Pledges & gifts overview

Karani keeps two separate records of money:

• A pledge is what someone has committed to give — an amount, at a frequency, over a period.
• A gift is money that has actually arrived.

Keeping them apart is what lets Karani answer the questions that matter: are you fully funded, and is anyone quietly falling behind?

Why both

If you only tracked gifts, you’d know what came in but not whether it was what you expected. If you only tracked pledges, you’d know what people promised but not whether they delivered.

With both, Karani can compute:

• Percent funded — total pledged against your pledge goal.
• Left to raise — the gap, expressed both as a total and as a monthly figure.
• Donors behind on giving — people whose gifts have fallen short of their pledge for the period.
• Given vs. pledged on every contact profile.

Pledge frequencies

Frequency	Gifts per year
Monthly	12
Quarterly	4
Twice a Year	2
Annually	1
One-Time	Once, but counted toward this year’s totals
Custom	You define the pattern

A pledge amount is per gift, not per year. Someone pledging $50 monthly has a pledge amount of 50, not 600.

Gift types

Karani ships with these types: Cash, Check, Credit Card, EFT (Bank Transfer), Direct Personal Gift, Online, Matching Gift, Soft Credit, Stock, and Cash/Check (Unspecified). Your organisation may add more. See Gift types.

Where these live

• The Finances page is the summary — goals, progress, totals.
• The Pledges and Gifts panels on each contact profile are the per-person view.
• The Gifts Report filters and sums every gift.

One-time pledges are worth understanding

If a donor says “I’ll send $1,000 this year” and that’s it, record it as a one-time pledge rather than skipping the pledge entirely. Otherwise the gift arrives with nothing to compare against, and your pledged total understates what you’d actually secured.

Where to go next

Setting your goalsPledge goal, gift goals, and the fiscal year they're measured against.

Adding a pledgeIncluding the start-date trap that quietly breaks totals.

Adding a giftRecord money that's arrived.

Thanking donorsHow Karani decides someone is unthanked, and how to clear it.