Background: this article on bulk acknowledgement of contributions.
And this one: bulk acknowledgement of commitments.
The announcement highlights an update regarding the subject lines of email acknowledgements. You now have the flexibility to enter a custom, fit-for-purpose subject line!
It’s not a required field, by the way. If you leave it blank, the emails will have the subject line as “Donation”.
Here’s a brief (3 minutes, 14 seconds) video showing the new subject line field in action.
The ShalomCloud statements, by default, show amounts charged, amounts credited, the balance, AND the individual payments that sum to the amounts credited.
If you (or your audience), find that listing the individual payments are clutter, or are confusing, you now have the option to suppress that detail. Here’s a before-and-after snippet:
Default, in effect today:
And, then, if you wish to choose this new option:
If you prefer the second format, here’s how to make that change:
It’s hopefully a “set-and-forget” option, rather than a choice you’d need to make every statement run.
Modest change here — having to do with your periodic statements.
One of the selection criteria on statement runs had been the ability to select all families, or one family:
With this change, you can now select multiple families or all:
Probably the most advantageous circumstance where this would be useful is this: Suppose you primarily send statements by email. The system dutifully warns of any families who would have received a statement, but for whom the system has no email address.
Before, you would proceed by selecting the first family and printing the statement. Then, you would select the second family; and so forth, one at a time.
Now, you can select all the families for whom there is no email address, and obtain printed statements in one step.
Here’s a video that illustrates the above.
By the way, if you want to see a series of articles about the various developments concerning statements, please peruse this collection.
Adding to the existing ability to acknowledge payments in bulk, we now have the ability to bulk acknowledge pledges.
If you’re not families with what we mean by “bulk acknowledge,” please view this article.
That works handily for recognizing payments of any kind. Now, we’ve added the a button to sent several acknowledgements for pledges, or any amount owed, for that matter. For example, you may want to sent email thank-you notes after a pledge drive, or after people have made commitments to a building campaign.
The procedure is the same as before — it stars with Queries -> Financial transactions. Then, you’d likely select a date ranges; and, perhaps focus on a designated set of categories
New is the light blue button to bulk acknowledge pledges (actually, any type of amount owed).
This post announces a new, more granular authorization — namely one specifically for handling items in the ShalomCloud shopping cart.
First of all, some background. If you’re not familiar with the ShalomCloud shopping cart, please review this handful of articles.
Some more background. ShalomCloud controls access to its major functions by means of a set of permissions, or authorizations. Each permission carries a flag — N for no access; R for read access; and W for read/write access. All well and good. In order to add or change items in the shopping cart, one needed the Financial permission. However, financial permission opens the door to see all financials, including pledges, contributions, and shopping cart activity.
And now we arrive at the focus of this article. You now have an authorization specifically for the shopping cart. In other words, you can grant access to create and update items in the shopping cart, without granting access to the rest of the financial information.
The accompanying video shows how you might set up such an authorization, and what that user can and cannot do.
For some time now, ShalomCloud has offered the ability to send emails from a general alternate email address. For background on that capability, see this article. Useful for things like newsletters, general information, et al.
We have expanded the use of alternate sender address, to both periodic statements by email, and tax letters by email.
Here is a very short video that demonstrates these two new use cases.
We call it, officially, “credit on file.” Sometimes referred to as pre-payments. These are funds sent in ahead of time, to be used in the future, as specified by your congregants.
We at ShalomCloud had conceived the periodic (monthly, quarterly, annually) statements as something geared to commitments, and then payments toward those commitments. However, as time bore on, we’ve received feedback that, in those cases where your folks send in money ahead of time, those funds should appear on the statements.
You’ve suggested; we’ve acted accordingly. Now, those credits appear on the statements, listed after the commitments (a.k.a. dues or pledges).
One rule-of-thumb to be aware of — once a credit balance gets drawn down to zero, it
Here’s the video illustration of the above textual description.
One more thing — we’ve guessed that the vast majority of our readership will prefer this addition to the statements. If you do not wish those credits to appear on statements,
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.
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.
It’s now your choice — either to accept, or to disallow, recurring contributions from the public portal.
On the publicly-facing payment/contribution page, you may have noticed an option to make a recurring contribution. This is analogous to what you’ll see on many charitable organizations, such as Shriners Hospital and Red Cross. Those organizations, like ShalomCloud, allow the contributor to choose between a one-time payment, or a recurring monthly payment.
Recurring contributions can add complexity to your synagogue finances. Accordingly, we now offer a way to exclude that recurring option. To effect that choice, simply go to Home -> Declare synagogue options, and you’ll see
By selecting “Do not allow recurring contributions,” your page will look like this:
instead of:
Here’s a video that displays and explains this new option.
