Back in September, I posted about a recent upgrade I’d done from Legacy Recurring Donations to Enhanced. Since then I’ve learned an additional lesson that seems worth writing down.
I started noticing that we had some Recurring Donations that were getting their future pledge created with the wrong Close Date. Some yearly Recurring Donations had multiple open pledges for the same calendar year, which caused problems in pledge reports! Some monthly Recurring Donations also had two Opportunities for one month.
This effected a pretty small number of our total records, but it was pretty annoying.
It turns out that the Effective Date value is extremely important in creating future pledges. The upgrade guide doesn’t mention this. The guide just says that Effective Date is changed by the data migration process, and that it will be set to the earliest Opportunity’s Close Date. I do not think that’s what happened in our case!
When I look back at our pre-migration data, I can see that we didn’t use the Effective Date field until November of 2019. That’s long enough ago that I don’t remember what changed then, but it does mean that most of our active Recurring Donations entered the migration process with a value in that field. The ones that didn’t seem to be the ones that needed to be repaired after the migration. It would have been great if the data validation had insisted I populate that field before the data could be migrated! I can’t figure out where the Effective Date value came from for these records, but it sure wasn’t correct! The day of the first Opportunity Close Date would have worked perfectly.
We also hadn’t used Day of Month before the migration. That value got populated in the migration, and in most cases it was fine, but I think it must have been using Effective Date to determine that value.
I figured this out only because when repairing these records, my updates didn’t stick until I also changed Effective Date.
I’m guessing we were fairly unusual to have active records with no Effective Date or Day of Month, but I’ll definitely keep it on my list of things to check for future migrations!
Artisanal Data 