The following page lists some of the features that are planned for upcoming version of DONATION.

The program has been regularly improved since its first release. For details of the various changes in each release, see the Revision History pages in the Help, or here online.

Dan's vision for the the program is that it is primarily for tracking charitable donors and donations and issuing receipts. Many features that have been requested in the past, like tracking memberships, major fundraising features, more general church or organization administration, or turning it into a full accounting system, are above and beyond the intent of this software.

Beta Testing

Dan is always interested in more beta testers - users who are willing to put a bit of time into trying out, testing, and commenting on work-in-progress versions of DONATION, to help make sure they are as good as possible before releasing them to all users. He also consults a list of advisors with questions about the business, and questions about directions he should take in the development of the program.

If you would like to join Dan's list of beta testers or list of advisors, please email him at info@software4nonprofits.com and let him know. Thank you!

Improvements in Upcoming and Recent Versions

Here are some of the improvements and additions to DONATION that Dan plans to definitely include in upcoming versions, or that have been included in recent versions:

• Properly allowing for what the Canada Revenue Agency calls "split receipting" or donations with an "advantage", where the donor receives something of value back in exchange for their donation. (Done in version 3.00.)
• Allowing for the entry of an appraiser's name and address for a high-value non-cash (i.e. non-monetary) donation, and printing that on Canadian receipts.
• Extending the First Name field to 30 characters from its current length of 20. (Done in version 3.00.)
• Adding a Business Name field (60 characters long), which you can use instead of the First and Last Name fields, for donations from businesses and other organizations. (Done in version 3.03.)
• Adding a 2nd Organization Name field, especially for users in Quebec who need to specify both the French and the English name of the organization. (Done in version 3.00.)
• Backups that aren't to diskette will use the last-used backup location, rather than defaulting to one standard location. (Done in version 3.00.)
• You will be allowed to select your own default donation category (which was previously always "General"). (Done in version 3.01.)
• There will be a popup calendar that you can optionally use on date-entry fields, such as for the donation date. (Done in version 3.00.)
• Searching for a donor by envelope number will no longer only work correctly if all envelope numbers are the same length. (In previous versions, this required you to put leading 0's on shorter envelope numbers, such as 001.) (Done in version 3.00.)
• The main window and One Date Donation Entry window will be sizeable, and will remember both the size and location on the desktop that they had the last time they were used. (Done in version 3.03.)
• There will be a new window for selecting reports, that gives a description of each report as well as its name.
• New easier-to-use HTML-based mail merge facilities, rather than the current functionality which runs the mail merge through your word processor.
• The One Date Donation Entry window will allow editing of previously entered donations for the same date. It will have a Find feature for quickly moving to a Donor by matching on the name or envelope number. It will also have an option to display the Description field for the donation and allow you to enter it. (Done in version 3.05.)
• Allow the program to be used by multiple users simultaneously on a local-area network. (Done in version 3.04.)
• A feature will be added to automatically re-assign all envelope numbers for a new year. (Done in version 3.01.)
• You will be allowed to delete a range of receipt numbers, if they were created in error. (Done in version 3.04.)
• An option will be provided to merge two donors, for instance if you accidentally have two donor records for the same person. (Done in version 3.04.)

The following are some further features that are on Dan's wish-list. They may appear at some point in the future, but not as soon as the features listed above.

• Allow technically skilled users to edit the built-in reports and build attractive new reports.
• There will be an option to print a user-specified piece of text (such as a sentence thanking the donor, or a quotation) on the receipts.

Note: Starting in January of 2007, Dan had started working on a complete re-write of the DONATION program, using the Microsoft .NET framework instead of the existing PowerBuilder programming environment. For a number of both technical and business reasons, Dan decided in August 2007 that it would be better to just continue making improvements to the existing PowerBuilder version of DONATION. There are no desired improvements that cannot be done as or more easily in PowerBuilder than in the .NET framework, and this will allow for getting smaller incremental feature releases to users sooner, rather than having to wait until the entire .NET translation is completed.