You can now search financial transactions using a wildcard, or key-word, for the category.
Especially for those of you converting from a legacy system, you may find yourself with hundreds of financial categories. Worse, the naming convention may have differed from year to year, especially if the fiscal year was part of the category name. We’ve seen lists such as
18-19 Senior Dues
2018-19 Dues
2018-2019 School tuition
Young couple dues, 2018-19
With that sort chaos in the naming convention, it’s time consuming to try pinpointing several related categories in a sorted list.
With today’s change, you can merely type a keyword or phrase into an area labeled Category wildcard.
Category wildcard
When accompanied by fiscal year, this gives you a powerful and quick way to focus on a set of transactions in related categories.
Feel free to enjoy this short (3m 26s) video, demonstrating this ability to search financial transactions using a wildcard in the category.
This enhancement includes a number of statement options. Note that you need not change anything, unless you wish to avail yourself of one or more of these options.
Currently, the name and address of the synagogue, along with phone number and website URL, appear at the bottom of the statement. If you’d like to eliminate that, you can put the phrase {no_footer} within the field named Top text. Related to that, if you’d like to print such information near the top of the statement, you can type those details into Top text.
New formatting options
If you would prefer showing the family code itself, rather than just the name and address of the family, on the statement, you can include the phrase {family_code} within the body of the letter.
If you’d like to change the font size of the statement, you can now include something like {font_size 13} within the Additional info. The default is a font size of 12. You can make that smaller or larger, as you see fit.
New content option
Finally — when you select Financial -> Statements, you’ll see an additional checkbox, to suppress zero-balance items. By default, statements include items that were posted and paid in the current statement period. In other words, if someone contributes $18 to a designated fund during the month, that item shows on the statement. On the other hand, if you check the box suppress zero balance, the statement will show only those items with a non-zero balance.
These statement options are by no means an all-or-nothing set of changes. Choose whichever make the most sense for you. Or, try several combinations. The most compact statement would be to un-check include recent payments, and check suppress zero balance.
If you’d like to see a before-and-after video of these changes, feel free to watch this video.
What do we mean by the term “waterfall?” Like water descending from a high plateau, we’re referring to the order in which payments are applied against owed items. As a result of this change, you may now alter the course of the waterfall (to continue the nature analogy) by changing the order of the to-be-paid items, or even adding new items. In addition, you can now drag-and-drop those new items to any position within the waterfall. For example, if you want school payments to come before anything else, you would simply drag the school payment charge to the top of the list.
Does this sounds abstract? Hard to understand? This short (3 minutes, 25 seconds) video should make this change clear.
The All-Children Report now has some additional capabilities.
Setup:
To set this up, it is imperative that, in the Configuration => Roles Within Family, you have various roles for adults and/or parents, and for children. Then, it is also imperative that each person, whether child or adult, to appear on the report, must have an assigned role within family.
List:
With that setup work done, you may now go to Registration -> All children. Here you’ll see a screen that lets you select one or more grade levels (Bet, Gimel, for example, which many temples use for 2nd grade and 3rd grade, respectively). In addition, if you have other distinctions, expressed as member attributes, such as Virtual class, or 4:15 pm session, you may make those selections in conjunction with the grade levels.
After making your selections and using the Submit button, you’ll see a list. The list contains the names of the children, the grade levels, and the family code. You’ll see that the family code is a link, that takes you directly into the family record. That would be handy if you want to change the child’s record — a class, or an attribute, for example. Looking farther to the right, you’ll see the parents’ names, cell phones, and email addresses.
Export:
Immediately below the list, you’ll see a button to export that list to a spreadsheet. There are two additional fields on the spreadsheet that do not appear on the screen:
The attributes mentioned in the previous paragraph, and the mailing address of the family.
The family’s mailing address
Email:
Below the export button, you’ll then see an area which you can use to email the parents. Note that, regardless of the number of times the parent email address appears in the list, the email list has each email address only once. From here, you can compose an email, and optionally include an attachment.
This enhancement talks about financial categories with the portals.
By way of background — ShalomCloud offers two payment portals: first, a public portal, where any person or organization can enter some basic information, then choose from a list of funds or categories. Another alternative is the member portal. For more information, feel free to browse these articles.
Today’s announcement, which applies to both portals, is that you can now specify exactly which financial categories should appear as choices within these portals. You may have old categories no longer used. Or you may have categories in use, but really meant only for the back-office.
In either case, you can mark any category as either Public, which means it’s on the portals, or Internal.
Running statements can tie up your screen for much more than a few seconds. In fact, if statements take more than two minutes, you’ll see a message about a Gateway timeout.
In order to avoid this, we are now processing statements as a background job. What does this mean to you? First of all, as you submit a statement run, you’ll get an immediate response, telling you that the statement run has begun. Later, typically two to five minutes, you’ll receive an email, from [email protected], informing you that the statements are ready. In that email will be a link, which you can use to download the statements.
For small synagogues, this may be a bit of an inconvenience — after all, it’s a two-step process to pull statements. However, you do gain the benefit of being able to use your browser while the statements are running. And, by running them in the background, you’ll not have to worry about the system timing out.
In weeks to come, we expect to be doing the same for some of the longer-running selections.
ShalomCloud now offers a convenient way to move a person from one family to another.
On occasion, you may have added a person to the wrong family. Or, you may have what are, in reality, duplicate records that you wish to consolidate. You may even have situations where families merge.
For any of these situations, we now offer a simple way to move a person from one family to another. It’s just a new field amidst the normal family/member maintenance.
Behind the scenes, there are a couple of clean-up actions that occur:
The system checks to see whether there are any financial transactions tied to the ‘from’ family.
The system checks whether there are any people remaining in that family.
If either is true, nothing further happens. Otherwise, the system goes ahead and deletes the ‘from’ family. If, for some reason, you want to see what was in the family record, you can go to the family/member audit trail to see those values.
ShalomCloud now offers the ability to add email attachments to your communications.
Before we delve into the “how-to,” let’s look at some of the things you might consider before sending out email attachments.
In most email systems, the recipient must download the attachment to see any part of the email.
Many users read emails on their cell phones; if, at the time, they are not in a wireless network, that data would count against their cell plan data allotment.
Sending large attachments to several hundred recipients is a generally frowned upon practice. Better would be providing a link to the document. That way, the email itself reaches its recipients more quickly, and they can decide whether or not to access the document.
With that being said, adding an attachment is rather easy in ShalomCloud. There is a new button at the bottom of the member query, as pictured below:
Adding an attachment to emails
There are a couple of limitations, though: first, you can add only one attachment at a time; second, the attachment must be smaller than two megabytes.
Pull a statement — amounts owed and paid — for any date range.
Make a payment, while designating exactly how those funds should be applied.
Member search, by any portion of the last name and/or first name.
To these functions, we now add the idea of creating, updating, and deleting recurring payments. For the sake of completeness, let us mention a couple of prerequisites:
Your temple or synagogue must have an account with our gateway that offers both card and ACH. For more information on that topic, please send us a note at [email protected], and we’ll guide you through the setup process.
There must be a charge, debit, or amount owed, to which the recurring payment would be applied.
The following video shows, not only the new recurring payments function, but actually everything that the member portal can do. Feel free share this post and video, especially if you have members who may want to have an online account.
Our larger customers may be interested in the capability to segment the turnaround document.
What is the turnaround document, you might wonder? For background, please have a look at this video. This is a document that holds all the fields we have collected for families, individuals, and Yahrzeits. The goal is to send each document to its respective family; and then the family would “turn around” that document with additions and corrections.
For large congregations, the program might well time out. In that case, you would want to take advantage of the new ability to segment the turnaround document — to run it by range of letters. It defaults to “A” to “Z.” If that’s too many, you might try entering something like “A” to “D”, then “E” through “H”, etc.
