Month: January 2019

Bimah List

Bimah List .

ShalomCloud has offered, from the beginning, a way to pull Yahrzeits by a variety of selection criteria. You could pull lists by by name, by related member, by Gregorian date range, by Hebrew date range. You could even pull a list of Yahrzeits where there is no related member.

Moreover, from the list, you could create emails to the related persons, or create hard-copy letters to those same folks.

Finally, you could export the list to a spreadsheet, and perhaps use that spreadsheet to format and print a document to read from the Bimah during Shabbat services.

We are announcing an added convenience–the ability to create a ready-made list, expressly meant to be read from the Bimah.

There are a few options when generating the Bimah list:

  • By Hebrew date or Gregorian date.
  • From and to dates.
  • Group the list by day or by week (for example, if you make the announcements weekly, and perhaps have a daily Minyan, you’d probably want to group the list by day. On the other hand, if you have services twice a month, you may want a monthly list, grouped by week).
  • Include or not include the relationships on the list.
  • Print the list (or save to a file), after you see it on the screen.

Here’s a video that shows a couple of ways to create the Bimah List.


QuickBooks Desktop Integration

ShalomCloud now offers QuickBooks Desktop integration.

For some time, we have supported near-real-time integration with QuickBooks Online.  By that, we mean that, within minutes of posting financial activity in ShalomCloud, that activity appears in QuickBooks Online.  This is a cloud-to-cloud integration, and one that seems to follow Intuit’s implied direction.  (For a comparison between QB Online and QB Desktop, please see this chart.)

However, in talking to customers and prospective customers, we have learned that QuickBooks desktop maintains its popularity.  Therefore, we developed the Desktop integration.

Basically, there are three steps involved.category mapping

Step 1–export your chart of accounts from QB Desktop, and import that chart into ShalomCloud.

Step 2–map your ShalomCloud categories  into the QuickBooks chart.  Then, after going about your normal financial posting,

Step 3–create the extract to QuickBooks Desktop.

 

 

The explanation above appears daunting–but it’s actually a simple process, as illustrated in this video, which walks through all the steps.  In reality, it may take some careful thought to get the mapping just right.  After that, though, the normal, day-to-day process just involves one link–to export financial activity from ShalomCloud–followed by importing that file into QB Desktop.

 

 

When your congregants do not have email

Most of the time, you can reach most of your community by email.  However, there will likely be some folks who either do not have an email address, or simply prefer paper mail.  How can you conveniently distinguish the paper-mail audience?

ShalomCloud now offers two different features geared toward the above.  First, we’ve added to the member query a check box to select those people who lack an email address:

paper mail--no email checkbox

Second–when you’re producing the so-called “turnaround document”–if you send a paper document to everyone, then this feature will not matter.

But–if you primarily send the turnaround document by email, you’ll see a way to reach the non-email members.  paper mail roster no email only

This is important to know–on the turnaround document, if you select “no email only,” that means that no one in the family has an email address.  Why?–a couple of reasons.  First of all, if anyone in the family has an email address, that household would have received the email version of the document.  Secondly, it is commonly the case that children may not have their email addresses loaded–and we wouldn’t want those families bombarded with redundant communications.

Yahrzeit Letters Enhanced

Enhanced formatting for Yahrzeit letters–by which we mean fonts, colors, sizing, and the like.

At first, ShalomCloud offered a way to control content for Yahrzeit notifications, presuming you would print and mail them.  After that, we bolstered the communication offering by making available email templates.  The latter included a toolbar to control letter sizes, letter colors, background colors, and even picture placement.

However, you, the user, had to choose one or the other–either the fixed format (but with editable content) of the letters, or the fluid format of emails.

No longer!  You may now format your Yahrzeit notifications using the email templates, yet use the email template to send hard-copy letters.  The best of both worlds.

Here’s a video (4m, 18s) that shows this new idea in action.