Year: 2021

Selected Journal Entry Screen

You can now remove items from the Selected Journal Entry screen.

If you’re a QuickBooks Desktop user, you’re likely familiar with the Selected Journal Entry screen. This panel shows the items posted to ShalomCloud since the last push to QBD. From its inception, you could pick and choose which items you wanted to summarize and send.

However, if for some reason you wanted to permanently remove an item from that screen, you had to contact ShalomCloud support. Otherwise, the item would stay on that screen. Now, though, the right edge of the screen has a link to Remove the item. This does not delete the transaction altogether. Instead, it just marks it with a faux batch code.

On the other hand, if you removed an item and want it put back into the SJE screen, there is a way. Namely, you would do a financial transaction query to find the item, edit it, and check a box to remove that faux batch code.

Here’s a video that shows these features.

Notification Flags

Now available — email notification flags, to control who receives any of various notifcations.

Until this change, the system used three rules to determine who received email notifications:

  1. Anyone with read or write permission for financial activity would receive an email whenever a payment occurred.
  2. Anyone with read or write permission for schools would receive an email whenever a school registration occurred.
  3. Anyone with read or write permission on families would receive a notification whenever any other type of form arrived.

With this change, you can designate which of these notifications go to each user. You’ll see a yes/no choice, when you edit the profile for any user.

Be it noted that, initially, we’ve set the flags such that there is no change in who receives what. Thus, we recommend that you have a look at your profiles, and turn off the flags for those who are receiving extraneous email notifications.

Feel free to look over this short (2m, 50s) video showing how to edit these three new flags.

Statement Address Precision

You now have the ability to specify where you’d like the family’s address to appear on the statement. You can be as precise as you’d like, down to 1/72nd of an inch. Thus, you can now configure window envelopes with precision.

Second announcement — if you use the option to include recent payments on the statement, the payment line now includes the transaction description. We’ve always shown the date, the category, the amount, and the source of funds. Now, though, we show the description, if entered within the item.

Please enjoy this 6-minute video to see these features in action.

Margins for family address

New features for Membership Directory

We now have available a few new features for the membership directory.

The most visible change is the option to print the directory in a linear, up-and-down organization. Before now, the only choice was to use a “Z-Pattern.” That is, ShalomCloud would print the first entry in the upper left corner. The the second name in the upper right corner. Then the third name on the next row, under the first name.

Now, you can choose to first fill the left column, then fill the right column. Then, a new page, continuing to the end.

Another change in the new style is displaying page numbers.

One more thing — if you populate the field known as “informal label,” you can now include that in the directory.

This video runs through all of new features for the membership directory.

Additional options for directory
Additional options for directory

Third-Party Payer

We now have a convenient, straightforward way to handle those situations where you have a third-party payer. By that, we mean cases where your congregant owes for dues or school, for example, and someone volunteers to pay on their behalf.

To enter the third-party payer, you’d use the same screen as always. There’s simply a new field, roughly in the middle, to select the family who is making that payment.

On the financial transaction query, you’ll see the family name of the payer in the “source of funds” column. Likewise, that information appears on a spreadsheet export.

On the monthly or periodic statements, the name of the payer appears in the detail underneath the charge.

Finally, on the tax statement, the item appears on the actual payer’s statement.

Please have a look at this video, to see a demonstration of this feature.

Third-party payer
Third-party Payer

Allocate Recurring Payments

We now offer the ability to allocate recurring payments. That is, within a single payment, to specify exactly what to apply to any and all outstanding items. Thus, you can now pay against categories such as pledges, school tuition, and a security fee, concurrently.

A little background: When we first rolled out recurring payments, the only method available was “waterfall.” Meaning the entire payment would go against whatever item was at the top of the list of owed items. After the top item went to a zero balance, the recurring payment would proceed to the second item, etc.

With this ability to allocate recurring payments, you can declare exactly how much to go against each outstanding item. You can concurrently pay pledges, school tuition, security fees, and the like.

You can change an existing waterfall to an allocation if you’d like. In doing so, you needn’t re-enter any the payment information; but rather just change from waterfall to allocation, as illustrated in this video.

allocation recurring payments
Recurring Payment Allocations

Payment Tear-off

Monthly statements now have an option to include a payment tear-off at the bottom of the statement.

We at ShalomCloud have done much to enable electronic statements and electronic payments.

However, inevitably, a segment of your congregation prefers to deal with paper statements and paper payments. Accordingly, you now have the option of including a stub at the bottom of your statements.

The left side of the tear-off shows the amounts owed for the household. Items such as pledges, school tuition, security fees, Bar/Bat Mitzvah fees. Then, the right side has the family name and address, along with a place to record payment information. That payment information could be a check number and amount, or card information.

Payment Tear-off
Payment Tear-off

Feel free to peruse this video demonstration of this feature.

Mass Change for Relationship Phrases

Now available — mass change for relationship phrases.

Suppose in your list of Yahrzeits, you have some inconsistencies. Brother and brother. Sister-in-Law and sister in law. Of course, you wouldn’t want to change them one by one, to match your preferences. Now, in one easy step, you can change all the relationships from one phrase to another.

Mass change for relationship phrases
Mass Change for Relationship Phrases

To see this feature in action, please have a look at this short video.

Link to Pay

We’re rolling out a new feature for statements, dubbed “Link to Pay.”

Some background. For some time now, we’ve offered the ability to send statement notifications by email. The statement notification has a link, that enables the congregant to pull down a statement. That statement is exactly what would have appeared if you’d printed it in the office.

Similarly, we offer a member portal. With a user id and password that we generate, any of your members are able to log in, edit family information, pull statements, and conduct financial transactions. Included, too, is a member search.

This new feature, “link to pay,” combines these capabilities. Within the emailed statement notification, you may include a link that automatically logs the person into the respective account. No password needed. In fact, it goes one step further. It sends your congregant directly to the payment page within the member portal.

To see this feature in action, please view this video.

Link to Pay. Automatically log into the member portal from the statement notification.
Link to Pay

As the video shows, there is a small but key setup item in the email template. Feel free to contact us if you’d like some help in getting that ready.

Five Enhancements

We have five enhancements to show and explain. In no particular order, they are as follows.

On the member query, you can now enter part (or all) of a family code as your search criteria. This might be especially useful if you’re intending to send an email via ShalomCloud to members of a specific family, who may have different last names.

Also on the member query, specifically the part of the screen used to send emails. Until now, the email addresses were placed into a text box. If you wanted to avoid sending content to one or several of the selected members, you had to find the respective email addresses and delete them from the screen. Now, you can use the check-boxes on the right of the screen to effect that selection.

Turning our attention to Yahrzeits — in the case where

  • the person passed away on February 29 (of a leap year, of course), and
  • there are observers by Gregorian date, and
  • the current year is not a leap year

the system works correctly if you pull a list for February 1 through February 28.

The “all-children report” now includes a record count.

For those who use our QuickBooks Desktop integration — you can now query financial transactions by the batch code. Furthermore, the batch code appears on the CSV exports. The batch code does not have to be complete. For example, you could query on something like 2020-12-20, and that will pick up all all batches from that day, such as 2020-12-20-1-CHK, 2020-12-20-2-CRD, etc.

If you’d like to see any or all of these changes in action, have a look at this presentation.