Category: Software

Suppose you want to know

• which families have joined your Temple during the current fiscal year; or
• which families have belonged to your synagogue for at least ten years.

There is now a way to pull that data (and export it to spreadsheet).

This three-minute video shows how.

ShalomCloud Query by Date Joined from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Suppose you’ve printed several labels, and now have a few more to print, for a selected audience.  You’d like to start where you left off, rather than inserting a whole new sheet of labels.

For example, suppose you’ve asked the system for a list of Board members:

Now, you want to print labels for this audience–and the latest sheet of labels used the first row and the first label of the second row–a total of four labels.

Simply change the starting label number to 5:

The result will be a sheet that looks like this:

Next time printing labels, you’d start with 12.

If you wish to gain a finer designation of family members, beyond what can be inferred from age alone, we now offer a field that we’re calling Role within Family.  Typical values would be Parent, Minor child, Adult child, and perhaps others such as Elderly parent.

You may then use these fields within the queries and reports–for example, to find all the minor children not enrolled in religious school.

Below is a 3 1/2 minute video illustrating the feature.

Creating your annual directory can be a daunting challenge.

No longer: After you’ve designated your format using the ShalomCloud Letter Templates, you are now able to product a directory in three mouse clicks.

Have a look at this three-minute video to see the end-to-end process.

ShalomCloud_Directory from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Some time ago, in response to how crowded with fields was the Member query, we made available check boxes by which the user could select which fields should appear on the reports and spreadsheet downloads.

The same selection ability is now available on the Yahrzeit queries.  This makes for a more device-responsive, cleaner appearance.

 

Realizing that this is fairly dry material, we nonetheless wish to mention several small enhancements within the Yahrzeit capability:

1. ShalomCloud has for some time offered “tags,” alternatively dubbed “attributes,” for Households and individuals.  Yahrzeits can also now be associated with tags….which means you can also query and report by those tags.
2. If your congregation maintains plaques for Yahrzeits, you might be interested in a new query–displaying all the Yahrzeits with no plaque.
3. In the same vein, the application has long been able to show and display Yahrzeits and relationships to people in the congregation.  Now we flip to the opposite question–showing all the Yahrzeits for whom no relationship exists.
4. Next occurrence of Yahrzeit, as of a user-entered date.

 

 

ShalomCloud has, from the outset, provided the ability for the congregation to create letter templates, used primarily when acknowledging donations and sending Yahrzeit notifications.  Moreover, the software exposes a letter preview for each contribution letter, which the office can use to override the letter template for that specific missive.

However, until now the letter heading has been fixed per congregation.  With today’s release, both the letter template and the letter preview allow control of the following:

• The heading text itself, including line breaks
• Bold lettering anywhere in the heading–by line, by phrase, by word–even by individual character(s).
• Italics anywhere in the heading–by line, by phrase, by word–even by individual character.
• Font size–varying anywhere in the heading.
• Option to center the heading or place it on the left margin.

In addition, several different fonts are now available for the entire letter.

As you’re gathering momentum (or just starting) to prepare for the holidays, allow me to recommend something a tad bold and different, but which should help mightily.

Does this describe your situation? (1) Many events to orchestrate and coordinate; (2) Several people, and several committees, with varying responsibilities; (3) A mix of professional staff, office personnel, clergy, and off-site volunteers, all with different tasks and ideas; (4) a flood of emails roaring across the landscape, some with too narrow an audience, some with too wide an audience.

What to do?  Suggestion–open a Slack channel.  

What is Slack?  It’s a tool to collaborate online.  Everyone involved in planning for the holidays (or for any large event, for that matter), can be a member of the Slack channel, and can post questions and answers, by topic.  For example, you could set up topics such as Seating, Children’s Services, and Assignment of Honors.

Let’s spell out a few advantages of this way of collaborating:

— All communications happen in one place, segmented by topic.

— All content can be searched from one location.

— If there are documents to be shared, that can also be done within Slack–even if you use tools like Google Docs or Dropbox to house them.

— If the need arises for private communication, that can be accommodated within Slack.

— There are iPhone and Android apps for Slack; thus, team members don’t need to be in front of a PC to fully participate.

If your holiday preparations flow smoothly, and coordinating among the widely varied participants poses no challenge–well, keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, consider giving this intuitive, popular tool a try.

Please feel free to subscribe to this blog, using the form in the panel on the right.  Or, if you’d like to join our own Slack channel,  synagogue-management.slack.com, drop us a line.

 

 

 

 

 

We have broadened our payments function to include recurring payments.  There are some rather sophisticated ideas implemented herein:

1. Validates the card information immediately
2. Shows you all the unpaid items for a selected family
3. Drag and drop(!) the order in which you’d like to pay the outstanding items (thus establishing a waterfall).
4. Select a payment frequency and amount
5. Optionally declare a maximum number of payments.

From there, the magic unfolds.  As each payment date arrives, the card is charged, of course.  Then, the payment is automatically applied to the outstanding items that you specified in step 3 above.

The system applies periodic payments until either (a) the maximum number of payments is reached, or (b) all outstanding items declared in the waterfall reach a $0 balance.  At that point, the program applies any remaining monies to credit on file, and sends an email to your office personnel to cancel the recurring payment.

As a synagogue back office, you would accomplish all of the above within ShalomCloud.  The actual card activity occurs within Stripe , but ShalomCloud handles the “conversation” with Stripe.

Many systems offer a recurring payment feature–however, you would typically find yourself making decisions on each individual payment as it arrives (“Here’s $100–let me look over the ledger–hmm, what should I apply it to??”).  Not the case here–when you set up the recurring payment, you’d make those decisions during setup.  The activity flows automatically from there.

If we’ve piqued your interest in this capability, please consider subscribing to this blog, by entering your email into the area at the top of the beige-colored box.