Category: General

Recurring Payments

There’s a new feature available in regard to recurring payments.

Previously, there were only two time periods for recurring payments–weekly or monthly. Now, though, you can specify the number of weeks or months between payments.

For example, if you specify a month-type payment, but with an interval of 3, that charge will happen every 3 months.

If you’re unfamiliar with the whole idea of recurring payments, as implemented within ShalomCloud, you’ll likely find this video helpful.

List of payment plans
Payment Plans

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.

 

 

Eight Tools to Edit PDF Files

Have you the need to edit PDF files?  The wonderful Zapier organization has published an article describing eight different ways to approach the task.

To save the reader some time, I’ve summarized some salient facts below.

Product Web Windows Mac iOS Android Entry price
Preview x free
Xodo x x x x free
Sejda x x x free
CloudConvert x free
PDF Expert x x 9.99 iOS; 59.99 Mac
PDFElement x x x x free iOS, Android; 39.95 desktop
Foxit x x x x x 7.99/month
Adobe Acrobat x x 14.99/month

Finer adjustments on letter templates

If you’d like to specify custom margins on your hard-copy letter templates, that is now available.  The adjustment goes down to 1/72nd of an inch–in other words, to declare a two-inch left margin, you’d put 144  (2 x 72) as the left margin; to specify a one-inch right margin, enter 72, etc.

custom_margins

Some other minor additional capabilities:

  • Bold, italic, and bold+italic characters in any of the available fonts.
  • Ability to suppress ShalomCloud-generated headers.
  • Ability to suppress ShalomCloud-generated footers.
  • Ability to print current date in various representations, such as June 30, 2018 and 6/20/18.

Handy keyboard shortcuts

Here is a small collection of keyboard commands that potentially could save the reader time, compared to constantly alternating between the mouse and the keyboard.  I can’t guarantee that these will work on all operating systems, all browsers, but it’ll take about two seconds to find out in each case:

  1.  Instead of pointing and  clicking to your browser’s address bar, just use <Ctrl>L       .
  2. Instead of scrolling to the bottom of a long document, whether Word or Google Docs,  use <Ctrl><End>     .
  3. Conversely, if you’re at the bottom of a long document and you want to go back to the beginning, instead of grabbing the scroll bar and dragging up, use <Ctrl><Home>.
  4. To go back one screen in your browser, Instead of grabbing the mouse and aiming at the small back arrow, use <Alt><left arrow>.
  5. If you’re fond of tabs in your browser, instead of clicking to go from tab to tab, use <Ctrl><Page up> or <Ctrl><Page down>  .

If this list looks daunting, I’d suggest picking any one of these shortcuts, and trying it for a week.  It’ll quickly become a habit, and you’ll find yourself incrementally more productive.

 

A handy productivity tip

This article has nothing to do with ShalomCloud, but rather is a general technology-related tip that may help the reader in ordinary daily activities, both professional and personal.

Have you heard of IFTTT (If This, Then That)?  IFTTT offers a way to integrate disparate applications.  A couple of examples:

Continue reading →

Any cloud or this cloud?

Let’s say you’ve heard about this ambiguous idea dubbed “the cloud,” and let’s say you’re in tune with the idea of running your organization on applications that don’t reside on your computers, or within your premises.  With those givens, what specifically can ShalomCloud do for you?

Let’s run through a few real-world examples:

  1. You’re the president of the Sisterhood, and you want an up-to-date roster of your members.  ShalomCloud provides a tagging system for any and all members.  By means of that tag (or “attribute”), you, the president of Sisterhood, can log into the system from your smart phone, pull down a spreadsheet of Sisterhood members, and call them via tapping the phone number–or send an instant email, right from within the software.
  2. You’re the comptroller, treasurer, or anyone else who handles incoming funds.  With ShalomCloud, you have the ease of booking financial activity, and having it flow through QuickBooks Online immediately.  Thus, you are freed from having to periodically download activity from the synagogue management system.  Furthermore, having an immediate update should dramatically reduce the complexity of reconciling the two systems.
  3. Building on the point above–you’re the Executive Director, and you’re looking for ways to reduce manual, repetitive tasks among your personnel.  With ShalomCloud, you can, at your discretion, allow your membership to make payments online, which flow directly into the software.  As a result, there will be less time spent taking phone calls with credit card instructions, and less time spent opening envelopes and applying payments.
  4. You’re on the Board of Directors, and you want multi-year running totals, by family, of pledges and payments.  And you want a yearly summary along with it.  Sure, if you’re familiar with pivot tables in Excel, and if your software can dump down its history in a usable format, you can achieve that goal.  But with ShalomCloud, the work is done for you–at the touch of button, it creates a six-year trend report, by family, for any set of categories.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list.  Rather, your author has sought to take what may be an abstract concept (“it’s in the cloud”) and put paint to the canvas, so to speak, to provide concrete examples of how our software would benefit your entire organization.

Handling Yahrzeits

The Hebrew calendar is tricky.  Seven years in each nineteen-year cycle, an extra month is added.  Furthermore, months can vary in number of days, from year to year.

Special care is needed for cases where

  • The congregant knows only the Hebrew month and day, but not the year
  • The Hebrew month is one of varying lengths, analogous to February 29th.


yahrzeit_demo from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.