Don’t miss the latest news! The BVCMS Newsletter for March 2012 is now available. It contains articles about our most recent features as well as information that will be of special interest to BVCMS System Admins (be sure to notice the article about the Church IT Roundtable event coming up in April). Click here to read it online.
Yep.you read that correctly. We have made yet another improvement to make it easier for you to enter a contribution that goes to multiple funds.
The first improvement was great for scanned checks or for online giving bundles, because the total amount was already in the entry.
Now we have improved how you can handle that scenario if you are entering the contributions manually. In that case, what you need is a way to easily duplicate the entry, minus the amount.
So, you don’t even need to click the Split button! All you do is complete your first entry (for the amount going into the first fund) and when your cursor is on the next line.drum roll, please..just enter the letter d and Tab!
That will prepopulate that entry with the People ID# and name from the previous entry, but with the Amount field empty. Your cursor will be in the amount field, so all you do is enter the Amount, select the Fund and continue as usual.
I have revised the PostBundle Help article to reflect this change.
Thank you to all you Finance users who have given us positive feedback when we add new features. We love knowing that our improvements are making your jobs easier.
Karen
You spoke and we listened. After talking with our contributions wizard – OK, she isn’t really a wizard, but she is a whiz at handling our contributions – we made some cool improvements to the new Split Contribution feature.
Now, you just enter the total amount of the contribution (which is already done for you if you importing from a scanned checks deposit) and when you click the Split button, it will ask how much to split from that entry. Enter the amount and a new entry appears below the original one – each with the correct amount. All you do at that point is select the fund for the new entry, either click OK or hit Enter. Voila! You’re done. Works quite smoothly.
Read more about how to split a contribution.
Karen
Gone are the funny curly braces and all that other stuff. We have greatly improved how to create a vote link inside an email and you are going to love it!
You will need to know the Organization ID and, if you want a Confirmation to be sent, make sure there is a Confirmation on the Messages tab for the Organization. Then just find the group to whom you want to send the vote link and click Email individuals from the toolbar. Notice that below the body of the email that there are brief instructions on how to create the vote link.
Click here to read more and see screenshots of just how to do this. Give it a try!
Karen
Have you ever gotten a call from someone in your church system complaining that they have not been receiving emails? You may have even called us to ask what was going on. We are able to look up in Sendgrid.com the status of emails and why they might be blocked.
But now you’ll know yourself! We have been meaning to do this for a long time. We are now getting notified of bounces, spam reports and dropped emails. And, we are recording those and forwarding them to the sender. It will be up to you and them to resolve whatever reason for the failed mail. The reason will be reported in the notice you receive. This should make it much easier to keep your database full of good email addresses.
For some, it will be an obvious misspelled domain name or a badly formatted email address and those will be easy to fix. For others, the report may be that the email address does not exist anymore. Still easy, but you should probably try to reach out to the person another way, perhaps give them a call. Finally, it may be that they have complained that you are spamming them and clicked the “Junk Mail” link on their email client. If that happens, you probably just need to remove their email from the system. They don’t want to hear from you evidently.
The next step in making this even easier to use is to give you control over whether to unblock the email on Sendgrid since they stop sending to such recipients when there are problems like this. There is good reason for that, it helps us maintain a very good reputation as a good citizen in the mass email sending community. We’ll get put on a blacklist if we were to keep sending emails to bad addresses. So once we see that it is bad, we stop. So eventually, you will have control over whether you want to unblock these emails and give them another try. You should probably wait until you have communicated with the recipient and figure out what the problem is on their end.
Bottom line, you are going to start getting notices from time to time on failed emails from BVCMS. Now you know what’s going on.
For those of you who have Finance role, you will be thrilled with the new changes we just published! Where do I begin.?
Split Button for assigning one contribution to multiple funds:
We have added a Split button on Post Bundle which will duplicate the entry in order to allow you to select a second fund for a contribution. This means you do not have to enter the person’s ID or name a second time in order to record one check going to multiple funds. Enter the contribution with the amount going to the first fund, then click Split. Now all you need to do is enter the amount and select the next fund for that person’s contribution. This will really be helpful for scanned check bundles and online giving bundles as the contribution has already been created.
Editing within a bundle (scanned check file):
You’re gonna love this feature! Now, after you Edit a row in the Bundle, it returns to its original position in the Bundle. It displays at the top of the list while you are editing it, but when you press Update, it magically returns to the row where it was originally. This will be especially helpful when you are editing both online giving bundles and scanned check bundles.
New look for the ‘Contributions-All’ page:
Take a look. We have added new Search features. Also, we added a Total amount and a Count. The amount will exclude any reversals, returns and pledges. You can filter for a person, notes, a fund, a type of contribution, status and year.
Non-Deductible Funds:
You can now flag a fund as Non-Deductible. This allows you to record receipts for items such as Easter Lilies or Poinsettias, payments for study materials, etc. – items that are not tax deductible, but that you might want to capture and associate with an individual. The System Admin can create these funds and set the flag. These will not appear on a person’s contribution statement. The Totals By Fund report now has a checkbox to allow you to view these non tax deductible receipts.
Totals By Fund Report and Excel Exports for Contributions:
This page has been totally rewritten to include several new features. In addition to the Non Tax Deductible checkbox (mentioned above), we have added tiger striping to the report to make it easier to view a specific fund total. You can still drill down for each fund. We also added a checkbox so you can view just Pledges.
We have added two new buttons: Export Contributions and Export Contribution Totals. These make it very simple for you to run these reports. The Contributions report is a listing of every contribution in the filter. The Contribution Totals gives a summary for each individual: one row for each fund to which the person has contributed, with a column for the number of contributions included, the total dollar amount. We also include the person’s People ID#, their name, their spouse’s name, the Fund Description and Fund ID#.
Funds page changes:
The first thing you will notice is that you will see only open funds by default. You can view closed funds by clicking the link at the top of the page. Also, we have removed the unnecessary description and have left only the fund name as well as adding tiger striping to make it easier to view the individual funds. Finally, you get better error messages if you try to create a new fund with an existing ID#.
We will be updating the Help Documentation to reflect these additions.
Karen
We implemented this new role a couple of months ago and are finding it very useful. Here at Bellevue, we actually have replaced OrgMembersOnly with OrgLeadersOnly for our lay leaders. Assigning this role to your lay leaders allows you to give users more privileges (like Edit or Attendance), because they are limited to only those Organizations in which they are a Leader. Whereas, with OrgMembersOnly, they have access to every Organization in which they are enrolled regardless of their Member Type in the Organization. Read more about lay leader user roles.
Another new feature that goes hand-in-hand with this new role is the concept of Parent/Child relationships for Organizations. The purpose of these is to give a lay leader (who has OrgLeadersOnly role) assess to Organizations in which he is not enrolled. Read more about these special types of Organizations.
We recently made it incredibly easy to compose Vote Links in an email (If you missed that blog post click here.) Well, now we’ve done the same thing for RegisterLinks.
Instead of using the old method for creating either a VoteLink or a RegisterLink, you will now create it directly in the email you will send to your target group.
Once a registration is set up and you know the Organization ID, just find the group to whom you want to send the register link and click Email Individuals from the toolbar. Compose your email and then highlight what you want them to click on – a word, a phrase or an image. Then, click on the hyperlink icon and type just 2 things: registerlink in the URL text box; then the Organization ID# in the OrgID text box under Special Links. Click OK and send your email.
That’s it! Seriously.that’s all there is to it. Read more about Composing RegisterLinks.
Karen
The latest BVCMS feature to be rolled out is the ability to upload documents related to a person’s church membership. This link – Membership Docs – is located on the Membership>Summary tab of a person’s record.
At our church, a person completes a Decision Information Sheet when they make a decision to join our church (or to be baptized without joining). Other churches have Membership Covenants that a person signs when they request membership. Whatever document your church uses can be saved as a PDF and uploaded to the member’s record. You can also upload JPG files as well.
You must have Membership or Admin role in order to both upload and access these documents. Read more
Karen
We have made it even easier to add a new Organization. There is a link right there under Organization in the main menu. If you are creating Organizations for a new database, just click that link and fill in the blanks. If you have existing Organizations that you want to copy (example: a Student Ministry Life Group that meets on Sundays at 8:00 AM), just go to that Organization and then select Add Organization under the main menu. This will create the new Organization and retain the basic settings from the one you were last viewing. You can also check a box that will allow you to Copy Settings if you want to copy the other settings like settings for online registrations. Read more.