Our NAS’LER report from the daily project routine
Various Excel lists with information about donors and hours of manual effort to create donation receipts. All of this was part of the everyday life of a foundation that I had the privilege of accompanying on its path to digitization.
By setting up our Business Central app NC365 Donation Accounting, we were able to create a solution that allows for centralized management of all donation data in Business Central. In the NC365 Fundraising App linked to it, all donor contact data can be conveniently managed and campaigns can be created for individual target groups. This includes information such as total donation amounts, times of first and last donations, preferred contact methods and, of course, complete donation history.
How is that possible? Via the standard functionalities of OPplus, account statements can be imported into Business Central. From the information provided, donation items are created when incoming payments are posted, which are either linked to a new donation contact or assigned to an existing contact. The identification of an already existing contact takes place fully automatically on the basis of the IBAN. With just a few clicks, the incoming payments are thus posted as donations with a link to the contact on the stored G/L account.
Donor contact information can be managed and edited in Business Central as well as in the NC365 Fundraising App. Any changes are synchronized between the two systems, so everything is always up to date and there is no need for duplicate data maintenance. This allows colleagues in financial accounting to make changes and corrections just as easily as those in fundraising. In order to get missing address data of the donors, which are needed for the receipt generation, the concerned donation contacts can be marked for the 1 cent remittance. All selected records will then be taken into account when creating payment proposals. You can define yourself which information should appear in the purpose of use. The donors receive a transfer in the amount of 1 cent and in the best case decide to send their address data to the foundation, receive their receipt and donations again.
The creation of donation receipts was previously done by manually filling out Word templates. For this purpose, the relevant data first had to be painstakingly collected from Excel lists and then transferred. With the amount of donations raised through various fundraisers to support artists in times of the Corona Pandemic, a real time eater. I was able to continue using the Word templates and integrate them accordingly, so that the creation now runs automatically. Various filter criteria are used to restrict which receipts are to be created, after which either printing can take place immediately or the generated PDF file can be sent to the print shop of your choice. It is also possible to send a receipt by mail.
In addition, I had the honor of automating the disbursement of grants to artists who applied. The several thousand applications received by mail were processed according to the decision of acceptance or rejection, so that the applicants were notified accordingly. If approved, the grantees were entered into Business Central as a vendor and the disbursement process was triggered. The mailbox quickly filled up with joyful messages of thanks, and the Foundation’s staff was able to continue processing the many applications in peace, rather than nudging each payment individually.
I am looking forward to the next projects.
Esther Lemmerz
