You can now create summarized contribution acknowledgements.
The traditional acknowledgement, addressed in this post from January of 2023, accommodates sending a passel of donation notification from one screen. Accordingly, for each line item, you can override the description; and for each line item, you can specify a third party to be honored or notified. And, by means of a checkbox per item, you can choose exactly which payments merit an email acknowledgement.
But suppose you’re faced with a different situation. For example, over a short period of time, you receive several donations, possibly repeated contributions per household. possibly on different days, possibly via different checks or card/ACH payments. You probably would not want to issue a thank-you per transaction. Instead, you’d like to send a note containing the sum of that activity.
That’s what this new concept handles. You’ll see a checkbox to the right of the Bulk acknowledge button.
By checking that box, and then selecting Bulk acknowledge payments, you’ll see a screen with one line per household, with the total of the payments contained in the underlying query.
This promotes sending one email per household.
One caveat worth mentioning — because we’re totaling, this likely needs a simpler email template. The only elements it can handle are today’s date, the name and address of the giver, and the amount.
Two different situations. Two different ways to handle them.
Over the past six months, ShalomCloud has delivered several key features designed to enhance user experience and streamline administrative processes. These updates focus on improving email communication flexibility, financial transaction visibility, and preventing payment errors. Some of these features may not have had an individual blog post; hence, we’ve gathered these topics here, in one article.
Community Field Now Available in Email Templates
Our most recently requested feature has arrived – the ability to include the “community” field in your email templates. (If you’re not aware of the “community” field, please review this blog post.) Previously, users could customize emails with various merge fields, but community designation wasn’t among them. Now, administrators can incorporate community information directly into their communications, allowing for more targeted and relevant messaging.
This enhancement is particularly valuable for organizations managing multiple communities (e.g. HOA associations, senior living facilities). Communications can now be automatically personalized based on community affiliation without manual intervention.
Enhanced Financial Transaction Visibility
We’ve improved the financial transaction posting page by adding a total-owed calculation underneath individual line items. This simple yet effective addition provides instant visibility into the overall financial picture while processing individual transactions.
Total owed beneath the line items
This feature addresses a common pain point where administrators had to manually calculate totals when reviewing accounts. Now, the system automatically displays the cumulative amount owed, saving time and reducing the potential for errors during financial processing.
Smarter Recurring Payment Protection
Our third recent enhancement focuses on preventing accidental overpayments when setting up recurring payments. The system now includes intelligent validation that compares the recurring payment amount against outstanding balances.
When an administrator attempts to create a recurring payment that would result in an overpayment, the system now displays a warning notification. This proactive approach helps organizations maintain financial accuracy and saves both administrators and members from dealing with refund processes.
Deceased Indicator for Yahrzeit Observers
We’ve added a new visual indicator within the Yahrzeit management system to clearly identify which observers are deceased. This thoughtful enhancement helps administrators avoid potentially sensitive mistakes when sending Yahrzeit notifications or planning memorial events.
The indicator appears directly in the so-called Combo Bimah List (and corresponding spreadsheet export), making it immediately clear which family members should not be contacted. This feature reflects our understanding of the delicate nature of Yahrzeit observances and our commitment to helping organizations manage these important traditions with appropriate sensitivity.
Acknowledgement emails can now be directed to specific household members based on their family role. This granular control allows organizations to ensure that financial acknowledgements, donation receipts, and other important communications reach the appropriate family member.
Administrators can now configure email preferences based on family roles such as primary contact, Adult1, or other custom designations. This enhancement respects family dynamics while ensuring important documents reach the right individual.
Understanding that different organizations use different terminology, we’ve added the ability to customize the phrase used for secondary addresses. Whether your organization prefers “Seasonal Address,” “Alternative Location,” or another term entirely, you can now configure the system to reflect your preferred terminology.
This simple but impactful change helps maintain consistency in your communications and creates a more familiar experience for both administrators and members.
Mass Attribute Assignment from Family Query
Finally, we’ve streamlined the process of managing family attributes by enabling mass attribute assignment directly from the family query screen. This powerful feature allows administrators to select multiple families based on search criteria and apply attributes to all selected records simultaneously.
This enhancement dramatically reduces the time required for bulk updates and ensures consistent attribute assignment across your database. Whether you’re tagging families for event invitations, special communications, or reporting purposes, this feature makes the process significantly more efficient.
These updates reflect our ongoing commitment to making ShalomCloud more intuitive and efficient. We continue to prioritize enhancements that directly address user feedback and streamline critical administrative functions.
Perhaps you’ve made use of the ShalomCloud Combo Bimah List. This change is an additional nugget of information that you may add to that list.
If there is a relationship, where the related party is also deceased, this change allows you to denote that fact with an acronym, or phrase, of your choice. Could be OBM, or z”l, or A”H — whatever is customary in your congregation.
For example, using this option, a line on the combination Bimah list would look like this:
And, how do you take advantage of this option? Start with Home => Declare synagogue options. Under Choices and Preferences, you’ll see a collection of terms that you can declare. The new one is called “Term for deceased.”
When producing donation acknowledgements by email, you may have noticed that the recipient seemed arbitrary. May have been adult 1…may have been adult 2.
With this change, you can choose, based on the field we call “role within family.”
How does that work? Under Configuration -> Roles Within Family, you likely will see something like this:
With this change, the person attached to the role with the lowest numbered display order will receive the acknowledgement email (provided, of course, that an email exists for the individual).
Here’s a video showing how this works. The video also shows how to view and change those roles.
By the way, the video mentions a technique to acknowledge several contributions from one screen. If you’re not familiar with that capability, please review this blog article.
There is now a new selection on statements, namely a “not” attribute.
In our quest to continually provide you with more flexibility, we’ve rolled out quite a few more options for producing periodic statements, over the years. To summarize here, those options have included:
Choose your email template when sending statements.
Include or suppress payment details.
Include or exclude credit balances.
Select a subset of categories (e.g., school-only).
Include or exclude a recent-payments section.
Select statement recipients by family/household attributes.
This is yet another of those incremental improvements. In regard to those attributes — you can now select by households that do NOT have a certain attribute.
Couple of examples where this might prove useful.
Your standard is to produce statements by email. However, you have some families who expressly want a paper statement only. In that case, you might set up an attribute, “Surface mail only.” Then, when your embark on your standard statement run, you can select Does not have attribute Surface mail only.
Your standard practice is to run statements monthly. In contrast, a few families want this communication quarterly. Accordingly, you’d set up an attribute, such as “Quarterly.” Then in your monthly run, select Does not have attribute Quarterly.
Prior to now, you needed an email template, specifically named “send_statement_link.” Now, you’ll see a drop-down box, that lets you choose your email template for statements.
This may be useful in a couple of circumstances, such as:
If you want to distinguish the statement email by monthly vs quarterly, or
If you send category-specific statements by email, and you want the content to be relevant to that category.
In the drop-down box — instead of showing all your email templates, the program will show only your email templates that contain the word “statement“. Doesn’t have to start with statement. So, “Monthly Statement,” or “Religious School Statement,” or “Membership Statement” will all appear in that drop-down box.
If you’re interested in some of the previous developments in regard to statements, feel free to peruse these articles:
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.
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.
ShalomCloud has for years been able to print labels. That is true both for individuals and for family units. However, until now, the labels were strictly mailing labels. That is, the program always printed the mailing address onto the label.
With this change, you now have the choice of printing name-only labels — excluding addresses. For family units, that name can be the formal name (“President George Washington and Mrs. Martha Washington”), or the informal name (“George and Martha”), or the informal label (“George and Martha Washington”). For individuals, it’s the title, the first name, and the last name.
A few possible uses for name-only labels: seating for a community Seder; badges for social events; badges for religious school, to name a few.
Here’s a short video showing the two places from which you can produce name-only labels.
