As reviewed earlier, a pledge in CiviCRM is a promise to make one or more payments in the future. A pledge is Pending until the first payment is received, at which point its status changes to In Progress. Once all payments have been received, its status changes to Completed. If one or more of the promised payments is late, no change occurs in the status of the pledge. In this way, think of a pledge as a container for multiple, promised, distinct contribution records.
If a person promises $360 to be paid in 12 monthly installments, spaced one month apart, CiviCRM considers this to be one pledge with twelve payments (contributions) of $30.
To manually create a pledge, click on CiviContribute | Pledges | New Pledge, or use Create New | Pledge. Alternatively, from a Contact Summary page, click on Actions | Add Pledge, or click on the Pledges tab and click on the Add Pledge button or link.
As with contribution records, the donor may provide the pledge in honor or memory of someone. As with contribution records, any custom fields associated with pledges will appear in their own fieldset panel for completion at this time.
Click on the Payment Reminders header to expand the fieldset panel and configure reminder e-mails. Recall that this functionality is dependent on the configuration of a cron job that should run nightly and manages both the pledge status updates and e-mail reminders.
Pledge reminders are only sent if it is possible to send to someone who has pledged a donation. If no e-mail is present for the contact, the e-mail becomes invalid, or if they have been marked either by administrators or themselves as Do not e-mail, then no reminders will be sent.
Once you've reviewed and completed the record, click on Save or Save and New. Click on Cancel to exit the record without saving.
After saving, take a moment to review how CiviCRM constructs and displays the pledge record. As mentioned, the pledge itself is a container for individual pledge payments. This is reflected in the contact's Pledges tab by a single pledge row expanding to display the individual scheduled and completed pledge payments.
As you receive contributions associated with pledges, it is important to log them through this interface and not the primary contributions tab (CiviCRM places a reminder on the Contributions tab to provide guidance). Since the essence of tracking the pledge progress and status involves reviewing actual payments received for pledged payment records, you need to ensure that the contribution is associated with the pledge appropriately.
If the constituent is late providing payment, submits a payment that is different from what is scheduled, or requests altered terms for the payment (such as extending the payment period), use the Edit Scheduled Payment link to modify the record.