Donor Manager Software

Hi again John,

This is more of a question than a firm suggestion:

I notice that the only type of automatic entry of donors' contributions is by 'reading' an electronic financial statement. I'm very grateful that you're working on the Wycliffe UK statements, which will be a great help for me in that area.

However, we also receive gifts from Wycliffe South Africa and Wycliffe Netherlands -- and if other European Wycliffe members use the program, not to mention Australians, Koreans, etc., there'll be a multitude of different statement formats to cope with!

What I'm wondering is whether it would be possible to have the program set up what in the UK we call "standing orders" -- i.e., regular automatic gift entries specified by the user. (I have a personal financial program, Quicken, which does this.) Thus I could specify that a gift of 20 pounds/dollars is to be entered for John Doe in South Africa on a certain date every month. A quick glance at my S. African statement would confirm whether the gift has been received -- and if it changes or stops, I can change or cancel the "standing order" accordingly.

This would just provide an easy way to cope with regular, ongoing gifts from sources not covered by your statement-import routines.

Again, just a thought! Thank you so much for all you're doing to make this program as useful and user-friendly as it is.

-- Steve.

Steve,

Thanks for this good posting. I am very familiar with the concept of a "standing order" and something like that could indeed be programmed. I'll put it on the "possible new features" list.

On the UK gift import, it's almost ready for testing.

I'm relieved at your positive reaction, John ! I was afraid this might go beyond what you intended for the program. But certainly for me, with four Wycliffe statements per month and quite a few regular direct gifts, the possibility of setting up standing orders would be a great help.

Blessings,

-- Steve.

Steve,

A lot depends on how widely used a function like that would be. What I'll probably do is write a separate little module to do this, then let you (and some others) test it and help fine tune it, then later embed it into the DM.

That way I can write a quick routine (maybe not full featured yet) that we can fool around with and see how it goes.

Programming wise, it's actually pretty easy to implement. So, we'll see.