ShalomCloud offers quite a few ways to handle Yahrzeits. The point of this post is a new way — a simple, all-in list of Yahrzeits, their observers, and the respective dates of the next occurrence.
Rather than providing that background in this article, we encourage the reader to visit https://blog.shalomcloud.com/?s=Yahrzeit . There, you will see explanations and videos on topics such as
We now have an additional approach. From the Queries menu, you’ll see a selection entitled Yahrzeit Simple List. This sends you to a screen with only one field — the start date for producing a list of every Yahrzeit in the system.
This list, meant to be extremely quick, goes straight to a spreadsheet. It lists all of your Yahrzeits, with a line for each related party (or blanks if there is no related party). Beginning with the start date that you’ve entered, it shows the next occurrence of the Yahrzeit.
The video accompanying this post shows a before-and-after look at a financial transaction query.
In the “before” look, you could
Edit any item in the list, to see all the fields for that item, and to change some of them.
For any credit — that is, a payment, an adjustment, or financial assistance — you could select the “DR” link to see the charge to which that payment was applied.
With this change, you can traverse in the opposite direction. For any given charge, you can see the credits applied to it.
And, once you select the “CR” link, the credits appear immediately below the one you selected.
You can now create summarized contribution acknowledgements.
The traditional acknowledgement, addressed in this post from January of 2023, accommodates sending a passel of donation notification from one screen. Accordingly, for each line item, you can override the description; and for each line item, you can specify a third party to be honored or notified. And, by means of a checkbox per item, you can choose exactly which payments merit an email acknowledgement.
But suppose you’re faced with a different situation. For example, over a short period of time, you receive several donations, possibly repeated contributions per household. possibly on different days, possibly via different checks or card/ACH payments. You probably would not want to issue a thank-you per transaction. Instead, you’d like to send a note containing the sum of that activity.
That’s what this new concept handles. You’ll see a checkbox to the right of the Bulk acknowledge button.
By checking that box, and then selecting Bulk acknowledge payments, you’ll see a screen with one line per household, with the total of the payments contained in the underlying query.
This promotes sending one email per household.
One caveat worth mentioning — because we’re totaling, this likely needs a simpler email template. The only elements it can handle are today’s date, the name and address of the giver, and the amount.
Two different situations. Two different ways to handle them.
A little bit of a time-saver here, in the guise of a birthday range checkbox.
From Queries -> Members, you’ve been able to choose a month and day from, and a month and day to.
Well, now, you’ll see a convenience checkbox, which will automatically populate next month’s date range:
If you want something other than next month, such as the next three months, you’re still free to pull down whatever range you want. This is merely a convenience to automatically fill out those four drop-down boxes for next month.
Over the past six months, ShalomCloud has delivered several key features designed to enhance user experience and streamline administrative processes. These updates focus on improving email communication flexibility, financial transaction visibility, and preventing payment errors. Some of these features may not have had an individual blog post; hence, we’ve gathered these topics here, in one article.
Community Field Now Available in Email Templates
Our most recently requested feature has arrived – the ability to include the “community” field in your email templates. (If you’re not aware of the “community” field, please review this blog post.) Previously, users could customize emails with various merge fields, but community designation wasn’t among them. Now, administrators can incorporate community information directly into their communications, allowing for more targeted and relevant messaging.
This enhancement is particularly valuable for organizations managing multiple communities (e.g. HOA associations, senior living facilities). Communications can now be automatically personalized based on community affiliation without manual intervention.
Enhanced Financial Transaction Visibility
We’ve improved the financial transaction posting page by adding a total-owed calculation underneath individual line items. This simple yet effective addition provides instant visibility into the overall financial picture while processing individual transactions.
Total owed beneath the line items
This feature addresses a common pain point where administrators had to manually calculate totals when reviewing accounts. Now, the system automatically displays the cumulative amount owed, saving time and reducing the potential for errors during financial processing.
Smarter Recurring Payment Protection
Our third recent enhancement focuses on preventing accidental overpayments when setting up recurring payments. The system now includes intelligent validation that compares the recurring payment amount against outstanding balances.
When an administrator attempts to create a recurring payment that would result in an overpayment, the system now displays a warning notification. This proactive approach helps organizations maintain financial accuracy and saves both administrators and members from dealing with refund processes.
Deceased Indicator for Yahrzeit Observers
We’ve added a new visual indicator within the Yahrzeit management system to clearly identify which observers are deceased. This thoughtful enhancement helps administrators avoid potentially sensitive mistakes when sending Yahrzeit notifications or planning memorial events.
The indicator appears directly in the so-called Combo Bimah List (and corresponding spreadsheet export), making it immediately clear which family members should not be contacted. This feature reflects our understanding of the delicate nature of Yahrzeit observances and our commitment to helping organizations manage these important traditions with appropriate sensitivity.
Acknowledgement emails can now be directed to specific household members based on their family role. This granular control allows organizations to ensure that financial acknowledgements, donation receipts, and other important communications reach the appropriate family member.
Administrators can now configure email preferences based on family roles such as primary contact, Adult1, or other custom designations. This enhancement respects family dynamics while ensuring important documents reach the right individual.
Understanding that different organizations use different terminology, we’ve added the ability to customize the phrase used for secondary addresses. Whether your organization prefers “Seasonal Address,” “Alternative Location,” or another term entirely, you can now configure the system to reflect your preferred terminology.
This simple but impactful change helps maintain consistency in your communications and creates a more familiar experience for both administrators and members.
Mass Attribute Assignment from Family Query
Finally, we’ve streamlined the process of managing family attributes by enabling mass attribute assignment directly from the family query screen. This powerful feature allows administrators to select multiple families based on search criteria and apply attributes to all selected records simultaneously.
This enhancement dramatically reduces the time required for bulk updates and ensures consistent attribute assignment across your database. Whether you’re tagging families for event invitations, special communications, or reporting purposes, this feature makes the process significantly more efficient.
These updates reflect our ongoing commitment to making ShalomCloud more intuitive and efficient. We continue to prioritize enhancements that directly address user feedback and streamline critical administrative functions.
Perhaps you’ve made use of the ShalomCloud Combo Bimah List. This change is an additional nugget of information that you may add to that list.
If there is a relationship, where the related party is also deceased, this change allows you to denote that fact with an acronym, or phrase, of your choice. Could be OBM, or z”l, or A”H — whatever is customary in your congregation.
For example, using this option, a line on the combination Bimah list would look like this:
And, how do you take advantage of this option? Start with Home => Declare synagogue options. Under Choices and Preferences, you’ll see a collection of terms that you can declare. The new one is called “Term for deceased.”
When producing donation acknowledgements by email, you may have noticed that the recipient seemed arbitrary. May have been adult 1…may have been adult 2.
With this change, you can choose, based on the field we call “role within family.”
How does that work? Under Configuration -> Roles Within Family, you likely will see something like this:
With this change, the person attached to the role with the lowest numbered display order will receive the acknowledgement email (provided, of course, that an email exists for the individual).
Here’s a video showing how this works. The video also shows how to view and change those roles.
By the way, the video mentions a technique to acknowledge several contributions from one screen. If you’re not familiar with that capability, please review this blog article.
In this article, we’ll review something old, and present something new.
Something old: from the Family/Household query screen, you can do a wholesale change of billing status. For example, suppose you’ve collected a few dozen prospective members during the High Holiday season. And you’ve appropriately entered them into ShalomCloud with a status of “Prospect.” A couple of weeks go by, and several of those prospective contacts have gone ahead and joined the congregation. Via the query, you can use the checkbox on the right, and use the red button to
And now for something new:
Hopefully, you’re acquainted with the idea of family attributes. You’d declare them near the bottom of the Configuration menu. Then, you’d assign them in one of two ways:
In the Maintenance -> Add/Update Families screen, or
Under Maintenance -> Assign Family (yours might say Household) Attr.
There is now a third way, via Queries – Families, as described in the second paragraph above. But, instead of using the “Change status for checked” button, you select an attribute, and use the new button, “Add attribute to families.”
For an animated look at what’s described in this article, feel free to follow this link.
There is now a new selection on statements, namely a “not” attribute.
In our quest to continually provide you with more flexibility, we’ve rolled out quite a few more options for producing periodic statements, over the years. To summarize here, those options have included:
Choose your email template when sending statements.
Include or suppress payment details.
Include or exclude credit balances.
Select a subset of categories (e.g., school-only).
Include or exclude a recent-payments section.
Select statement recipients by family/household attributes.
This is yet another of those incremental improvements. In regard to those attributes — you can now select by households that do NOT have a certain attribute.
Couple of examples where this might prove useful.
Your standard is to produce statements by email. However, you have some families who expressly want a paper statement only. In that case, you might set up an attribute, “Surface mail only.” Then, when your embark on your standard statement run, you can select Does not have attribute Surface mail only.
Your standard practice is to run statements monthly. In contrast, a few families want this communication quarterly. Accordingly, you’d set up an attribute, such as “Quarterly.” Then in your monthly run, select Does not have attribute Quarterly.
Ensure you are utilizing the powerful feature of assigning attributes (a.k.a. tags, groups) to individuals in your congregation. If you haven’t yet, the following video will give you a concise introduction.
Admittedly, there had been an unwelcome delay when navigating to Maintenance -> Assign Member Attr, especially with a large number of members and attributes. We’re excited to inform you that improvements are now in place to reduce delays and enhance your experience significantly.
You will now see a significant improvement in response time, with the assignment screen displaying 50% to 95% faster.
Also — we’ve included more information on the assign screen.
