Seeking Guidance: Transitioning from Crystal Reports to Power Automate for Gift Receipts

Mark Kosier

Hello Power Automate community!

I have a big request and would greatly appreciate your help. In our current setup, we are still using an on-premises Raiser's Edge server, and we’re in the process of transitioning our gift receipting process from Crystal Reports to Power Automate.

Here’s a quick rundown of our current workflow:

• When a donor makes a contribution, a document we call the UDEV is generated using Crystal Reports.
• This PDF is saved locally to a shared drive used by our Gift Administration team.
• The gift admin then manually adds a few additional pieces of information to the file.
• The completed UDEV is emailed to our accounting team, which uses it as a receipt to process the donation in the ledger.

The UDEV is essentially a detailed receipt used by our accounting department for proper documentation.

I am new to Power Automate and have only built a few simple flows so far. I've mapped the UDEV data fields to Raiser's Edge, but I’m struggling to build an end-to-end flow that automates this process.

I’m reaching out in the hopes that someone in this amazing community has a similar flow they’d be willing to share or can provide guidance to help me get started. I’ve attached a screenshot of the UDEV for reference.

Thank you so much in advance for any help or advice you can offer—I truly appreciate it!

UDEV

Austen Brown

@Mark Kosier - I recommend setting up a word template as your UDEV replacement and then have an automation that runs when a file is exported to specific folder generate these for finance and save them to a specific folder/email them to appropriate person; if you have RE: Queue the export process can be automated.

Take a look at the BB provided documentation for an Acknowledgement Flow - the same principles will apply here:

If your org has any plans to move to RE NXT, that helps out a bit more with Power Automate as you're able to use the API/Connectors to grab dynamic data (rather than pull from a static export) as well as write back to the database; it's not a requirement but it certainly helps.

Alex Wong

@Mark Kosier
Am I understanding that you already got the gift entered in RE, and you are trying to post to a financial system ("process the donation in the ledger") that is not FE?

If so, first, don't use crystal report, use Query or use Export. OR if you got team member that knows RE Database Schema, then ask your IT team (since you said you are self hosted) to allow SQL querying into RE database.

• Use Query or Export from RE
  • as mentioned by Austen, you can have the exporting automated with RE:Queue if you have that subscription, otherwise, someone will have to manually export
  • Unfortunately, b/c you are self hosted, Power Automate is not going to work automatically (auto-triggered when there's a file exported), so you will have to manually trigger a flow
  • in this flow
    • you can have the data copied to a shared location (on the cloud, can't really work with network shared drive)
    • then send notification to have gift admin team add info to the file (preferbly excel)
  • another flow can be trigger when the excel is updated and have the info filled in by the gift admin team
    • take all the data in the excel and format it in a workable format to “import” or add to the ledger platform manually
    • or if the ledger platform support API, then power automate likely can create the entries directly in the ledger
• Direct SQL
  • you will need to create a power automate gateway to the SQL instance
  • then power automate can be created such that it will run a SQL query to get the data from RE
  • put that information into an excel file that is shared on the cloud
  • same as above after file saved to cloud.

Mark Kosier

Hello @Austen Brown and @Alex Wong , thank you both for replying to my post.

I apologize I was not more clear in my original post. All of what I am testing is in RE NXT. Not the data base that we have on premise. We have a live version of NXT that I am using for testing that has old data sets. This flow I am trying to build for the UDEV will be done via RE NXT.

I already have the word template created to replace the UDEV. The part I am struggling with is starting the build of the flow. I am lost on how to start the flow itself. Its intimidating when staring at a blank canvas trying to figure out what to start with. This is my first flow I have ever built so I am a PA noob.

Do you have a flow you could share with me that might give me a good starting point?

Austen Brown

@Mark Kosier - I recommend you pause and take a couple steps back. If you haven't already, take a training through BBU - if your org doesn't have the Learn Subscription you can view an older version of the course on YouTube:

Through your course work, they'll have you start small with a gift notification from the template showcase. From there you can work your way up to this report automation. Make sure to give yourself the time to learn the tool first, that will help you out in more ways than one once you start to build this.

Alex Wong

@Mark Kosier
Power Automate isn't hard to figure out, it comes down to:

• getting setup properly, the getting started guide Austen sent will get you started with it
• what do you want to do
  • flow is all about “trigger” and “action”, there is ONE trigger and many actions
  • there are “normal” trigger in flow and “special” trigger:
    • normal trigger like scheduled trigger (trigger flow every day, every hour, every other day, etc), when a file is created or modified in SharePoint, when a file is created or modified in SFTP, etc
    • special trigger specific to Blackbaud RE NXT like when a gift is created, changed, or deleted, when a constituent is created, changed, or deleted
  • then you have to decide when the trigger happen, what do you want the flow to do automatically for you
    • a ton of action exists that is default to flow
      • filter data
      • populate a word template document
      • create a pdf out of a word document that has been previously populated with dynamic data
      • create new excel file, update excel table data
      • send email, including being able to send attachment created dynamically in the flow
    • there are special Blackbaud action
      • create a new gift: cash, pledge, etc
      • create update constituent
      • create action, edit action, opportunity, etc

that's only scratching the surface of what trigger and actions are available in flow.

Let's come back to what do you want to do, you need to be able to define your business need that you want to automate, you can start with a flow chart, or if you want to be simple, a bullet list works too. For example:

1. scheduled trigger to run every day (set a time, say 5AM or 7PM)
2. list gift that has been entered in the past day that is over a certain amount (i.e. $1000)
3. loop through each gift
   • send an email notifying someone (major gift officer) to do something with info of gift in email

The above is Large gift notification with Appeal and Fund info:

https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/586/63853