For organizations such as churches that have Sunday (or other day) collections or offerings, where a large percentage of their donors make donations on the same date, you can use File à One Date Batch Entry to bring up a window listing each donor, with a place to enter the Amount, Category, and optionally the Cheque No / Paid By and Description for the donation that each donor gave that day. You can also access this window via the Batch Entry button above the donations area on the main window.
This window can be used both to enter new donations, and to edit existing donations. (This was a change in version 3.05 - previously it could only enter new donations.) All existing donations for the selected date can optionally be displayed, along with spaces to enter new donations for all of the other donors. The only existing donations that are not displayed are ones that have already been included in a charitable receipt, because they can't be edited anyways.
N.B. This window is not available with the free Lite version of DONATION.
Specifying Options
When you select File à One Date Batch Entry or click the Batch Entry button, the first thing that appears is the following dialog:
The main thing that you must always set on this window is the date for entry of donations. All donations entered with this window will go in for the same one date that is specified here. If you do not change the date, you will be prompted to confirm that this is indeed your desired donation date. (This helps to prevent errors.)
You can also change the default donation category for the donations to be entered, via this Options window, overriding the default set on the Donations tab of the Maintenance à Main Window Options window. If you have multiple offerings or collections to enter which are for different services or campaigns, and which are each mostly for one category (but different categories between the two services or campaigns), just use One Date Batch Entry twice, setting the desired donation category on the Options window each time. Please note that changes to the default category made here are not remembered between uses of the window - it always starts up showing the default set in Maintenance à Main Window Options.
On this same window, you can also specify whether or not you want to see the Cheque # / Paid By and Donation fields on this window. Changes you make to those selections are remembered between uses of this window. If you have set a Default Paid By value on the Donations tab of the Maintenance à Main Window Options window, it will always be used for the initial value of the Cheque # / Paid By field for each donation, whether or not that field is displayed.
In addition, there is a checkbox for "Include existing donations for the specified date". If this is checked, any existing donations for the given date are displayed, so that you can edit them, and there are also blank rows for all other donors that did not have donations on that date. If this is unchecked, there is just one blank row for each donor (which is how the program always worked prior to version 3.05). Changes you make to this selection are also remembered between uses of this window.
Once the date that is displayed is the desired date, and you have changed the donation category if desired, if you want to see all donors displayed (which will be by far the most common choice), just click OK or press Enter on the Options window. Details of what else you can do with this options window are described below.
At this point the main window for entering your batch of donations is displayed, with the title "Enter Batch of Donations for One Date".
Sorting the Rows
On this window, you can decide in which order you want to see the donors listed. The default order is by Donor Name. If you prefer to see them sorted by Member/Envelope Number, click the "Member/Env #" radio button. This sort order is remembered between your uses of this window.
Data Entry
Then, just go down the list of donors, entering the donation Amount, Category (when it differs from the default one) and optionally Cheque No / Paid By and Description fields for each donor that made a donation on this date. You will notice that there is only one line for each donor. If a donor made a donation that has to be split between two or more Categories, then after you finish entering the first donation, click the Split Donor button (or press Alt-D) and it will insert another empty line for that donor. Fill that in, and if necessary repeat these steps to put in further splits for this donation.
Please note that unlike entering donations on the main window, you cannot enter donations of $0 on this window. My assumption is that entering $0 donations will only be done in exceptional circumstances, and as such does not need to be allowed on this window, which is for speeding up routine data entry.
You can move from row to row of this window with the Enter or Down Arrow keys (which take you to the same column in the next row), or the Tab key (which takes you across the fields of one row, then down to the next row).
Finding Donors
If you have many more donors in your list than you have donations to enter on this date, finding the donors may require a certain amount of scrolling. You can avoid that by using the Find Donor button (or Alt-F) to find a donor by part of its name, its member/envelope number, phone number or address. (This is basically the same function as File à Find Donor on the main window.)
It may seem odd that you are able to find by phone number or address on this window, although you cannot immediately see the values in those fields. However, this window has a popup tooltip, when you hover your mouse over the Name field for a donor, that displays the phone number and address, if they have been filled in. So that way you can check it's the right donor that you have found.
Checking and Saving your Work
If you are working from input sheets that have subtotaled the day's entries by donation category, and want to make sure that you have entered everything properly before saving, you can click the Totals by Category button at the bottom of the window, beside the overall total. That will tell you how many donors you have made donations for, how many individual donations that includes, the dollar total, and a breakdown of numbers of donations and dollar amounts by donation category.
When you are done, click the Save button to save all of the donations that you entered back to the database. It will tell you how many entries you made and their total, and ask you to confirm that you want to save them.
If you decide you did not want to be in this window, and do not want to save any entries that you may have made, click the Cancel button and no changes will be made to the database.
If you want to further double-check the total donations you made on one day (with the same entry Date), you can use one or more of the reports under the Reports à One Date Donation sub-menu.
If you use member or envelope numbers, you can also use Reports à One Date Donation à Details with Member/Envelope # (or Details with Member/Envelope # and Summary) for checking your entries. These reports have two “Member / Envelope # Checksum” values at the bottom. The first value is just the sum of all distinct envelope numbers that appear in the report. The second is the sum of all envelope numbers that appear in the report, adding in a number multiple times if there are multiple donations listed with the same number (e.g. splits). Either one can be used as a double-check that you entered the donations for the correct donors, if you add the envelope numbers up with a calculator before doing your entries. If your calculator total differs from the Member / Envelope # Checksum displayed, either you added them up incorrectly on the calculator, or you entered one or more donations for the wrong donor.
If you find any errors, you can either fix them individually on the main window, or go back in to One Date Batch Entry again to fix them, being sure to check the "Include existing donations for the specified date" checkbox.
Adding Donors
Sometimes you may be entering your donations and realize that there are new donors. You can't actually add a donor while you are using this window, but that's not a problem. The easiest thing in this situation is to do the following:
| • | finish entering the donations for all existing donors on this window |
| • | Save them |
| • | add all of your new donors on DONATION's main window (with the New button, or F3) |
| • | after adding each new donor, add their donations(s) on the main window, for the date you were entering the batch for, with F2 |
Once you have done that, you can run whichever One Date Donation reports you would regularly run after your Batch Entry, and your totals should be correct.
Alternatively, you could just Save your work so far, add the donor on the main window, then come back in to this window again (for the same date). Be sure to check the "Include existing donations for the specified date" checkbox. All of the donations you have entered so far will be displayed, and you will be able to continue from the new donor. Your totals at the end, when you Save again, will include the previous donations you Saved for this date. However, there is really no advantage of this over the previous suggestions, and it will take more steps overall.
There is actually an Add Donor button on this window, but all it does is inform you of the suggestions above.
Fixing Date Errors
If you complete a session with One Date Batch Entry, Save the entries, and then realize that you specified the wrong date for the donations you just entered, you can fix this with the Database à Change Date of Donations menu option.
If you wish, you can use the "One Date Batch Entry Options" window that comes up when you first select File à One Date Batch Entry to restrict the donors that it shows to you. You can restrict them based on the value in the Donor Category 1 or Donor Category 2 fields, or you can restrict them to only those who have already donated in the current year.
If you wish to restrict them to donors in a certain donor category, just pull down the appropriate drop-down list for that category, and select the desired value from it. An example of when you might want to do this would be if you have given a certain category value to those of your donors who are interested in a certain project, and the collection you are entering is entirely for that project.
To select only those who have already donated in the current year, select the checkbox titled "Only show donors who have donated this year". Checking this would be helpful if you had a lot of regular donors, and quite a few others in your list of donors who currently aren't donating, to avoid having to see those others.
When you have made the desired selections, click OK, and it will restrict the list according to your specifications. If you don't want a restricted list, just don't select any criteria.