Reporting on Raiser's Edge Recurring Gifts with the RE Recurring Gift Reporter Excel Add-In. It is so easy!

Hi everyone.  Thanks again for coming to my blog.  Recently I posted about different ways to report on The Raiser's Edge.  Then I took a deeper dive into Microsoft Excel reporting.  In this edition I am going even further, focusing on one example of a pretty cool way to integrate The Raiser’s Edge with Microsoft Excel.  I am thinking that this will be one post to highlight what I did but I could see it turn into multiple posts.

Awhile back, I saw a post on some forum about how to report on recurring gifts.  This got me to thinking about one of the challenges of reporting on recurring gifts: that it is difficult to get a report of future recurring gift installments (or future revenue from recurring gifts).  At least I don’t know of a good way to get at this info right now.  And I would be willing to bet that many organizations would like to be able to see what their expected future revenues are, and particularly for future recurring gift installments.  Having this information could result in better future planning of future fundraising success.

OK, lets cut to the chase:  What did I do?   I used Visual Studio to create a Microsoft Excel Add-In which can be installed on a pc or laptop running The Raiser’s Edge and Microsoft Excel  (disclaimer versions must be compliant; e.g. this will not run on Excel 2007 as it was built for 2010 and higher;  however also note that it has not been tested with Excel 2013 yet).  This Excel Add-In hooks into The Raiser’s Edge API, prompting the user for a RE Login if they are not already logged in and then generates the raw data, along with reports and charts (if selected) automagically in Excel. 

Lets circle back around and discuss what this stuff looks like and how it behaves.   After the Add-In is installed, the next time you open Microsoft Excel 2010 you should see a new ribbon available named RE Recurring Gift Reporter. 

Once Excel opens and you navigate to the RE Recurring Gift Reporter ribbon, you are presented with several options.  Lets take a look at the View Future Recurring Gift Installments, which is really a forecasting report.  Clicking on the button reveals the following form:

As you can see it is pretty straight-forward.  But that is the point.  Keep it simple and if anyone wants more features they can easily be added to the form.  But lets take a closer look, the user can select to create pivot tables and charts or not.  If no pivot tables are selected, then just the future recurring gift installments are exported in raw data format.  In addition, the user can select an "End Date" for future installments.  As a result however far in the future you want to report on, you can.

After you click the "Create" button then what you selected will be exported into Excel, resulting in something like the worksheet below:

Again, it really is that easy!!

The second large button, View Recurring Gifts, functions just the same as the other button, but provides reports on the recurring gifts themselves, not future installments.  When those reports are run it may look like the spreadsheet below:

It is really that easy.  Open Excel, select a report to run, click the settings, (possibly log into RE), and the report is generated.  You can run it multiple times, day after day and begin to have some intelligence about your future revenues.

A few other notes about how the Add-In works:

It exports the raw data into a spreadsheet and creates a named range from which it creates reports.  You can run it to export only the raw data and you then work with the data yourself.  Or you could select it to create the pivot tables and charts, giving yourself a starting point for how to use the raw data.

In the event that your database has a large number of recurring donations and you select a very large time period to report on, it may take a while to load the data into the spreadsheet.  This could be improved and function slightly different should you need that capability. 

Only a subset of the available columns in RE are used in this Add-In.  I focused on the core ones for now.  For a reasonable fee I can customize the Add-In for your needs, including adding more columns available in the Add-In.

 It pulls gift split information, so it can report on campaign, funds, and appeals for split gifts.  In addition, the system record id for the gift is included so that you can group gift information together to report on total gift information (e.g. the total amount for the gift not just the split amount). 

     
So what you say?  I say great question, or is that really a statement.   I would turn it back around and ask you the following questions:
     1.  Can you tell me how much expected future revenue you have coming in per month from recurring gifts over the next X number of years?
     2.  Can you tell me how much money you have coming in for a specific campaign, fund, or appeal over the next X number of years?
     3.  Can you tell me how much money you have coming in for a specific primary constituency (from the constituent record) over the next x number of years?
     4.  Can you tell me how much money you have coming in for a specific fund and gift constituency (from the recurring gifts) over the next x number of years?
     5.   If you can do any of the above, how long will it take you to pull that information?

I think these are pretty great questions to ask.  We can do 1 through 4 plus produce all other kinds of reports slicing and dicing future recurring gift installments and we can do it in a matter of seconds, maybe minutes depending on how much data you have.  I think that is pretty darn awesome. 

Guess what else?  Your Executive Director, or Development Director, could get this information without having to ask their Database Manager to “produce the report and send it to me”.   It is that easy to use.  Plus you now have the data in a workable format and you can create a lot of other reports from the data presented to you.  This data is not static, like a Crystal Report would be.  You can trust the data as it is coming directly from The Raiser’s Edge (assuming that is that you require your employees to enter this information into The Raiser’s Edge).

OK – Now the sales pitch.   I know, I know, but it is necessary for me to continue providing these great tools for non-profits.  Go check it out and request a download to see for yourself.  Even better, we can customize it further to tailor it to what you need at a great rate.   We can even do something similar with other Raiser’s Edge data or  even data that exists in other databases.  Stop struggling with getting your data into a format that is difficult to use and extend, or takes forever to produce.  Reach out to us and we can tell you more about the product and discuss how easy it would be to make it even better for your needs.