Tracking gifts outside of Batch?

Nicholas Gerard

Hi there,

We just converted from our old database to NXT and are still trying to adjust to the new world. One of the biggest question marks for our gift processing team is what gifts can't or shouldn't be entered in Batch, and when they're not, what else to use to track them with our Finance team.

Our legacy system relied exclusively on batch numbers and required every gift to be tied to a batch. It didn't work without it. We had that system for about 20 years, so no one here knows of another process we could use. So I'm wondering if y'all have any best practices for how you track gifts that are recorded outside of batch.

For context, we have PeopleSoft (I work at a university), so it's totally separate from NXT and requires a manual process for daily gift load. Let me know if I can provide any other details in case that's helpful. We're super new, so I appreciate your patience if this is the most obvious question on the planet!

Thanks,

Nick

Dariel Dixon 2

Welcome to the community @Nicholas Gerard. To answer your question, as long as you have processes in place, you can enter almost all types of gifts in batches. That may mean several batches a day depending on your processes, but if your legacy system needed batch information, that process can continue if you like.

It can really depend on your gift volume. I think it's easier to create batches, but also knowing that the batch process may change in the near future. My organization also only processes gifts via batch, but we don't process in NXT outside of recurring gifts and batch in DB view for a variety of reasons. Once all options are available in NXT batch, we will make a determination at that time.

Faith Murray

@Nicholas Gerard, we are also waiting to process gifts in webview until the standard “database-view” batch functions are released later this year. In database view, pretty much any gift can be entered through batch and has an associated batch number, as Dariel mentioned. The only gifts we don't enter through batch are pledges, as we usually enter those one at a time on a constituent's record for best customization … but I believe you can enter pledges on a gift batch too, if you want to. You would just set different fields and columns to capture the different types of information.

Dariel Dixon 2

@Faith Murray: The only gifts we don't enter through batch are pledges, as we usually enter those one at a time on a constituent's record for best customization … but I believe you can enter pledges on a gift batch too, if you want to. You would just set different fields and columns to capture the different types of information.

Pledges can absolutely be added in batch. Some of the fields will change but they definitely can.

Alex Wong

@Nicholas Gerard
As others has mention, it all comes down to “process” that you and others follow/need.

using batch (db view) has a lot of advantages (as the name suggest) it is good for entering a lot of gifts that is “same” category. (i.e. all credit cards goes on one batch; all checks goes on another, etc). Batch will help you create “structure”, specific columns of info that needs to be filled in, and default/hide columns that need specific info but no need to be entered to save time. (i.e. a credit card batch can hae Payment Type default to Credit Card and hidden so you don't even need to see it but it will be automatically be there when you commit the batch).

webview of RE NXT batching process is lack luster right now and as others has mentioned, Blackbaud is planning to make a big change to match all dbview batch functionality this year.

However, we don't have limit on gift that must be entered into a batch neither. Pledges can be done in batch (if we held a gala dinner and hundreds of people pledged, we will use a batch for pledge so things like gift type=pledge, appeal=gala dinner, gift date=date of gala, etc can be default and hidden, where you will only need to do minimal entries), or we can enter pledge individually directly onto a constituent record without going through batch. We also have automation in place to create different gift that doesn't goes into batch too: i.e. gift in kind

Nicholas Gerard

Thank you so much for your replies @Alex Wong @Dariel Dixon @Faith Murray ! Your insights were very helpful. I'm glad to hear batch is still so widely used. Our implementation made it sound like we needed to move away from it. Not using it for pledges makes sense, and since those aren't fed to finance anyway, I think we can come up with a process there that still meets our needs.

One of my team prefers web view batch right now but seeing how the functionality is more limited, I may push for us to stick to database view until they roll out those enhancements. Thanks again for the insight and validation!

Christine Robertson 4

@Nicholas Gerard If you want/need to be able to import into a batch in database view, there are third-party tools that do that. Importacular from @David Zeidman's team is one option.

Daniel R. Snyder

@Nicholas Gerard Can't agree with @Christine Robertson more. I love Importacular for importing into batch for our 3rd party donations.