within a specific range by selecting an option on the Filter By drop-down menu and then specifying a date range.

Range options include Today, Yesterday, This Month, Last Month, This Year, Last Year, Custom Range, and All.

Once you find the recurring payment you're looking for, click on the recurring ID to get to the management interface. From there, you'll be able to update Personal Information, Billing Information, Payment, Frequency and Amount. 

You can update this information by clicking on the Edit button next to the section you want to update. 

If your form includes dedications or custom fields, you can edit donors’ responses to those fields by clicking Edit under Recurring Transaction Custom Details. Editing the information in that area will update the info for all future transactions tied to the recurring payment.

Pausing/Unpausing and Cancelling Recurring Payments

From the edit interface you can also pause or cancel an active recurring payment via the buttons at the top of the page. 

Please note: Cancelling a recurring gift series only impacts future payments. It does not refund or otherwise impact payments in the series that have already been processed.

If you're working with a paused recurring payment, you can use the Unpause button at the top of the page to reactivate the donation.

Be sure you're adjusting the next bill date as necessary. Missed recurring payments will not be processed. 

Within the recurring payment record you also have access to the Recurring History, which shows all transaction activity related to this recurring setup, and the Change History, which shows any creation, edits, or status changes to this particular record. 

Enabling/Disabling the Recurring Donation Billed Receipt

If a recurring donor no longer wishes to be notified each time a recurring payment is processed, you can disable the Recurring Donation Billed receipt. 

Just click the green Enabled link in the Receipts column for the donor. 

To re-enable a disabled receipt, click the red Disabled link.

You can also enable or disable the Recurring Donation Billed receipt by clicking the transaction ID for the recurring gift, and then using this toggle under Personal Information on the Recurring Details screen. 

Pulling Reports and Filtering Recurring Payments

You can filter your list of recurring payments by Form, Form Tags, Recurring Status, Restrictions, Frequency, Giving Plans, Classification, or Credited To. Simply click on Advanced Filtering, and then choose the options by which you'd like to filter.

If you filter by Recurring Status and pull a report of Cancelled recurring donations, your export will include two additional fields: Cancel Date and Cancelled By.

This will let you know when the recurring donation was cancelled and whether it was the donor or someone from your organization who cancelled the gift.

You can also find specific recurring donations in the recurring reports by filtering your exported report by the Created On Date field.

You can download a full recurring report to include more information on the recurring payment, or you can download a Contacts report that includes basic information by choosing CSV or Excel file types from the area shown below.

To get an idea of the expected value of your recurring gifts, view the Recurring Forecast report.

To find this report, click Reporting from the org-level dashboard, then select Reports and then view the Recurring Forecast report.

This report will default to display the current month and year and will display all recurring donors and the amounts of their gifts expected each month, with a monthly expected total displayed beneath their individual gift amounts. You can change settings to view recurring donations from specific forms and group results by payment interval. 

To download the report, click the gray Recurring Report button at the top of the page and select a file type to export.

Group Edit 

If you would like to pause, unpause, or cancel multiple recurring payments at one time you can use the Group Edit button. 

To read more about group editing recurring gifts, check out this article.

What Happens If Recurring Payments Are Declined?

In the event a recurring donation is declined or fails to process, the payment will be tried again at a later date. The default setting is to retry the recurring gift payment 3 days, 7 days, and 15 days after the first attempt failed. If after these three attempts the payment is still declined the gift will be automatically paused and no further attempts will be made.