Tracking bequests and planned giving

Question

I am wondering if or how organizations track bequests of any kind through CiviCRM.

Answer 1

I haven't had to deal with this myself, and hope someone with direct experience can chime in. However, I would either handle this with CiviPledge, or with contributions of status "Pending", with some flag (e.g. a separate financial type, a custom field) indicating that this is planned giving so that you can run reports solely on those contributions.

Personally I prefer "Pending" contributions to CiviPledge, particularly if you have any sort of accounting integration, and especially if you're doing accrual or deferred revenue accounting. CiviPledge feels a little dated to me.

Answer 2

I think it would depend on what you mean by 'tracking'. if you mean 'money coming to us' then Jon's answer is more useful than mine. if it is to do with tracking the process from 'first contact' through to 'formal agreement' etc and how to ensure that the necessary contacts are recorded for when the bequest is finally available to you, then I would be looking at Activities, possibly within the container of a Case, but I expect it can be largely done without that extra layer of management