QuickBooks Desktop Integration

by Norman Snyder, posted in General

ShalomCloud now offers QuickBooks Desktop integration.

For some time, we have supported near-real-time integration with QuickBooks Online.  By that, we mean that, within minutes of posting financial activity in ShalomCloud, that activity appears in QuickBooks Online.  This is a cloud-to-cloud integration, and one that seems to follow Intuit’s implied direction.  (For a comparison between QB Online and QB Desktop, please see this chart.)

However, in talking to customers and prospective customers, we have learned that QuickBooks desktop maintains its popularity.  Therefore, we developed the Desktop integration.

Basically, there are three steps involved.category mapping

Step 1–export your chart of accounts from QB Desktop, and import that chart into ShalomCloud.

Step 2–map your ShalomCloud categories  into the QuickBooks chart.  Then, after going about your normal financial posting,

Step 3–create the extract to QuickBooks Desktop.

 

 

The explanation above appears daunting–but it’s actually a simple process, as illustrated in this video, which walks through all the steps.  In reality, it may take some careful thought to get the mapping just right.  After that, though, the normal, day-to-day process just involves one link–to export financial activity from ShalomCloud–followed by importing that file into QB Desktop.

 

 

When your congregants do not have email

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Membership Tracking

Most of the time, you can reach most of your community by email.  However, there will likely be some folks who either do not have an email address, or simply prefer paper mail.  How can you conveniently distinguish the paper-mail audience?

ShalomCloud now offers two different features geared toward the above.  First, we’ve added to the member query a check box to select those people who lack an email address:

paper mail--no email checkbox

Second–when you’re producing the so-called “turnaround document”–if you send a paper document to everyone, then this feature will not matter.

But–if you primarily send the turnaround document by email, you’ll see a way to reach the non-email members.  paper mail roster no email only

This is important to know–on the turnaround document, if you select “no email only,” that means that no one in the family has an email address.  Why?–a couple of reasons.  First of all, if anyone in the family has an email address, that household would have received the email version of the document.  Secondly, it is commonly the case that children may not have their email addresses loaded–and we wouldn’t want those families bombarded with redundant communications.

Yahrzeit Letters Enhanced

by Norman Snyder, posted in Software, Yahrzeits

Enhanced formatting for Yahrzeit letters–by which we mean fonts, colors, sizing, and the like.

At first, ShalomCloud offered a way to control content for Yahrzeit notifications, presuming you would print and mail them.  After that, we bolstered the communication offering by making available email templates.  The latter included a toolbar to control letter sizes, letter colors, background colors, and even picture placement.

However, you, the user, had to choose one or the other–either the fixed format (but with editable content) of the letters, or the fluid format of emails.

No longer!  You may now format your Yahrzeit notifications using the email templates, yet use the email template to send hard-copy letters.  The best of both worlds.

Here’s a video (4m, 18s) that shows this new idea in action.

Smarter Contribution Portal

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Finances
Non-logged-in-portal
Non-logged-in portal

The contribution portal has added a smarter search for contributors who might be Temple members.

What do we mean by that?  First of all, if you watch the video about the non-logged-in portal,  you’ll have the background for this post.  Regardless, let’s squeeze an explanation into a few sentences.

The non-logged-in portal accepts payments and contributions without needing a login. Its biggest advantage–it can identify contributors who are Temple members.  That saves your admin the time of looking up contributors, and manually making entries.

Prior to this change, the portal did a look-up based on email address alone.  If it didn’t find the email address, it created a Family record.

With this change,  the portal tries a few other techniques to find the user.  We shan’t go into the details here.  Let it be known, though, that we’re using more fields entered into the contribution form–with the goal of doing better on finding known contributors.

One other point–suppose that, despite the “smarter” search, the system can’t find the giver, and creates a family record like Smith-1.  Later, you discover this was actually Smith, and you’d like to merge the Smith-1 activity into Smith.  There has been a screen to move that money in one fell swoop.  In addition, we’ve now added a check box to delete the Smith-1 record.

reassign payer
Reassign Payer

Bulk Billing

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Finances

Our newest feature, Bulk Billing, comes into play when you want to create many receivable transactions, for the same amount, in the same category.

Probably the most typical example would be a pledge drive.  Let’s say you have a standard membership of $1000 and a Young Member rate of $300.  With ShalomCloud, you can designate memberships by billing status, by family attributes, or by some combination.  Then, using this feature, you can create pledges with just a few mouse clicks.

Or, let’s say you’re accepting orders for sets of Lulav and Etrog.  Accordingly, you could create a family attribute called, fittingly, “Ordered Lulav and Etrog.”  As the orders come in, you could simply assign that attribute to the respective families.  When the ordering period closes, you could use the Bulk Billing feature to create a receivable for each order, all at once.

Here’s a video (3m, 25s) that shows how this feature works.

ShalomCloud Bulk Billing from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Deposit Assistant

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Finances

Until now, ShalomCloud offered three ways to record funds–checks, cash, and credit cards entered into ShalomCloud.

With this enhancement, you’ll be able to enter other sources of income.  For example, you may have PayPal transactions; you may have card activity coming in from sources other than ShalomCloud.

Whether or not you use the new “other” sources of income, you’ll be able to take advantage of a new report, expressly formatted for printing–the Deposit Assistant.

 

deposit report

Here is a video that shows the entire end-to-end process.

There are two pieces to this enhancement.  First–under the Configuration menu, you can designate your various sources of income.  Cash, check, and credit cards done via ShalomCloud are automatically included.  Then, as you enter financial activity into the system, you can pull down any of those sources of income, type in a reference number, and enter the amount.

Second–at a time of your choosing, go into Financial -> Deposit Assistant and enter a date range.  You’ll immediately see all the activity in the date range, broken down by category, with subtotals by category and by source of funds.  At the end, there will be a grand total.

Last–you can print, or save to PDF, this deposit report.

 

Now Available – Email History

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Membership Tracking

ShalomCloud now keeps a history of outgoing emails.

  • the recipient
  • the subject
  • the message itself
  • when you sent the email

Watch the video (5 1/2 minutes).

 

Moreover, you can query the email history, by

  • any portion of the recipient’s email address
  • any word or phrase in the subject
  • sent after and sent before.

From the resulting screen, you’ll be able to

  • resend an email with a single click, or
  • edit the sent email (perhaps the recipient address was misspelled), and then resend it.

 

Labels and Envelopes for Families

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Membership Tracking

Watch the video on this topic (two minutes).

On the Queries => Families (for some, Queries => Households), the checkboxes on the right now apply to the printing of both envelopes and labels.  Prior to this time, the checkboxes pertained only to envelopes, while the program printed labels for every family that met the search criteria.

 

 

Export Chart Data

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Finances, Synagogue Membership Tracking

NEW — you can now export chart data to CSV or Excel–or display the underlying data right on the page!

(see blue highlighted area in the screen shot)

 

Revenue by Category
Revenue by Category, with options to export

In case you haven’t seen our application, let’s list the available charts:

  • Families by year
    • Joined by year (this is the number of households who joined the congregation, year by year)
    • Joined minus resigned by year (which gives you a net membership count, by year)
  • Families by Zip (bar graph, showing number of households by zip, with hyperlinks to those households).
  • Pledges by Year (stacked bar graph, interactively showing pledged and paid, by year)
  • Revenue by Category (pictured above)
  • Pledged-Paid Gap (line graph, going back several years, showing the cumulative difference between pledged amounts and paid amounts).

For each chart, there is a little symbol toward the upper right that lets you export the chart to PDF, JPG, PNG, or just print it directly.

With this change, that same symbol allows you to export the data that goes into making the chart, into a spreadsheet-compatible format.

 

Better Queries

by Norman Snyder, posted in Synagogue Finances, Synagogue Membership Tracking

We have three improvements in which you might be interested, with a six-minute video that runs through all three:

Queries with ‘NOT’; bulk status changes.

  • Bulk change of family status:  when you run a family/household query, you will now see a button on the bottom left of the screen.  That button enables you to change the status of any families that you check.  For example, you might query for all families with attribute “moved away.”  From there, in one step, you could change all of those families to a status of “Inactive.”
  • On family/household queries, you can now pull lists of families who do not have a certain attribute.  There is one example in the video above.  Here’s another example–suppose you want to do a paper mailing, appealing to raise funds for a new roof.  You maintain an attribute called “Founding Families,” to whom you might make a personal appeal.  You would want to exclude from that query the Founding Families, so as not to send them the general appeal communication.
  • Likewise on individual member queries. There is a good example in the video, namely pulling a list of ladies in your congregation who are not in the Sisterhood.