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

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.

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.

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.