You now have the ability to specify where you’d like the family’s address to appear on the statement. You can be as precise as you’d like, down to 1/72nd of an inch. Thus, you can now configure window envelopes with precision.
Second announcement — if you use the option to include recent payments on the statement, the payment line now includes the transaction description. We’ve always shown the date, the category, the amount, and the source of funds. Now, though, we show the description, if entered within the item.
The most visible change is the option to print the directory in a linear, up-and-down organization. Before now, the only choice was to use a “Z-Pattern.” That is, ShalomCloud would print the first entry in the upper left corner. The the second name in the upper right corner. Then the third name on the next row, under the first name.
Now, you can choose to first fill the left column, then fill the right column. Then, a new page, continuing to the end.
Another change in the new style is displaying page numbers.
One more thing — if you populate the field known as “informal label,” you can now include that in the directory.
This video runs through all of new features for the membership directory.
We now have a convenient, straightforward way to handle those situations where you have a third-party payer. By that, we mean cases where your congregant owes for dues or school, for example, and someone volunteers to pay on their behalf.
To enter the third-party payer, you’d use the same screen as always. There’s simply a new field, roughly in the middle, to select the family who is making that payment.
On the financial transaction query, you’ll see the family name of the payer in the “source of funds” column. Likewise, that information appears on a spreadsheet export.
We now offer the ability to allocate recurring payments. That is, within a single payment, to specify exactly what to apply to any and all outstanding items. Thus, you can now pay against categories such as pledges, school tuition, and a security fee, concurrently.
A little background: When we first rolled out recurring payments, the only method available was “waterfall.” Meaning the entire payment would go against whatever item was at the top of the list of owed items. After the top item went to a zero balance, the recurring payment would proceed to the second item, etc.
With this ability to allocate recurring payments, you can declare exactly how much to go against each outstanding item. You can concurrently pay pledges, school tuition, security fees, and the like.
You can change an existing waterfall to an allocation if you’d like. In doing so, you needn’t re-enter any the payment information; but rather just change from waterfall to allocation, as illustrated in this video.
However, inevitably, a segment of your congregation prefers to deal with paper statements and paper payments. Accordingly, you now have the option of including a stub at the bottom of your statements.
The left side of the tear-off shows the amounts owed for the household. Items such as pledges, school tuition, security fees, Bar/Bat Mitzvah fees. Then, the right side has the family name and address, along with a place to record payment information. That payment information could be a check number and amount, or card information.
Now available — mass change for relationship phrases.
Suppose in your list of Yahrzeits, you have some inconsistencies. Brother and brother. Sister-in-Law and sister in law. Of course, you wouldn’t want to change them one by one, to match your preferences. Now, in one easy step, you can change all the relationships from one phrase to another.
Mass Change for Relationship Phrases
To see this feature in action, please have a look at this short video.
We’re rolling out a new feature for statements, dubbed “Link to Pay.”
Some background. For some time now, we’ve offered the ability to send statement notifications by email. The statement notification has a link, that enables the congregant to pull down a statement. That statement is exactly what would have appeared if you’d printed it in the office.
Similarly, we offer a member portal. With a user id and password that we generate, any of your members are able to log in, edit family information, pull statements, and conduct financial transactions. Included, too, is a member search.
This new feature, “link to pay,” combines these capabilities. Within the emailed statement notification, you may include a link that automatically logs the person into the respective account. No password needed. In fact, it goes one step further. It sends your congregant directly to the payment page within the member portal.
We have five enhancements to show and explain. In no particular order, they are as follows.
On the member query, you can now enter part (or all) of a family code as your search criteria. This might be especially useful if you’re intending to send an email via ShalomCloud to members of a specific family, who may have different last names.
Also on the member query, specifically the part of the screen used to send emails. Until now, the email addresses were placed into a text box. If you wanted to avoid sending content to one or several of the selected members, you had to find the respective email addresses and delete them from the screen. Now, you can use the check-boxes on the right of the screen to effect that selection.
Turning our attention to Yahrzeits — in the case where
the person passed away on February 29 (of a leap year, of course), and
there are observers by Gregorian date, and
the current year is not a leap year
the system works correctly if you pull a list for February 1 through February 28.
The “all-children report” now includes a record count.
For those who use our QuickBooks Desktop integration — you can now query financial transactions by the batch code. Furthermore, the batch code appears on the CSV exports. The batch code does not have to be complete. For example, you could query on something like 2020-12-20, and that will pick up all all batches from that day, such as 2020-12-20-1-CHK, 2020-12-20-2-CRD, etc.
If you’d like to see any or all of these changes in action, have a look at this presentation.
ShalomCloud now creates automated emails to contributors. Well, not only contributors, but also people paying any kind of commitment. And, also, payments made from the ShalomCloud shopping cart.
Some background: originally, ShalomCloud was strictly a back-office utility. Appropriately, it tracked membership, Yahrzeits, and commitments and payments. Primarily, office personnel recorded those payments, most of which arrived via paper check. Also, ShalomCloud offered, and continues to offer, a way to produce acknowledgement letters.
However, as people have become more and more accustomed to making online payments, ShalomCloud has expanded beyond a back-office program. Accordingly, we offer three different windows for payments. There is a pure payment portal (login not required), a logged-in member portal, and a shopping cart. Again, to keep pace with what perhaps has become an expectation in this digital society, we now generate immediate acknowledgements via email, for each of those three windows into ShalomCloud.
One thing more, not shown in the video. You can designate the sender of those emails. By default, the sender will be info@shalomcloud.com. However, after logging into the system, if you go to Home -> Declare synagogue options, you’ll see a place to declare the “Default email from.” We will need to verify that sender email address, just be aware.
When a congregant passes away, there are a number of tasks to take care of. Until now, we provided a list of those actions, which you had to perform one by one.
With this enhancement, we have streamlined that process and automated quite a few steps. Where the steps do require manual input, we’ve gathered those inputs into fewer screens than you had to visit in the past.
The manual steps are:
Update the formal name, informal name, and informal label of the family
Possibly changing the billing status, especially if the one who passed away was the last survivor of the family
The automated steps — those that ShalomCloud performs without your intervention are:
Sets the “deceased” flag for the member.
Erases the email address (to avoid inadvertently sending an email from ShalomCloud).
Erases the cell phone (to avoid inadvertently sending a text message from ShalomCloud).
Changes the role-within-family to “Deceased.”
For all Yahrzeit notifications that the newly deceased was receiving, sets the notification flag to “N”. This avoids the embarrassing possibility of sending Yahrzeit reminders.
Tags the Yahrzeit as a former member. Thus, you can query Yahrzeits for former members who passed away during a given time period.
After performing these actions, both manual and automated, the system then provides you with a link to all the Yahrzeits currently observed by the person who passed away. This gives you the opportunity to declare other reminders, thus keeping alive the lineage.
To see this process in action, please peruse this video, illustrating the process to follow when a congregant passes away.
