Batch Gift Entry

Hello and welcome to our pre-recorded webinar on batch gift entry. Do you find yourself with a lot of donations to add all at once? This could be a manual process where you go to everybody’s profile and one by one add those gifts as donations, but batch gift entry will speed that Read More

Hello and welcome to our pre-recorded webinar on batch gift entry. Do you find yourself with a lot of donations to add all at once? This could be a manual process where you go to everybody’s profile and one by one add those gifts as donations, but batch gift entry will speed that process up tremendously. Hello, my name is Sean Potero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect, often working one-on-one with clients, teaching them all about DonorPerfect and how to best use their database. Today, I’m recording this webinar about a process that a lot of our charities have to go through batch gift entry. It’s a very helpful tool if you have it. There is a paywall behind this feature. Fortunately, as with most of our webinars, it does come with a caveat: the features and fields of this presentation may be different than your own. Certainly, the fields in my system are a little bit different. These databases are customizable. No paywall behind that. You can always use Screen Designer to add new fields for data entry, and that can certainly be incorporated in your in your routine. Batch gift entry is an add-on. Now it is included in a lot of the donor perfect packages that are sold, but if you’re not seeing batch gift entry under tasks, it’s possible that you might not have this feature. But hey, if you don’t, stick around, hang out, and see if it works for you. There’s many different options that come along with this. There are some default templates. Templates in this context are going to be fields or columns for data entry. When we’re doing this repetitive data entry of adding donations over and over again, what fields or what columns are we going to be using? From there, there is a suggested workflow. Really, it is the only workflow if you are using batch gift entry from posting to reporting. Starting off with the benefits, it really does speed up data entry for large volumes of gifts and pledges. Where this is the big catch, all of the data entry that you’re going to be doing are for donations that are all on the same day. So this is great, say for our churches. If you’re a religious institution, you get a lot of donations on one day, or maybe from a certain event. It doesn’t have to be large donations, large amounts of donations on a regular basis. But if you have a large amount of donations for a single day, you don’t have to go to 50 different profiles and add 50 different gifts. If you have a stack of donations from Sunday, you can do all that data entry in one single place. And this could be of gifts. This could be data entry of pledges. Pledges being the commitments that are attached alongside the gifts, the donations. This could also be soft credits. We could also be doing tributes here as well, in memory of or in honor of donations. The biggest benefit of doing it this way, besides saving your sanity and saving yourself a lot of time is that it reduces data entry errors. We’re going to have one column for general ledger to record the fund that all all of these donations are going to be going into. We have all that information visible in front of us. We can correct any mistakes that we see before we create all of those gifs. If I have a batch of 50 gifs that I’m adding, I can spend as much time as I want editing those 50 gifs before posting them and creating them all at once. Visualizing all of the columns and all the fields in one spot certainly going to help you reduce any data entry errors, especially with the templates that are in there. We’re going to be able to lock in the options in the columns. So if that template is already told that the general ledger is going to be a certain fund, well, as soon as we open it up, that column’s filled in for us already. I’ll show us how we could make one of those custom templates. And like I said, we do have an opportunity to double check things before we actually post it. I kind of. Describe it as an Excel file.

We’ll have different columns for the different fields, and as many rows for as many gifts from as many people as you’re doing data entry for in that day. And those templates we can customize for certain purposes. Now I’m going to start off with the default templates that everybody has using the basic fields: general ledger, solicitation, thank you letter. I’ll do that for my first example. But these these templates that you have access to really are the big time saver there. Custom fields, custom options, all of that is possible. We’re going to start off by creating the batch header. That is to say, we have all those donations from that day. We are going to add them all up. We’re going to add up those donations, count out the gifts, get a total. From there, one by one, we’re going to enter all of them. We’ll have an opportunity to spot check for errors before actually posting the batch. It’s not until we actually click on this button to post the batch do these gifts get created? Let’s hop into DonorPerfect. This tool, batch gift entry, you’re going to find it from the Tasks drop-down menu. Batch gift entry. If you don’t have it, reach out to the support department. They’ll get in touch with your account manager, so you can get access to it. Help the question mark bubble at the very top, and then chat support Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. There’s always a a person there to answer questions for you. For everybody that does have it, we will find it here: tasks and batch gift entry. If I was in the middle of any batches, we might see them here. I might see them listed out. It’ll give me an opportunity to edit it. I could also even see old batches. Right now, it’s looking for gifts dated today. If I were to delete that date range, and if I were to select my view option of all batches, and then apply filter, we can see all of the previous batches that have previously been posted. It looks like user Sean McClellan posted a batch with six gifts totaling $1,800 back on the sixth. He called it 12 624 gifts. Easy straightforward name, and I can really quickly get a report of that batch by clicking on Batch Report. We can see the gifts. We can see any pledge or tribute, or even soft credit details if that were the case. Right from here, we can see the header too that he created. He called it 12 624 gifts. He would have had to initially count this out, count up the six, add them up before filling in the rest of the information. Really quick reports on our previous data entry. All right, from here. We could get specific with different dates at the top if we wanted, but let’s add a new one. New day, new donations. At the lower left, I can click on Create New Batch. Now we’ll see this batch ID and this batch status be filled out. It does present these fields to us. These are going to populate automatically. There’s a few fields that are going to be populating automatically. These are the first two. One that isn’t going to populate automatically is the batch description. Let’s let’s get some Sunday donations in here. This will be 1222 donations, and that is the catch. These all this data entry is going to have to be dated the same day, and the batch description really could be anything. If this was an event, I would want the event name in there, but I’ll just keep it simple with a character limit and. There, going to need to add up these donations in the interest of time. I’ll keep it short, and we’ll add these donations up. Now, our data entry templates, it has defaulted to the default options. If you’ve never used Batch Gift Entry before, most likely your only options are going to be the default templates. But I will show you how you can make some new ones. For now, I’m going to stick with the default options here, but we’ll see some of the other options. You know, maybe we’re doing data entry for an event that’s going to be a little bit different from our standard donations.

We might change things a little bit, and I’ll show you how. But for now, we’ll keep it simple. Recording the standard donation Information, and from here we’ll click on Save Field and Exit. Now, at at this point, just to give context to really what we’re doing here, we have four rows for four different gifs, and just to visualize this over in another screen, just pulling open one of our profiles here. Here’s Sean McClellan, one of our loyal longtime donors. If I were to add a gift for Sean from from Sunday, I might go to his profile and click on Add Gift. Not the most efficient way of doing it. Batch gift entry is definitely going to save me some time, but ultimately that is what we’re doing here. We’re scaling up a manual process. Maybe he donated by check $1,000. We could fill in the type of gift, what type of donation that was. Was a cash? Was a check? Was it some type of credit card? General ledger. What fund is that money going into? Solicitation. Was this unsolicited? Was it from a certain event? This dropdown will have all of our different fundraising efforts in it. And then lastly, we have the thank you slash receipt template, sometimes called the thank you letter dropdown, where the intended use for this donation-I’m sorry-the intended use of this drop-down is to list out the email and letter templates that you have at your disposal to thank people. Real quick refresher on data entry for gifts because that’s ultimately what we’re doing here with batch gift entry. Here’s the slow way: pull up Sean’s profile and then add it, rinse and repeat, go back to quick search and do it for everybody else. I’m going to emulate that process through here, where my first option is the donor ID. Now, if I’m going to record a gift here for Sean, sure. If I happen to know the donor ID, if you’re doing mailings and you have return slips on that mailing, including the donor ID, is a very good idea for this reason, because when I’m doing batch gift entry, I could just take that donor ID. Sean is 1241. I could pop that in here 1241, and then when I click on enter, it knows that Sean is a profile that’s in there already in Stevens, PA. I don’t need to look him up because I had that donor ID. We’ll see how that magnifying glass works next to donor ID. If I did have to look him up, no big deal. There’s a very quick way for me to do that. I could even create profiles during this process of batch gift entry if I had to, and then I’ll just go through essentially the same thing that I just did individually. We’ll select our type of gift. We can pop in the reference number there if it’s a check. We have our general ledger, selecting what fund it is. The campaign, our overarching strategy. Some people use this field. Not everybody does. I’ll scroll over to the right. We have our other fields. We have our solicitation. We have our sub-solicitation, not a required field, not always needed. We might be using this to designate a revenue stream or perhaps a segment of a mailing, not required for data entry. And then we have the the thank you receipt template. How are we going to thank? Is there a specific message we want to send them? Because it was a golf outing, or it was from Giving Tuesday efforts, or do we just have a standard thank you that we’re going to send them? And now, actually, as I’m looking at this, this is not the standard gift template. This has been edited to include some additional fields. If you’re following along with me, you likely don’t have as many fields as I do right now. Again, that’s because of the template that I selected. This is the standard default GIF template for data entry. Here, it’s including the GIF narrative, where hey, if I had any miscellaneous notes that I wanted to add here, GIF narrative is the perfect spot to add that. Not a part of everybody’s data entry, but if it is for you, we could certainly consider adding that as a column. Now there is a column here for error messages.

If our data entry is off, if something is required here, it will let us know. See the the learning center is getting in my way here. Learning center, great resource if you want to know more about donor perfect step by step guides, articles, videos, all of that’s in this little learning center rectangle, which can be moved out of the way. Let me just click and drag to move it out of the way, where we can see our additional options of tributes, links, pledges, and soft credits. Say Sean is making this donation in memory of somebody. We could do that. Look up the person who is being memorialized in memory of or in honor of, and select that. Here we have an existing tribute to Betty White. It could always be a new one as well. We are now marking this as a tribute donation in memory of somebody, and we’ll carry on. We’ll see that the header at the very top not only is it showing us the contact information for the constituent, it is also keeping track of how much I have to go. I added up the stack of donations for 1222. I said that there were four gifts in there, and that it totaled this much. It’s going to keep track of this, so that I don’t make any mistakes. And then we’ll carry on. We might not have that donor ID. No big deal. We can use the but not sorry the the magnifying glass. It’s always going to remember the profiles that you looked at recently, but you could always do a quick search and you could look for that profile. You could even add them at the top. We have our options to add a new individual or add a new organization if they’re not in the database already, and we’ll just go one by one, adding the rest of these. This is really highlighting where use of template could save me some time for data entry. If all of these Sunday donations that I’m adding right now are getting the same exact codes, I pretty easily could have had my template set up so that these options are in there for me already. Now these drop-down options are unique to me in this database that I’m using. Yours, your drop downs will be different, but your drop downs will have something. Everything in DonorPerfect boils down to these drop downs and the options that we have in it for data entry. The only way for us to see how many checks that we got in this this year is if we’re filling in the type of gift of check, and if all of these funds and all these other drop downs are going to be the same, just like these thank you codes, I could have had it set up that way so that they were filled in already. And it’s not gonna, it’s not even going to let me post until the math checks out. Until I have four gifts that add up to a certain total. You know there is an option in here for soft credits. Let’s say on Sunday we. Also got a foundation donation. Now that’s from the Barclay Foundation. That is the institution from which this donation came. This was a check, let’s say, coming directly from the foundation. Now, foundation donations are often via a certain person. This $1,000 may have actually came from a person. That person may have given to the Barclay Foundation. The Barclay Foundation then gave to my charity. I am recording the gift here, the record type of gift, an often ignored field. The record type of gift is going to the foundation, but we might want to soft credit the person who gave to the Barclay Foundation. All the way over to the right, we have the SC option here for soft credit. Let’s look up the person we’re going to soft credit. Let’s say it was Amanda here. Amanda gave to the Berkeley Foundation. Berkeley Foundation gave to us, and then we’ll save that. That will ultimately create a soft credit for Amanda, showing that even though she didn’t give directly to the charity, she gave to the Berkeley Foundation. Her role was still crucial to this donation, and that’s what soft credits do. That’s what they’re there for.

We might also notice too that the P has lit up for both of these, for both of these rows, this is my profile here. 1244. Let’s go there. Actually, let’s go to 1244 here. And I have pledges here. There’s a purple dot next to pledges. If we were to go over here, we’ll see that I have all of these ongoing commitments for gifts. Some of them are fixed. Some of them are monthly. And because I have that pledge there, the P is lit up. If I click on this P, it’s going to show me those pledges that are there. So if this gift was a part of some type of ongoing commitment, I could mark it as such from here. I could even create a pledge if that pledge wasn’t created just yet. And now it’s keeping it’s keeping tabs for me. I have one gift to go for a total of $207. Oops! There we go. Let’s get one. All right. Now everything balances out. Gifts to go zero, amount to go zero. I can click on save and close. Now, in the interest of time for this webinar, I’m only doing four rows. You most likely will probably be doing more than four at a certain point. Maybe you have 40 that you’re doing here. Make friends with this save button. There is no auto saving going on in DonorPerfect, and you will be logged out after a period of time. We’re not machines. Some people are better at the repetitive task than others, but eventually, you are going to get distracted. You’re going to be a human. You’re going to go get a drink of water. You’re going to take a phone call, and if you if you get logged out in the middle of this process, you do have the potential to lose all this data. So. Repeat after me. I am going to save my batch often. As long as you’re doing that, friends, you’ll be all right, and you won’t lose any information. Not too bad after four. It’s not going to log me out that quick. And here we go. From here, I can save and close. If that didn’t add up. It would be an invalid batch. I would have an error here in this message, and I would have to go go back to the drawing board and make sure that everything balances out. If I miscalculated, if I miscalculated, and I can’t simply go in and make those edits to the gifs because my initial math was wrong. Well, we might have to go Back to our details and make that change that way. Whoops, was missing a check. One got swept under some papers on my desk. Forgot there’s actually a fifth one from that day. I can go back before posting it, and I can add it. So let’s add that along with the other ones. Get our codes in there, nice, nice, nice, and then we’ll click on Save and Close. And I don’t know if you saw what I did there. I put a mistake in there. Now it’s telling me batch is not valid. That’s a problem. I I can’t do anything with this. I can’t post this until that message goes away. I’ll go back and I’ll edit, and yep, we’ll say this is the the correct amount. But if I save and continue, I entered 100 instead of 1000 for that last one. And now, if I click on save, we recalculate amount to go is zero. We don’t have any errors. I can save and close. And now, and only now, can I post these gifts. If we were to look at any of these five profiles that have gifs in this batch, none of those gifs exist just yet. They won’t show up on any reports. They’ll show up in this batch report if I click on it, but they technically don’t exist just yet? Not until I check off this box and I click on post batch. There we go. These batch IDs go one after another, starting with the year. It’s 2024, so that is prefix here, and then underscore 17. This is the 17th batch of the year. Batch IDs always get filled out automatically. Now, like I said, there’s a lot of variety here with the data entry. That’s all going to be due to the template that you select.

Now, technically, I already have an event template in here, and I oh boy, do I not like deleting things out of DonorPerfect, because if I delete this, there’s no way to get it back. But there is a trash can there. I can click on it to delete the event template. No worry, I can make a brand new one. Let’s make a new event template. Let’s create a new one. This is going to be our events template. I’ll call it the same exact thing. We could be more specific. Could say that this is the. Oh boy, let me look at my gift screen here. Our different solicitations. Winter appeal 2024. Still snow on the ground for me. This is our winter appeal template. There we go. We can click on continue, and here, here is a step that you will have to consider, but you don’t need to put too much thought into. At this step, it’s showing me all of the users of my database. These are all my colleagues and co. Workers, and I would encourage you to instinctively just select all when you get to this step. If I want Donna to be able to use the template I made, save herself some time, I can just say, “Hey, Donna, when you get to adding those checks, just use the winter appeal template, and she’ll have access to it. If I don’t check off Donna’s name here, she won’t have access to it, and she’ll she’ll have to make her own template, which is easy enough to do. But if we’re sharing our work, we share on the productivity, we share on the success, and now it’s showing me a whole bunch of fields that are from the gift screen. We have donor ID. We’re going to need that amount, record type. It’s going to be a gift. The general ledger. If it’s going to be the same for all of these. If all the money is going into our building fund, I can just lock that general ledger code in. Our solicitation, we already have that created. I can go to the magnifying glass, Select Winter Appeal 2024, and then we could add more fields. And really, we should. It’s giving us a little sampling of main and GIF screen fields. Let’s find. If you hold down Control and press F, you’ll get a search box. Let me find my thank you fields. Now, this is going to be one of the things that’s different in my database from your database. Is it’s presenting to me a lot of different fields. You might not have as many fields as I do. You certainly have a a thank you field. For me, it’s called thank you slash receipt template. For you, it might be called thank you letter. This is the field where we select the template we’re going to use to thank them. And currently, my thank you field for this template. Take note of this column here. This column is checked off for all of these fields. If I scroll up to the top, we’ll see that this checkbox is hiding all of those fields. So if I want to include them in my template, I’m just going to unhide them. So let me go back down. Let’s find it. Here’s our thank you receipt template. I will uncheck that, and I’ll just go through this type of gift. That’s helpful to have. Type of gift. We might not have a code we want to lock in for our thank you letter for our winter appeal. We don’t have a specific winter appeal. We use our standard thank you sub solicitation. Let’s unhide that one. Specifically, we can say that this was a mailer. What else might we want here? These are some of the big ones. A QuickBooks class. Not everybody uses this. Some accountants do. Subcategory of funds. What Quick? class. Are we going to be recording this money under a lot of fields? A lot of fields on the gift screen. Really, these in the first section are probably the most important. And now, now that I’m looking at this example, let me add the receipt delivery preference as well. We’ll hide that one. There’s two receipt delivery preferences. Specifically, we’re looking for underscore G, the one that says DP gift here, and we’ll say all these people are going to get letters. There we go.

That’s our winter appeal template. We have our big win, our big winter appeal, and when we get all those donations coming in, I’m saving myself time. I don’t need to reselect winter appeal 2024 for every single gift. From here, we can click on Save and Validate that step. Just make sure that I’m not putting anything illogical in here. Give it a few moments, and now I have my winter appeal template that everybody has access to. So it’s brand new day. We have a stack of winter appeal donations for us to add. I can go to tasks, go to batch gift entry, and I can create a new gift batch. Give it a name. Select our dates. Add everything up. Select our templates. I’ll go with our winter appeal template, and save and continue. Let’s add our donations for the day. Look people up, create the records. Maybe you thought ahead. Maybe have donor ID somehow, some way. And now I only need to worry about putting in the donor ID, using the magnifying glass, and putting in the numbers. All the other drop-down options are already selected for me. Type of GIF though, I should fill that in as well. Save and close. This is a valid batch. Everything adds up. I can check off this box and then post batch. And that is batch gift entry, folks. Create templates. Create those data entry templates. It’ll save yourself a lot of time if you create the batch templates beforehand. It’ll speed things up tremendously. You don’t have to select the same option over and over again. The defaults will probably have a lot of people covered. If you are just using general ledger and solicitation for everybody else, you might consider making those templates and save yourself some time. And I should really put this as its own data point. Save, save frequently. You will save yourself some time, but there’s no auto-saving again going on in there. So make sure that you’re clicking save pretty frequently. If you do have any questions, reach out to the support department, the question mark bubble at the top of DonorPerfect. Go to chat support. There are people there to assist you with any questions that you have. Thank you so much. I have been Sean Potero. This has been Batch Gift Entry, and you have been a great audience. Thank you for all the great work that you do. Keep it up.