Importing gifts from excel

Jan Hawkins

Help please,


Our organization has amalgated with another, and I have an excel list of all donors/donation for the last 3 years.  I read somewhere that I should first import the donors, and then import the their donations.  I have already imported the donor list. 


In the list are donors who have made more than one donation.  I thought it would be a straightforward import but I got a response about a lot of duplicates, and was nervous about moving forward.  Has anyone experienced this before and if yes, what is the solution?  The only solution I can think of is to create multiple spreadsheets that don't contain any duplicate account names - ie. one gift per donor - and then import 1 group at a time until I've imported all the gifts.  That sounds like a lot of work.  Thanks in advance for your help/suggestions.

Jan

Jen Bernth

Jan,

We use the import function a couple times a year for fundraisers where credit cards are processed by a third party.  Our Excel contains rows for each separate item (ie: if someone buys a raffle ticket and wins an auction item, they'll have 2 separate transactions).  This will cause the import to flag these as duplicates.  It is okay to go ahead and complete the import as you are aware that the names are duplicates, because the transaction itself isn't a duplicate.  You can acknowledge the duplicates but move forward anyway.  In fact, you will have to in order to complete your task.  The first time I ran an import like this, I was concerned about this as well.  So, I took my list of transactions and manually checked that each one of them posted to the accounts correctly.  They did!


One related comment: after I know that all of the donors are in my database, I include their account number on my spreadsheet.  Then I import gifts by account number and not name.  I have discovered that names have to be exact to post to the correct account.  If the name is John Smith on the spreadsheet but the name in the database is Jane and John Smith, the import doesn't recognize it.  So, then I end up with a new account created that I have to merge with the original, (assuming I even find out that this happened).  I know that wasn't your original question, but I just thought I'd mention that quick.  

Ruth Jones CFRE

Account numbers are terrific!!!! I found this out when importing employee payroll deductions as the payroll department has the name listed differently sometimes than I do. (Yes, I know I can fix this and match the payroll department, but I want to list them by the name they've chosen and I have my own formatting rules.) Account numbers are the way to go on imports.