Year: 2018

Smarter Contribution Portal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 

 

Member Portal, Part III

Members of your congregation can now add people to their families via the member portal.

Previously, your members could change only existing information. Now, they will be able to round out your membership by adding, for example,

  • children
  • elderly parents
  • adult children who may have moved back home.

 

 

First batch of changes in 5779

Several small enhancements are now live:

  1. If you print labels from the member query screen, the first line of the label now shows the individual member name, rather than the family formal name.
  2. On the household/family query screen, you can now query by date resigned, and by reason for resigning.
  3. 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.
  4. Pertaining to Yahrzeits, where some notifications are by Hebrew date, while other notifications are by Gregorian date–a single export button now gives you two tabs.  The first tab matches the top part of the screen; the second tab matches the Gregorian portion of the screen.
  5. When producing a directory, beside each email address is the person’s first name.

In addition, there is one change intended to solve a reported problem that manifests itself as the cryptic message “502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.12.1.”

Eight Tools to Edit PDF Files

Have you the need to edit PDF files?  The wonderful Zapier organization has published an article describing eight different ways to approach the task.

To save the reader some time, I’ve summarized some salient facts below.

Product Web Windows Mac iOS Android Entry price
Preview x free
Xodo x x x x free
Sejda x x x free
CloudConvert x free
PDF Expert x x 9.99 iOS; 59.99 Mac
PDFElement x x x x free iOS, Android; 39.95 desktop
Foxit x x x x x 7.99/month
Adobe Acrobat x x 14.99/month