New capability — to acknowledge pledges

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).

Here is a video to view the end-to-end process

Direct Link — Member Portal to Shopping Cart

Now available — a direct link from the member portal to the shopping cart.

Some basics — if you’re unfamiliar with the member portal, it might help to view this video.

The ShalomCloud shopping cart provides a way for your community to purchase items (including zero-cost items), and sign up for events. Examples include Shabbat dinners, Rabbi classes, Lulav and Etrog, concerts … quite a variety.

In the last step, where the user goes through a check-out process, there’s a form to fill out. As described in the shopping cart tutorial, ShalomCloud uses the demographic information in that form to identify the buyer, and to attribute the purchase to a family known to your synagogue — or to create a new family unit, if none of the info matches anything in the system.

What is new about this announcement is that, if the congregant first logs into the member portal, a new button will appear. That button will launch the shopping cart. Furthermore, when that person enters the check-out, all the demographic information will be pre-filled. Name, email, phone, physical address. Thus, no need to repetitively fill out known data–as long as your congregant first logs into the member portal.

Video demonstration

Announcing a new, more granular authorization

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.

Unlocking the Full Potential: More Ways to Maximize Your Alternate Email Sender

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.

Now available — track form responses

The ShalomCloud form builder offers an integrated capability to send forms. The most common use is for school registration and membership renewal. However, the form builder accommodates any kind of information that you wish to gather. Surveys, interests, preferences, for example.

For some forms, especially those two most common uses, there has not been a convenient way to track who has and has not responded. The best way, until now, was to set up an attribute for each sent form, and then mark the attribute as forms came in.

We now have available a feature we’re calling the Form Tracker. Here’s how it works:

For any form for which you want to enable tracking, there’s a radio button to say so. By default, tracking is off for a given form.

With tracking enabled, each time you send a form, the system tracks when, and to whom, you sent the form. In the case of school forms, it also tracks the student .

Then, when someone responds, the systems records the date and time of the response.

Moreover, there is now a convenient screen that shows the times sent and received. There is also a check-box, so that, if you want to send, say, a reminder, you can do so, directly from that tracking screen.

Finally — each time you send a form, the system creates an attribute, more or less matching the name of the form. And, as people respond, it attaches that attribute to the responder. Therefore, you can easily query families or individuals, perhaps to promote sending acknowledgements.

You can see this feature in action in this video.

Two New Features for Yahrzeit Emails

Announcing two new features for yahrzeit emails.

First — until now, the recipient of the reminders saw only the email address of the sender. So, for example, if you logged in as admin@yourtemple.org, that’s all the recipient saw. Now, the name associated with that user will appear, alongside the email. Thus, for example, assuming that Adam Adams is the administrator, the email will come from Adam Adams <admin@yourtemple.org>.

Second change — until now, the subject of those yahrzeit emails was always the single word Yahrzeits. If you’re content with that, you need do nothing. If, however, you want something more descriptive as your subject line, you can go to Home => Declare synagogue options. Scroll near the bottom, where you’ll find a field labeled Subject for yahrzeit reminders. Whatever you enter there (after touching the submit button), becomes the subject line for emailed yahrzeit reminders.

To see a brief video demonstrating the above, feel free to access this link.

The directory and the portal — respecting privacy

If any of your folks have expressed a desire to NOT appear in your ShalomCloud membership directory — – or, if they wish to not appear in the member portal search — here is how you’d fulfill that wish.

First, create a family attribute, specifically with the abbreviation _EXCL. That’s uppercase EXCL, preceded by an underscore.

Then, you’d proceed to tag the privacy-oriented families, using Maintenance -> Assign Family Attr.

Once so tagged, when you produce a directory (Queries -> Produce Directory), that entire household does not appear.

Also, in the member search section of the logged-in member portal, people in the excluded families do not appear.

Video illustration.

Credit balances now on statements

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

  • Does not appear if its effective date precedes the statement period.
  • Conversely, does appear if its effective date falls during the statement period.

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,

  • After signing into ShalomCloud, go to Home -> Declare synagogue options.
  • Find the selection “Statements show credits on file.”
  • Select the radio button Exclude credits-on-file on statements.
  • Submit

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.