Month: July 2023

An additional way to see Yahrzeits

This is purely an incremental change, and one of modest scope. Nonetheless, it’s something that a few of our customers and prospects have suggested.

Let’s say that you want to see the Yahrzeits related to a person or a family. Heretofore, there were basically two way:

Way I: Go to Queries -> Yahrzeits. Enter any part of the member’s last name, and optionally any part of the member’s first name. Check a few boxes in the list of fields to appear, and search. You’ll see a screen with all the Yahrzeits observed by the member whose name you entered, alongside with other observers of those Yahrzeits.

Way II: Go to Maintenance -> Yahrzeit Relationships. In the search box toward the left side of the screen, enter the last name of the member in question. ShalomCloud displays the corresponding Yahrzeits. Take note that the link to the far left on the Yahrzeit name, jumps into maintenance on the deceased. And that the link on the right jumps into maintenance on the relationship. For example, from there you could change the notification to N (no notification).

And now, we have Way III:

Go to Maintenance -> Add /Update Families. Enter a portion of the family code. Then, use the Edit link on the right to drill into the details for that family. First you’ll see the household information; after that, the individual members of that household. Immediately below the last member of the household, you’ll see the new section, showing all the Yahrzeits for any member of the household. That, too, has a link that allows you to jump into editing any one of those Yahrzeits.

This accompanying video runs through all three techniques.

New warning on duplicate form responses

With the ShalomCloud form builder, you can declare certain questions as auto-bill. This means that, depending on what the user selects, ShalomCloud creates an amount owed. Example — membership type, like this:

  • Family membership $2000
  • Single membership $1000
  • Senior couple $1200

What has been happening on occasion, is that either both adults in a household respond to the form — or the same person responds a second time. The result would be double-billing. Two family memberships, in the above example, for a total of $4000.

Now, with this safety check, when someone accesses a form, the system checks whether anybody in the household has already submitted the form. The system provides the name of that person, and the date of the previous form submission.

One caveat — this is just a warning. That is, it does allow the 2nd person to continue with the form. Why? At this juncture, we are leery of stopping those cases where, perhaps, someone didn’t fill out the form completely, and just wants a do-over. Depending on how this plays out, we can consider preventing the subsequent submission.

Also — we have not yet applied this logic to school registrations. Most assuredly, it needs to be there, but we opted to put this portion of the enhancement into production.

Here’s an end-to-end run-through of the first, then the duplicate, form submission.

Two Small Enhancements — Plaque Location on the Bimah list…

and a summarized version of the Deposit Assistant.

We have two small, unrelated enhancements to show you.

Enhancement One: This relates to the combination Bimah list. The combination Bimah list, for those of you not familiar with it, combines onto one list, the Yahrzeits observed by Hebrew date, along with those observed by Gregorian date.

The combo Bimah list contains a growing numbers of options. Prior to now, those options were

  • Group by month, or group by day.
  • Whether or not to show the relationships on the list (e.g. father of, mother of).
  • To include all Yahrzeits with plaques, whether or not there was an observer.
  • Whether to specifically exclude relationships with a notification flag of “N” (meaning do not notify).

Now, we have one additional checkbox. If you’d like to show the plaque locations on the Bimah list, there is a corresponding selection.

For our second small enhancement, we turn to the Deposit Assistant. Here, as before, you can select recent incoming funds, either by Deposit ID, or by date range. Until now, the report always showed the detailed line items, grouped by category, within the source — cash, check card, ACH, etc.

Now, you’ll see an additional radio button — to produce the report in summary, with only headings and totals.

Here’s a video that runs through these two features.

Your entry did not go to QuickBooks Online — now what?

Announcing the ability to post activity to QuickBooks Online retroactively.

First of all — this article does not pertain to those who use our QuickBooks Desktop integration. Because that is, by its nature, run in batch, after the transactions post to ShalomCloud.

When would you want to use this capability? Not often, hopefully. However, let’s say you’ve set up a new financial category in ShalomCloud, and haven’t mapped it to the corresponding chart of accounts entries in QuickBooks. And, then, some items post — could be via the administrative screens, or via any of the online portals. If that happens, you’ll receive an email, saying something like, “No mapping for credits on category <name of the category>.

Given that the integration from ShalomCloud to QuickBooks Online occurs within seconds, how can you correct that missing entry? In the past, you could post the entries manually; or we in ShalomCloud support could handle it, also manually.

Aha! Now, you can go into the familiar Queries -> Financial transactions. Enter whatever criteria will include the items(s) in question. Check the box on the far right, and touch the orange button at the bottom, Send checked to QBOL. That’s it.

You can see the above scenario in action by viewing this video.

Retroactive posting to QuickBooks Online