Month: June 2023

Easily Track High Holiday Honors

We’ve expanded on the already-available, but not widely publicized, ability for ShalomCloud to manage the process of assigning honors. This pertains primarily to the High Holidays, but could be used for any set of honors.

There a detailed tutorial available, which may serve better than this text description. Nonetheless, here goes. With this feature, you can

  • Nominate people to carry out various honors.
  • Track the status — accepted in person, accepted virtually, declined — whatever terminology you’re accustomed to using.
  • When assigning honors, ask for a specific last name, or by anyone who has not already been assigned an honor.
  • Obtain a spreadsheet, with contact information, of who has not received an honor.

And on the query side,

  • Obtain a list of honors for which there is no assigned person.
  • Ask for those who have been offered an honor, but who have not yet responded.
  • From that list, send formatted emails, with the specifics about the respective honor.
  • Obtain a list of those who have accepted an honor, and email a formatted reminder, replete with details about the honor.

New ability to group checks by deposit ID

For those of you who process a significant number of checks, you now have the ability to group checks by deposit ID.

What this means, is that, as you enter checks (or cash, for that matter), you can select a free-form label that will stick with those transactions. As you enter financial activity, you can enter a never-before-used deposit ID, or you an select from a drop-down list of previously used deposit ids. By the way, the previously used list, appears according to when they were created, with the most recent being at the top.

Where does the deposit ID appear? One place is within the financial transaction query. You can use deposit id as one of the filtering criteria. And, regardless of the filtering criteria, deposit ID appears in the source of funds column. Moreover, if you do a financial transaction download, the deposit ID appears as a column in the resulting spreadsheet.

One more place — the Deposit Assistant. Prior to this change, the sole choice for the Deposit Assistant was a range of dates. Now, in addition, or instead of, a range of dates, you can select deposit ID from that same drop-down list as mentioned above.

If you find the above description promising, and are wondering how to enable this feature — someone with administrative access would go to Home -> Declare synagogue options. There, you’ll find a radio button to “Use deposit id.”

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