Soft Credits

Overview

Soft Credits are a way of associating multiple people with a single donation or pledge for which they were not the primary donor.  In Veracross you can associate any number of people with a donation using the Soft Credit tab on the donation and pledge screens. While any number of people can be manually added to the soft credit tab for a donation, there are a few common scenarios where the system will handle creating soft credits automatically. If a pledge has soft credits, then any donations that are entered as payments for that pledge will have the same soft credits automatically set up for them.

Household Soft Credits

Donations

Often times donations that are received by a school come from a married couple rather than just one of the partners.  When looking at the giving history for an individual, one should be able to see donations that were made by that person’s spouse.  Including a spouse’s giving provides a better picture of the individual’s total giving towards the school.  To include a soft credit a spouse on a donation, check off the “from both” check box on the Donation detail screen and the person’s spouse will then be included on the soft credit tab of the donation.  Note:unchecking the “from both” box will not remove the spouse from the soft credit tab, you will need to remove them manually if they should no longer receive soft credit for that donation.  This scenario is called “household” because you should also use it if you are going to manually give soft credit to any other individual who lives in the same household as the original donor.

Pledges

If the “from both” check box on the pledge detail screen is checked then a soft credit will automatically get created for the spouse of the pledger.

Note: The main thing to know about Household Soft Credits is that they are not counted in any Household-level reports. Household soft credits are not counted in “Total giving,” or any of the Giving History numbers. This is by design: the purpose of the Household soft credit type is to avoid counting the soft credit on a Household level; that is, to avoid double counting, when the Hard credit is already counted for that Household.

In the cases where a soft credit for a Spouse (or typically Ex-spouse or some other person) should be counted at the Household reporting level, then a different soft credit type should be used: these should typically be designated as “Other” soft credit type (see below).

Organization Soft Credits

Donations

Organization soft credits are for when certain individuals at an organization should be credited for donations made by that organization.  For example, it might be worthwhile to have the CEO or president of a company always receive soft credit for donations that are made by their organization.  More than likely, they are not the one who are actually making the donation, but it is still helpful to associate them with those donations for reference.  In order to indicate that a person should receive soft credit for donations made by an organization, go to the organization tab on person’s detail screen.  If necessary you can first add the relationship between that person and the organization.  Once the relationship has been established, you can check the “Receive Soft Credit” check box.  Once that has been checked, any time a new donation is entered for that organization, this person will show up on the soft credit tab of that donation. If the individual that is credited from the organization soft credit has a spouse, then the spouse will receive a household soft credit from the shared organization soft credit, as well.

Pledges

If the “receive soft credit” check box is checked off for the relationship between a person and an organization, then that person will automatically receive pledge soft credits for any pledges made by that organization.

Learn more about Foundation/Organization Soft Credits.

Matching Soft Credits

Donations

The final common scenario for which the system will automatically handle the creation of soft credits is for matching gifts.  It is often the case when an individual makes a donation their employer (or some other individual or organization) will match that donation.  In this case, the person who made the original donation should receive soft credit for the matching donation.  This soft credit will get automatically created under two scenarios.  First, if there is a matching donation made, when the two donations are related the soft credit will get created.  In the second scenario, a matching pledge is associated with the original donation.  When payment against the matching pledge is received, then the original donor will be soft credited on that payment.

Pledges

If a person’s donation or pledge is matched by an organization pledge, then that individual will be soft credited on the organization’s pledge.

Learning more about Matching Gifts.

Other

There are other scenarios outside of these common examples where you may want to give a person soft credit for a donation or pledge.  For these other scenarios, you will need to manually indicate the people who should receive soft credit for a specific donation or pledge.  One example of this might be if someone pays an installment towards a pledge for which they were not the original pledger.  In that case, the person who made the pledge should most likely get soft credit on the donation made by another person towards their pledge.  As an aside, a person should not receive soft credit for donations for which they were also the primary donor; in other words a person should not receive both hard and soft credit for the same donation.