Important DONATION Testing Needed

Hello DONATION beta testers.

The program that we create DONATION with, PowerBuilder, has a significant new release, and we have created a new version of DONATION with it. Although you should see almost no changes in DONATION due to this, for us it’s a big deal, and as such, we have jumped the version number of DONATION up to 4.00.

Although we have done significant testing ourselves on this new version, the only way to be sure it will work well for everyone is to have many users test it. So PLEASE if at all possible, try it out, by downloading and installing it from the page:

http://www.software4nonprofits.com/pretest.htm

Unlike most beta test updates that we put on this page, this one needs to be done with a full installation program, which means you need to know whether you are running the Standalone, Lite, Network Server or Network Client version, and download and install that version from this page. If you aren’t sure which version you are running on this computer, use the Help -> About DONATION menu option in your current installation of DONATION to find out.

If you encounter any issues that you think may be new problems, please inform us of them as soon as possible, and we will fix them as quickly as possible. If something is a real problem for you and we do not think we will be able to fix it quickly, you can always revert to the existing version 3.86, built with the older version of PowerBuilder, by downloading and installing from the normal DOWNLOAD page:

http://www.software4nonprofits.com/download.htm

As always, you can send us your experiences by replying to this blog post online, or by directly emailing us. In this unusual case, it would be good to hear from you even if you try this and don’t observe any problems, just so we can have some notion of how many of you have tried it.

In case you are also using our ACCOUNTS bookkeeping program, there will be a similar beta test of the new version of it within the next few days.

Many thanks.

Bank Deposit Slips and Cash Counting

Hello DONATION advisors. I’m writing to ask about bank deposit slips, which as you know aren’t currently explicitly included in DONATION. (Some users have found that the Bank Deposit Report in the program can be accepted as a deposit slip, but we are doubtful that would work for all financial institutions.)

Your answers to each of the following questions will help us decide what to do about adding such a feature (or not doing so!).

So my first question to you is, can you find out whether your bank would accept a report, in place of their official bank deposit slip, that included the same information, but possibly not with the same layout? That would mean it would have to include a list of the cheques (or other non-cash, such as money orders), plus a count of each type of coin and bill, and totals of coins, bills, and cheques, and a grand total.

Are we missing anything from that list of what would have to be on a report that might be accepted in place of a standard bank deposit slip?

Even if your bank would not accept such a report, would having it help your processes, since you could copy from it into the official bank deposit slip?

This would clearly require adding a window in the program for counting and adding up coins and bills. Where do you see that being called from? The Batch Entry window (if you use it)? The Bank Deposit window? Both?

Would you see a need for those counts of coins and bills that go into that deposit slip being saved in the database, so they can be reprinted in the future along with the current standard Bank Deposit Report? Or would you just need to do that as a one-time printout, and then saving the information is irrelevant?

Thank you in advance for your input! Given that there are a number of questions here, it would probably be best for you to reply directly by email, rather than trying to put all of your answers into a comment on this blog post.

Canadian Gift in Kind Receipts

If you aren’t in Canada, this blog isn’t for you! (We do at some point need to look at special Gift in Kind receipts for the U.S.A., but sorry, we’re not there yet.)

Currently Canadian users have an option (in Maintenance -> Receipt Options) whether or not to use a distinct format for Gift in Kind (GIK) receipts. However, the CRA requires a distinct format, with different information and rules (like including on the receipt a description of what the gift actually was, and only including one GIK per receipts).

So we are thinking that Canadian users should be forced to use the distinct GIK receipts, and this should be a change enforced by the next release of DONATION.

The only downside I see to this is for users who weren’t using the distinct receipts, but were using the mail-merge version of the receipts and had customized them with additional wording etc. They would then have to make those same customizations on the mail-merge GIK receipt template. But that seems very doable – you can cut and paste changes from the regular to the GIK receipt template, in the built-in mail merge editor.

For regular receipts you had already created that include Gift in Kind donations, if you ever need to reprint them or correct them etc., you could still do so normally, but using the main Receipt menu options, not the Receipt -> Gift in Kind submenu options. Of course, those receipts would still not be fully adhering to CRA rules. Alternatively, you could delete any GIK donations included in regular receipts, issue a corrected regular receipt excluding those now deleted donations, then re-enter the GIK donations and issue them properly as GIK receipts.

Does anyone see any clear objection to this change – forcing turning on of using distinct GIK receipts for all Canadian users? Since it’s a CRA requirement, I really can’t imagine a justification for that, but I’m open to input. (Of course this would not affect users who never have GIK donations!)

Thank you. As always, you can reply by commenting on the blog, or just emailing us back directly.

How to Help Users Find Help Topics (2)

Further to yesterday’s post at https://donationusers.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/find-help, here is the messagebox I have added, as a new Help -> Search by Topic or Keyword menu option:

Any thoughts, particularly suggestions for improving it? Thanks to those of you who commented yesterday.

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For your information, this change has been released, in version 3.82b of DONATION, and also in version 1.39 of our ACCOUNTS program.

How to help users find help topics

Hi DONATION advisors. I’m often surprised when talking to users on the phone, or via things that come out in email exchanges, that they don’t seem to know how to find help by topics we give them or by sensible keywords (like for instance “pledge” if they want to know about pledges).

This is despite the fact that I at least think the menu option Help -> Contents and Index should be pretty obvious (especially when we’ve told them to look something up in the Index of the Help) and also, there is the menu option Help -> How to Use Help.

I’m wondering about the idea of adding a Help -> Search by Topic or Keyword menu option, which just pops up a messagebox saying something like this:

 To search for Help by a topic title or a word related to what you want to know, please use the Help -> Contents and Index menu option, make sure you are on the Index tab near the top left, and type what you are looking for into the entry field below those tabs.

Alternatively, you can use the Help -> How to Use Help menu option, which takes you to a Help page with full details about how to use the Help. Would you like to see that page now?

                              Yes     No

Do you think that would help some people find help topics without us having to guide them very explicitly through it? We’d appreciate your comments.

 Thanks.

 

New Software4Nonprofits Website

Hello DONATION beta testers and advisors.

We have been working on updating our website to look good on any device, especially mobile devices like phones and tablets. It should have an appropriately adjusted display for those devices, so it’s not just squished pages as it is now. On your computer, it should look very much the same as before.

While we have been able to test the pages on a couple of different phones and tablets, obviously that testing is still limited. So we would like to invite you to please take a look at the draft version, which starts at [non-existent site removed] (the caps on “NEW” are required!). If you can, look at it with both a regular web browser on your computer, and any devices you have. Please report any problems in the display and navigation of specific pages to us, so that we can fix them.

When reporting display and navigation problems, please include:

• the device and the screen size (if known),
• the problem web page,
• and the description of the problem.

If you see any typos or anything that appears to be bad writing or factual errors, we’d also love to hear about that! (Those things probably haven’t changed from the current live website.)

Please enjoy the new experience of our website on your mobile devices. As soon as we have a reasonable number of replies, we will upload this draft to be the new official site for DONATION and ACCOUNTS at the main web address.

Thank you.

DONATION New Version Testing

Hello again DONATION beta testers. I have uploaded a new beta test version, 3.79 Beta3. We would greatly appreciate it if as many of you as possible could test it out. As usual, you get it from:

http://www.software4nonprofits.com/pretest.htm

There are a lot of small improvements in it, including:

• Email Sending Configuration working better with Gmail addresses
• special setup for users in New Zealand
• built-in receipts for English Canada fitting in #10 single-window envelopes
• fixed the date format used in receipts for English Canada and the U.S.A.
• detecting and trying to prevent duplicate envelope numbers in the same year
• lots of other small feature improvements and bug fixes, all of which are listed on that pretest.htm page, and the Revision History in the program’s Help.

However, the biggest change from our perspective (which you should really not see at all) is a significant re-organization of the program’s code so that a lot of pieces of it can be shared with our ACCOUNTS bookkeeping program. If we have done this correctly, you won’t see a single difference from it, but if we missed something, some features could fail to work.

Of course, both Kwame and I have carefully tested pretty much every feature in the program, but we know from experience that the more different people test things, the more likely problems are to be caught, because someone else will just try something in a slightly different way than we thought of trying it.

Of course, if you encounter any problems report them to us ASAP and we will fix them and get a fix back to you ASAP as well.

Thank you very much in advance.