We call it, officially, “credit on file.” Sometimes referred to as pre-payments. These are funds sent in ahead of time, to be used in the future, as specified by your congregants.
We at ShalomCloud had conceived the periodic (monthly, quarterly, annually) statements as something geared to commitments, and then payments toward those commitments. However, as time bore on, we’ve received feedback that, in those cases where your folks send in money ahead of time, those funds should appear on the statements.
You’ve suggested; we’ve acted accordingly. Now, those credits appear on the statements, listed after the commitments (a.k.a. dues or pledges).
One rule-of-thumb to be aware of — once a credit balance gets drawn down to zero, it
Does not appear if its effective date precedes the statement period.
Conversely, does appear if its effective date falls during the statement period.
One more thing — we’ve guessed that the vast majority of our readership will prefer this addition to the statements. If you do not wish those credits to appear on statements,
After signing into ShalomCloud, go to Home -> Declare synagogue options.
Find the selection “Statements show credits on file.”
Select the radio button Exclude credits-on-file on statements.
This is purely an incremental change, and one of modest scope. Nonetheless, it’s something that a few of our customers and prospects have suggested.
Let’s say that you want to see the Yahrzeits related to a person or a family. Heretofore, there were basically two way:
Way I: Go to Queries -> Yahrzeits. Enter any part of the member’s last name, and optionally any part of the member’s first name. Check a few boxes in the list of fields to appear, and search. You’ll see a screen with all the Yahrzeits observed by the member whose name you entered, alongside with other observers of those Yahrzeits.
Way II: Go to Maintenance -> Yahrzeit Relationships. In the search box toward the left side of the screen, enter the last name of the member in question. ShalomCloud displays the corresponding Yahrzeits. Take note that the link to the far left on the Yahrzeit name, jumps into maintenance on the deceased. And that the link on the right jumps into maintenance on the relationship. For example, from there you could change the notification to N (no notification).
And now, we have Way III:
Go to Maintenance -> Add /Update Families. Enter a portion of the family code. Then, use the Edit link on the right to drill into the details for that family. First you’ll see the household information; after that, the individual members of that household. Immediately below the last member of the household, you’ll see the new section, showing all the Yahrzeits for any member of the household. That, too, has a link that allows you to jump into editing any one of those Yahrzeits.
With the ShalomCloud form builder, you can declare certain questions as auto-bill. This means that, depending on what the user selects, ShalomCloud creates an amount owed. Example — membership type, like this:
Family membership $2000
Single membership $1000
Senior couple $1200
What has been happening on occasion, is that either both adults in a household respond to the form — or the same person responds a second time. The result would be double-billing. Two family memberships, in the above example, for a total of $4000.
Now, with this safety check, when someone accesses a form, the system checks whether anybody in the household has already submitted the form. The system provides the name of that person, and the date of the previous form submission.
One caveat — this is just a warning. That is, it does allow the 2nd person to continue with the form. Why? At this juncture, we are leery of stopping those cases where, perhaps, someone didn’t fill out the form completely, and just wants a do-over. Depending on how this plays out, we can consider preventing the subsequent submission.
Also — we have not yet applied this logic to school registrations. Most assuredly, it needs to be there, but we opted to put this portion of the enhancement into production.
and a summarized version of the Deposit Assistant.
We have two small, unrelated enhancements to show you.
Enhancement One: This relates to the combination Bimah list. The combination Bimah list, for those of you not familiar with it, combines onto one list, the Yahrzeits observed by Hebrew date, along with those observed by Gregorian date.
The combo Bimah list contains a growing numbers of options. Prior to now, those options were
Group by month, or group by day.
Whether or not to show the relationships on the list (e.g. father of, mother of).
To include all Yahrzeits with plaques, whether or not there was an observer.
Whether to specifically exclude relationships with a notification flag of “N” (meaning do not notify).
Now, we have one additional checkbox. If you’d like to show the plaque locations on the Bimah list, there is a corresponding selection.
For our second small enhancement, we turn to the Deposit Assistant. Here, as before, you can select recent incoming funds, either by Deposit ID, or by date range. Until now, the report always showed the detailed line items, grouped by category, within the source — cash, check card, ACH, etc.
Now, you’ll see an additional radio button — to produce the report in summary, with only headings and totals.
Announcing the ability to post activity to QuickBooks Online retroactively.
First of all — this article does not pertain to those who use our QuickBooks Desktop integration. Because that is, by its nature, run in batch, after the transactions post to ShalomCloud.
When would you want to use this capability? Not often, hopefully. However, let’s say you’ve set up a new financial category in ShalomCloud, and haven’t mapped it to the corresponding chart of accounts entries in QuickBooks. And, then, some items post — could be via the administrative screens, or via any of the online portals. If that happens, you’ll receive an email, saying something like, “No mapping for credits on category <name of the category>.
Given that the integration from ShalomCloud to QuickBooks Online occurs within seconds, how can you correct that missing entry? In the past, you could post the entries manually; or we in ShalomCloud support could handle it, also manually.
Aha! Now, you can go into the familiar Queries -> Financial transactions. Enter whatever criteria will include the items(s) in question. Check the box on the far right, and touch the orange button at the bottom, Send checked to QBOL. That’s it.
We’ve expanded on the already-available, but not widely publicized, ability for ShalomCloud to manage the process of assigning honors. This pertains primarily to the High Holidays, but could be used for any set of honors.
There a detailed tutorial available, which may serve better than this text description. Nonetheless, here goes. With this feature, you can
Nominate people to carry out various honors.
Track the status — accepted in person, accepted virtually, declined — whatever terminology you’re accustomed to using.
When assigning honors, ask for a specific last name, or by anyone who has not already been assigned an honor.
Obtain a spreadsheet, with contact information, of who has not received an honor.
And on the query side,
Obtain a list of honors for which there is no assigned person.
Ask for those who have been offered an honor, but who have not yet responded.
From that list, send formatted emails, with the specifics about the respective honor.
Obtain a list of those who have accepted an honor, and email a formatted reminder, replete with details about the honor.
For those of you who process a significant number of checks, you now have the ability to group checks by deposit ID.
What this means, is that, as you enter checks (or cash, for that matter), you can select a free-form label that will stick with those transactions. As you enter financial activity, you can enter a never-before-used deposit ID, or you an select from a drop-down list of previously used deposit ids. By the way, the previously used list, appears according to when they were created, with the most recent being at the top.
Where does the deposit ID appear? One place is within the financial transaction query. You can use deposit id as one of the filtering criteria. And, regardless of the filtering criteria, deposit ID appears in the source of funds column. Moreover, if you do a financial transaction download, the deposit ID appears as a column in the resulting spreadsheet.
One more place — the Deposit Assistant. Prior to this change, the sole choice for the Deposit Assistant was a range of dates. Now, in addition, or instead of, a range of dates, you can select deposit ID from that same drop-down list as mentioned above.
If you find the above description promising, and are wondering how to enable this feature — someone with administrative access would go to Home -> Declare synagogue options. There, you’ll find a radio button to “Use deposit id.”
It’s now your choice — either to accept, or to disallow, recurring contributions from the public portal.
On the publicly-facing payment/contribution page, you may have noticed an option to make a recurring contribution. This is analogous to what you’ll see on many charitable organizations, such as Shriners Hospital and Red Cross. Those organizations, like ShalomCloud, allow the contributor to choose between a one-time payment, or a recurring monthly payment.
Recurring contributions can add complexity to your synagogue finances. Accordingly, we now offer a way to exclude that recurring option. To effect that choice, simply go to Home -> Declare synagogue options, and you’ll see
By selecting “Do not allow recurring contributions,” your page will look like this:
instead of:
Here’s a video that displays and explains this new option.
Expanding on our memos/notes capability, ShalomCloud now accommodates assigning additional users to a memo. The term you’ll see on the screen is “interested parties.”
Until now, you could assign one and only one user to a memo. There is still a primary “assigned to” person; but now, you can select any number of additional users who have access to that memo. All that’s required is that they exist as users in the system, and that they have at least the family permission. If an intended user is not in the list, you’d need to create that person as a ShalomCloud user, and give that user at least Read permission on families.
Each memo contains a checkbox to declare it as private. Once so declared, only users attached to that memo, either as primary or as an interested party, will be able to edit the item. That includes changing the reminder date, marking it complete, and even changing the topic. Non-attached users will, as before, be able to view most fields, other than the body of the note, which says, “*** Contents of note private ***”.
If you’re not at all familiar with this aspect of ShalomCloud, let us repeat this information from a prior post, to wit:
For the notes/memos–you can now receive an email with your individual tasks that are past due (which appear in red), or due within the next seven days. Your administrator can determine the timing and frequency of those “push” emails–for example, the system can send the emails at 11 pm, seven days a week; or, if that seems too often, perhaps 5 am Monday through Friday.
