Importing pledges and payments from a lockbox situation.

Lynette Sowells · July 2017

Each year we create a Campaign year with a total amount due and under it we create 80 different funds for each of our entities with their portion of the Campaign goal due. This works well for reporting for us. We have always entered pledges into one batch and payments into another all manually. We have contacted Omatic about using their process to symplify, but thought there would still be considerable keying of information required based on our set up. In the future we would really like to have pledges and payments sent to our bank via lockbox. We would then take the file of information our bank would give us and import the information into RE quite possaibly using Omatic. Has anyone else done this? How has it worked for you and how did you set up your goals to lessen any manual keying of information if possible. I have only ever spoken with one other entity that imported and they said that to set the import up and successfully import installment information still involved alot of work. Any thoughts, suggestions or the like ?

Jen Claudy · July 2017

We do something similar to this for one of our clients. It's doable, but there is some manual review needed, and the setup (which is one-time, unless you change banks or your bank updates/changes the data they're sending you) would probably take some time and would need some testing. But that's going to be the case with just about any route you take. There will always be upfront setup time needed and then some manual review if you want your RE data to stay consistent (you can either review the data prior to importing or after Import using RE Batch or queries). For us, the way it works is preparing/reviewing the file for Import, importing using Omatic (which includes an opportunity for reviewing and updating or adding constituent records), then reviewing the gifts in Batch and committing the Batch, which creates the Gift Records in RE. We also run some audit queries afterwards to check for errors that made it through and into RE. It's not super fast, but it's more efficient than manually keying everything.

Cindi Stewart · July 2017

Lynette,

We have 2 big campaigns with an overall campaign goal but it is broken down by 154 locations, each with an indivdual goal (totaling the campaign goal). Our organization has 4 lockboxes. Two of these lockboxs are for the specific large campaigns and from those 2 we download information provided from the bank. There are some edits and review involved but we have found that overall, it is an enormous time saver as opposed to the manual entry process. We have preset imports used for these processes so we do not need to continually set up new imports. It is fairly streamline. Our imports originate from pledges and payments sent to the lockbox by the donor where the bank creates a check copy from the bank (which is received on a daily CD) or we receive the individual pledge form. We quickly flip through the pledge forms for changes made by donors such as name, address or location changes. Another import originates from donors who used the online donation page which links to the bank. All of those gifts are downloaded with payment schedules. Our goals, by location, are set up on the appeal level so we can tract and report on each locations goal. Reports are generated regularly and sent, by email, 2 times each week to each location so they can see their status. The reports include both a summary and detail which includes the donor name/amounts. We have used this process for years and find it works very well for us. The only change we had was to move the location appeal and goal set up from fund to appeal to accommodate our accounting staff when we tried to used the automatic Re-FE integration. They do not want totals by location, just one total for the fund. We ended up not using the automatic integration, which we found cumbersome and extremely difficult to reconcile, at least with our system. Our IS team built us a process to use instead of the integration and we are quite happy.

I hope this helps a bit!

Lynette Sowells · July 2017

Thanks ladies, for your replies. I will pass this on to my supervisor. She is wanting to get as much feedback as possible to help her decide how to proceed.

Lynette Sowells · July 2017

Hello Cindi,

My CFO was interested in your response and asked to me find out who you use for importing. Would you be willing to share that with Nikki and I?

Cindi Stewart:

Lynette,

We have 2 big campaigns with an overall campaign goal but it is broken down by 154 locations, each with an indivdual goal (totaling the campaign goal). Our organization has 4 lockboxes. Two of these lockboxs are for the specific large campaigns and from those 2 we download information provided from the bank. There are some edits and review involved but we have found that overall, it is an enormous time saver as opposed to the manual entry process. We have preset imports used for these processes so we do not need to continually set up new imports. It is fairly streamline. Our imports originate from pledges and payments sent to the lockbox by the donor where the bank creates a check copy from the bank (which is received on a daily CD) or we receive the individual pledge form. We quickly flip through the pledge forms for changes made by donors such as name, address or location changes. Another import originates from donors who used the online donation page which links to the bank. All of those gifts are downloaded with payment schedules. Our goals, by location, are set up on the appeal level so we can tract and report on each locations goal. Reports are generated regularly and sent, by email, 2 times each week to each location so they can see their status. The reports include both a summary and detail which includes the donor name/amounts. We have used this process for years and find it works very well for us. The only change we had was to move the location appeal and goal set up from fund to appeal to accommodate our accounting staff when we tried to used the automatic Re-FE integration. They do not want totals by location, just one total for the fund. We ended up not using the automatic integration, which we found cumbersome and extremely difficult to reconcile, at least with our system. Our IS team built us a process to use instead of the integration and we are quite happy.

I hope this helps a bit!

Cindi Stewart · July 2017

Lynette Sowells:

Hello Cindi,

My CFO was interested in your response and asked to me find out who you use for importing. Would you be willing to share that with Nikki and I?

Cindi Stewart:

Lynette,

We have 2 big campaigns with an overall campaign goal but it is broken down by 154 locations, each with an indivdual goal (totaling the campaign goal). Our organization has 4 lockboxes. Two of these lockboxs are for the specific large campaigns and from those 2 we download information provided from the bank. There are some edits and review involved but we have found that overall, it is an enormous time saver as opposed to the manual entry process. We have preset imports used for these processes so we do not need to continually set up new imports. It is fairly streamline. Our imports originate from pledges and payments sent to the lockbox by the donor where the bank creates a check copy from the bank (which is received on a daily CD) or we receive the individual pledge form. We quickly flip through the pledge forms for changes made by donors such as name, address or location changes. Another import originates from donors who used the online donation page which links to the bank. All of those gifts are downloaded with payment schedules. Our goals, by location, are set up on the appeal level so we can tract and report on each locations goal. Reports are generated regularly and sent, by email, 2 times each week to each location so they can see their status. The reports include both a summary and detail which includes the donor name/amounts. We have used this process for years and find it works very well for us. The only change we had was to move the location appeal and goal set up from fund to appeal to accommodate our accounting staff when we tried to used the automatic Re-FE integration. They do not want totals by location, just one total for the fund. We ended up not using the automatic integration, which we found cumbersome and extremely difficult to reconcile, at least with our system. Our IS team built us a process to use instead of the integration and we are quite happy.

I hope this helps a bit!

Lynette,

Good morning. Sorry I did not see this last week! We receive a file that is downloaded from our bank. Once received we import it using the Raiser's Edge import process. We have saved/preset imports where we only need to change the file name. I know there is alot a negative information on RE imports, which can be challenging sometimes but these are all preset and work extremely well. On some imports, we not only import the basic gift but also the schedule the donor chooses on our pledge files. There can be some quirks in the scheduleimported but overall it is still a big time saver on our side.

Joan Perry · July 2017

Lynette,

We've recently automated some of our lockbox payments processed by our bank and using ImportOMatic. Our set up is slightly different -- we use "campaigns" to track our locations and "funds" for the different annual fund years. What helped was having Gift IDs automatically generated for all new gifts, but especially pledges. We then create an OCR scan line for our pledge reminders which includes the Gift ID. For us this was important as some donors may have made more than 1 pledge to different locations. By using the gift ID we can ensure the payment gets applied to the correct pledge.

We needed to work with the bank and the printer to created the OCR scan line definition and field parameters.

--look at your existing pledges/payments to determine what info you need, what depends on the donor/payment and what is fixed info.

Then we were able to get some test data to work with IOM to configure the import.

--is there information from your lockbox that you need to track, if you have to research anything later?

Due to some other complications, this process took longer than expected, but I'd be happy to share more insights, if this seems like something you are interested in.

Good Luck,

Joan Perry (Joan.perry@camdendiocese.org // 856-583-6161)

Cindi Stewart · July 2017

Joan Perry:

Lynette,

We've recently automated some of our lockbox payments processed by our bank and using ImportOMatic. Our set up is slightly different -- we use "campaigns" to track our locations and "funds" for the different annual fund years. What helped was having Gift IDs automatically generated for all new gifts, but especially pledges. We then create an OCR scan line for our pledge reminders which includes the Gift ID. For us this was important as some donors may have made more than 1 pledge to different locations. By using the gift ID we can ensure the payment gets applied to the correct pledge.

We needed to work with the bank and the printer to created the OCR scan line definition and field parameters.

--look at your existing pledges/payments to determine what info you need, what depends on the donor/payment and what is fixed info.

Then we were able to get some test data to work with IOM to configure the import.

--is there information from your lockbox that you need to track, if you have to research anything later?

Due to some other complications, this process took longer than expected, but I'd be happy to share more insights, if this seems like something you are interested in.

Good Luck,

Joan Perry (Joan.perry@camdendiocese.org // 856-583-6161)

Lynette,

Joan is absolutely correct. This takes time and testing with your bank to implement the process. We use the import ID, rather than the Gift ID but either way, the process is a great idea depending on your volume. We recenty started a huge new campaign using a lockbox which previously had been used for a specific campaign years ago. I was amazed how much time it took to complete the new, updated set up. But, in the end, it is all worth it. My apologies for not including contact information! I can be reached at cstewart@archgh.org 713-652-4422. Good luck!--

Importing pledges and payments from a lockbox situation.

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