A recurring gift and the schedule that charges the donor are separate records. The recurring gift is Fundraising’s copy, which you use for reporting and for reviewing a donor’s standing gift. The billing schedule creates the actual charges. Rhythm keeps the two records in step automatically, but it does not treat them as one record. Most changes move in only one direction, and a few important fields never move between them. Once you know which direction each change follows, status changes and totals that seem to appear on their own are easier to understand.
How a Billing Run Actually Charges the Donor
Creating a recurring gift, or a pledge with an installment plan, only creates the billing schedule that will charge the donor. It does not charge anyone by itself. The charge happens only when your organization runs a Financial Billing Run with the Process Installment Schedules action turned on, optionally limited to gift orders, pledge orders, or both. Staff can also charge one installment schedule right away with Process Now, without waiting for a run. Everything else in this article describes what happens after a charge succeeds or fails; none of it happens on its own.
You can view and edit the installment schedule behind a recurring gift or pledge from the Console or the Portal, including its saved payment method. See Manage a Customer’s Installment Schedule and Process Installments Now for how.
Tip
Recurring gifts use Fundraising’s own installment schedules, not Membership billing runs. Guidance for reviewing and running a Membership billing run does not apply to recurring gifts.
Because everything depends on the billing run, several everyday situations trace back to it:
- Donor-chosen charge dates. If your giving process lets a donor choose their charge date, the recurring gift’s next gift date tells the billing run when to charge. A daily billing run that staff review and approve each day keeps charges close to the donor’s chosen date and reduces manual corrections compared with a weekly or monthly run.
- A schedule can be skipped, not just delayed. If the charge for a recurring gift’s current period still shows as processing, such as when the last attempt never received a response, the schedule’s next bill date can stay blank. The next billing run then skips that schedule instead of charging it. A monthly recurring gift does not receive a new next bill date just because it is monthly; Rhythm sets that date only after the current period’s charge finishes. If a recurring gift has no next gift date and the last charge looks stalled, check this before you assume the donor was billed correctly.
- An unresolved installment can hold up the next one. If an earlier month’s installment order for a recurring gift or pledge is still open, Rhythm does not create the next month’s invoice until that earlier order is resolved.
- If billing keeps failing for one donor. When recurring billing keeps failing for the same donor and you cannot fix the cause quickly, stop relying on the automated run for that record for now. Collect that donor’s gift by hand each period until the problem is resolved.
- Reactivating a schedule has limits. From the schedule’s edit page, you can move it back to Active only from Payment Declined, Error, or Suspended. Once a schedule is Completed or Cancelled, Rhythm refuses the reactivation. If a donor wants to give again after their schedule finished or was cancelled, create a new recurring gift instead of trying to reopen the old one.
Fundraising does not have its own article for configuring billing runs because that setup belongs to Finance & Billing. See Create or Edit a Billing Run and Set Up a Recurring Billing Run for how a run’s schedule and processing window are configured. A common setup runs a billing run on the second of the month with one day of pre-processing, so charges intended for the first are still picked up. Once a run is configured that way, it creates and processes its own entries automatically. You should not need to create anything by hand for it to pick up a recurring gift’s next charge.
What Flows from Billing to the Recurring Gift
When the billing schedule behind a recurring gift changes, Rhythm copies several results to the recurring gift automatically, usually within a few seconds:
- Status. If a charge is declined, the recurring gift’s status changes to
Payment Error. Rhythm does not notify you or the donor, so the status on the recurring gift record page and in search results is the only sign. If the billing schedule itself goes into an error state, rather than having one declined charge, the recurring gift showsSuspended. That looks the same as a suspension set by staff, so a billing-side error is one likely cause when no one on your team suspended the gift. - Amount Given and number of gifts. Every time the billing schedule changes, Rhythm recounts every gift linked to the recurring gift and updates the running totals. Every linked gift counts toward the total, regardless of its own status. A refund reduces the total only if the refunded gift’s own amount was changed to reflect it. If the recurring gift has produced gifts in more than one currency, Rhythm adds the totals together without converting currencies, so a mixed-currency total may not mean what it appears to mean. These totals change only when a billing change happens; nothing else recalculates them.
- Next Gift Date. The next gift date on the recurring gift comes from the billing schedule. If you enter a different date on the Edit Recurring Gift page and save it, the schedule’s next change overwrites your edit, so a manual correction to the next gift date does not stick. After the first installment processes, an active recurring gift keeps showing a future next gift date rather than losing it. A blank next gift date on an active recurring gift is worth investigating; see How a Billing Run Actually Charges the Donor above for a common reason.
- Last Processing Date and the gift it produced. These fields come from the billing schedule’s own record of what it last processed. If several entries were processed together, Rhythm records the last one in the schedule’s list, not necessarily the most recent by date. Because of that, the date shown can occasionally be earlier than you expect.
- Suspended Until. This date comes from the billing schedule’s suspension end date. If the schedule does not have one, Rhythm clears the field on the recurring gift the next time it receives a billing update, even if you entered a date in Suspended Until: on the Edit Recurring Gift page.
Tip
A newly created recurring gift can take up to about ten seconds before it is ready to receive its first billing update. If a change arrives before then, Rhythm quietly drops it instead of showing an error. If something looks missing when you check a brand-new recurring gift right after it is created, give it a moment and check again.
What Flows from the Recurring Gift to Billing
When you edit most fields on a recurring gift, such as its amount, fund, campaign, appeal, or frequency, you change only the recurring gift record. Those edits do not reach billing, so the donor keeps being charged exactly as before even after you save a different amount or frequency.
Status is the exception. When you change a recurring gift’s status, billing responds this way:
flowchart LR
A[Status set to Active] --> B[Billing resumes charging]
C[Status set to Suspended] --> D[Billing pauses charging]
E[Status set to Cancelled, or cleared] --> F[Billing is cancelled]
G[Status set to Payment Error or Completed] --> H[Billing is left alone —<br/>charges continue]
Cancelling a recurring gift cancels its linked installment schedule right away, including when a donor cancels their own recurring gift from the Portal. You do not need a separate step to cancel the schedule to match. That sync happens automatically as soon as the recurring gift’s status changes, so there is no need to run a separate schedule-cancellation billing run for a recurring gift you already cancelled this way. A recurring gift that stays cancelled is also left alone by future billing runs. The Process Installment Schedules action selects only schedules that are still active, so it does not charge a cancelled schedule or set it back to active on its own.
Warning
Setting a recurring gift’s status to Completed or Payment Error by hand does not stop billing. Only Active, Suspended, Cancelled, and clearing the status entirely reach billing. If you want to stop the charges for good, cancel the recurring gift rather than marking it completed.
A recurring gift’s suspension end date is never sent to billing, even when you suspended the gift yourself. Only the status travels. Rhythm also does not check whether a status change makes sense for the recurring gift’s current state. If you set a cancelled or completed recurring gift back to active, billing restarts no matter how the gift reached that status. A donor managing their own recurring gift in the Portal can suspend it the same way staff can.
Why This Matters Day to Day
Because the sync runs in the background and mostly in one direction, a recurring gift’s status, totals, and next gift date are the most reliable signs of what is happening with the donor’s billing. They are more reliable than anything you type into those fields yourself. When you need to change what a donor is actually charged, such as the amount, frequency, or card on file, make that change through the appropriate task instead of assuming an edit to the recurring gift record will reach billing.