One-time manual pledge in Etapestry for event management

When tracking a pledge and then later receiving payment and entering it via “add payment” I cannot add a non-deductible. However, I can add a non-deductible in the original pledge JE, but this doesn't work for sending tax receipts. There's no merge field in communications for “pledge payment received minus non-deductible”, " received minus original pledge non-deductible” or something of that sort. The only option is “received minus non-deductible” which doesn't work to calculate the deductible in either of the entries.

If I use the alternate way of tracking a pledge (meaning I add a pledge and then go to the same journal to apply the payment), that resolves the problem above, but I can’t process a credit card via BBMS! It only will let me enter the credit card info, not select a processor.

We want to move away from using excel and third-party event management systems and make eTap the authoritative source of truth. Partially into using pledges I’m realizing this is completely reducing efficiency. These issues are so strange to me I’m not even sure if the developers are aware.

I realize there’s workarounds, like processing on the backend of bbms and entering card details in the JE without processing. Or entering a received pledge as a gift and re-entering all the associated UDF's (needing to enter things twice) and then writing off or deleting the original pledge. But if we can’t use pledges to improve efficiency it doesn’t make sense for my organization to use them at all. Someone from Blackbaud suggested I create a UDF in the journal and manually calculate the deductible to merge into my tax receipts, but I disagree with this method. We're talking big fundraising events with lots of data, and a small team (1-2 ppl) to manage it.

Would love to see some improvement with this, thanks!!