Reassigning Envelope Numbers

Some churches that use envelope numbers like to reassign / renumber them annually or periodically. The Database à Reassign Envelope Numbers menu option can be used for this purpose. This would often be used on a new year's donors, after using Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year.

After selecting that menu option, the Reassign Envelope Numbers window appears. On it, you have to make two choices:

Which donors to give new numbers to. This is either "All current non-business donors", or "Only donors who already have an envelope #".

The former option gives a new envelope number to every donor in your database, except for businesses (because they don't attend church and make weekly donations with envelopes!). If any businesses do have envelope numbers, those numbers are removed. Businesses are considered to be those donors whose First Name is empty.

The second option only renumbers the envelope numbers of all donors that currently have envelope numbers. If you currently have donors with envelope numbers that you want to be excluded, so that they don't get envelope numbers, you will need to manually remove them by editing those donors first to remove the contents of the Member/Envelope # field, and then use this option.

Once you have made these selections, click the Reassign button. The program will the first confirm that you have made a backup of your database recently. This is important, in case you do the reassignment, and then decide it was not what you wanted, or you did it on the wrong year's data, or something. If you have made a backup, do the renumber, and aren't satisfied with the results, just restore that backup (with Database à Restore) to be back to where you were before the backup.

The program then asks you to confirm that that this is what you want to do, telling you how many donor's envelope numbers will be affected. When it is done, it tells you whether or not it was successful.

Probably the easiest way to use this option is either near the year end, or shortly into a new year, after you have used Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year to move into the new year's data. When you use this option, only the new year's donors' envelope numbers are changed. If you change back to the previous year with Maintenance à Change Year à Previous Year, the donors will still have their old envelope numbers.

If you need to do the renumbering for the coming year a month or two before the year end, because you need to re-order new envelopes and want to know how many you will need, you can first switch to the next year, do the Reassignment, review the results, then switch back to the current year. When you pass the year end and are ready to start entering donations for the new year, you should use the Database à Copy Missing Data option to copy any donors added during those last couple of months from the current year's donor list to the new year's donor list.