Importing Donations from Other Programs or Regular Donations

The option Database à Import Donations can be used for two different purposes. First, you can use it to import donations for a previous program when you first start using DONATION. Second, you can use it to import regular or recurring donations, such as monthly donations, in the case where lots of donors have given you either a series of monthly cheques or pre-authorized bank withdrawals or credit card charges. In both cases the usage is the same. However, if you want to import Donors, Donations, Categories etc. together when you first start using the program, you may prefer to look at the option Importing all Data from Other Programs.

This routine imports the Donation data from a tab-separated text file. A tab-separated text file is a plain-text file where each donation is on its own line, and each field (even missing optional fields) on the line is separated by one tab character. Fields may optionally be enclosed in quotation marks, but that is not necessary. The file may optionally have one or two rows of column headers at the top.

What follows is a description of the tab-separated columns of data to be imported from the file of donations.

Field	Max Length	Required	Description
Member/Env. Number	10	Y	A member or envelope number for the donor giving this donation. This is how the donor is identified.
Date Received	?	Y	A date in a format that will be accepted by the program, such as MM/DD/YYYY.
Amount	?	Y	The amount of the donation, with no dollar signs. Decimal places and cents are optional.
Category	20	Y	The description of this donation category, which must already be on your list of acceptable categories.
Cheque Number	20	N	The cheque number that this donation was paid with, or any text describing how the donation was paid. Standard options are "Cash", "Check" or "Cheque", "VISA", "MasterCard", "Money Order", "Credit Card", "Direct Debit", "Debit Card", "PAC", "PAR", "Non-Receiptable", and "Pre-Receipted".

You can create this file in a couple of different ways. First, you can use a text editor (such as Notepad) or a word processor (such as Microsoft Word). If you use the word processor, make sure you use File à Save As to save the file, and select to save it as type "Text only" or words to that effect. Alternatively, you could create the file in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel, and again save it as type "Text (tab delimited)". Make sure that the Amounts do not contain dollar signs in the saved file, since that is not allowed.

It is important to understand that this procedure does not replace any existing data, but rather adds additional donations into your database. All existing donations will stay there. This procedure also is very careful to identify duplicates. If any donation in the file to be imported has the same Member/Envelope #, Date Received, Amount and Category as an existing donation, you receive a detailed message about it and the whole import is cancelled. The reason it is cancelled in this situation is that you are most likely importing the same file for a 2nd time, which is obviously not desirable!

You will notice that you have to supply the donor's Member/Envelope # to identify them. That means that even if your organization does not normally assign Member or Envelope numbers to donors, you must do so for the donors that you want to use this import donation feature for. That means that you must not uncheck "Show Member/Envelope #" in Maintenance à Main Window Options, since that makes the Member/Envelope # field in the Donor Details area disappear. For more details on how to enter Member/Envelope numbers, see Entering a New Donor.

In section 1 of the dialog box, there is a checkbox to specify whether you wish to review the data to be imported before it is added to the database. I strongly suggest that you leave this checked, so that you can check the donations being imported before you commit to importing them.

In section 2, you specify the name of the Import File that is to be imported. You can either just type it in (include the full path – drive and directory), or use the Browse button to bring up a standard File Open dialog box to find the file.

In section 3, you can specify how many lines of column headers are at the top of the import file. Most commonly this should be set to 0 (if there are no column headers in the file) or 1 (if there is one line of column headers in the file). It defaults to 1 when the dialog box opens, so it will probably be easiest for you if you put one line of headers in the import file.

Once you have entered your desired choices for sections 1 to 3, click the Import button. The first thing that will happen is that it will read the import file, and look for problems in it. If there are any problems that are fixable, it will tell you that fact, and display the list of problems in the Notepad program. Print off that list for later fixing, then exit Notepad. An example of such a problem is a field that is too long for the field lengths in DONATION, or a dollar sign at the beginning of the Amount. If the problem is not fixable in an obvious way (e.g. an Amount that does not appear to be numeric), it will just give you a message about it and return.

If problems were found, in most cases a fixed file will be created, with overly long fields shortened, and dollar signs removed. Its name will be re-entered into the Import File entry box for you. To try importing the fixed file, click the Import button again.

If you checked the checkbox in section 1 to review the data, it will now be displayed for you. Take a good look at it. Make sure the right data is shown with the right fields, and that any rows of headers from your data are not displayed. (N.B. the program will have put in its own headers, so what you are checking is that you don't seem to have two or more rows of headers.) Also check that all of the donations you expected to be displayed are in fact displayed. Finally, you can check the count and dollar total of the donations in the summary at the end of the list. If everything looks fine, click OK and the import will begin. If there are problems with what you see in the data preview window, click Cancel and the Import will not be done.

After you click OK in the preview window (or after you click Import if you didn't select to preview the data), it will perform the import. When it is done, it will tell you so, then close the Import window.

If errors were shown in Notepad and you printed them off, you should now go back in the original import file to each donation that had an error displayed in that printout, and decide how you wish to fix it.

If you are using this feature to import regular donations, such as monthly donations, don't forget to update the Date Received values each month before you import the file! For instance, if all of the donations are on the first of the month, and you last used it in January of 2007, so that the Date Received values were all 01/01/2007 (format MM/DD/YYYY), do a search and replace, replacing 01/01/2007 with 02/01/2007 for February 1st. If you have any regular donations which are dated on the month-end day, this will need a bit more manual editing in the months where the number of days in the month is not the same as the number of days in the previous month.