In our organization, thank-you letters are always assigned by data-entry staff. When a letter is of a type that needs to be merged (grant thank-you letters, or gifts of stock, those sorts of things), the data entry person will go in to the gift, merge the letter, and assign the letter as an action from within the word merge. However, every time we do this, the action is automatically marked as "completed." So we have to remember to uncheck that box every single time.

I understand that this default system works for some orgs, but there should be a way to change the default behavior in these cases. It's a major source of annoyance for our database team.