Two-Way Elvanto to Tithely Integration
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Pat Miller
The more back and forth integrations the better. In other words, work gets done on one platform and then transfers over. The need for less choosing "which are we going to use for this" and having significant pros and cons trade offs. Ex. We use elvanto for this and therefore now it's not on the app.
Julia Rhodes
Merged in a post:
Mirror Elvanto and Giving financial transactions
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Rick Gunderson
As a church financial secretary, I currently spend considerable time editing every Elvanto financial transaction for a credit card or bank transfer gift to show the processing fee. That distinction disappears when a transaction migrates from Giving to Elvanto. Our church uses Elvanto as its primary financial record, so it is critically important that each transaction accurately show the details of the transaction. Please provide the means whereby a church can chose to show that distinction when the transactions migrate over. Thank you.
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Timothy McCabe
This would be a great improvement.
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cay villars
Having two different databases for managing member information/transactions is a member management nightmare and will only get worse over time. It forces churches to "hobble" together member information as described above. It is NOT OK to have two separate databases under ANY circumstances. This is not a good data management practice. I know of no for-profit company that does this for their internal customer management if they can possibly help it. There needs to be one master database for all member transactions/information with no transaction data excluded. Merging the Elvanto and tithely data and having the entire database searchable/reportable is absolutely essential to good member management over time. This is the power of a relational database. This includes chat, email, financial (purchases, donations, events) transactions, customer data, etc.
Sabrina Sherman
Hi Rick :)
I just wanted to let you know that I have merged your request with another like it so that your votes all count together. This is something we will consider as more and more people vote and voice their opinion for this change.
For now, I thought it would be helpful for you to see Adam's comment on this thread:
The Financials section in ChMS is meant for allocating donations to people within ChMS. Donors receive full credit for their total donation (gross amount before fees are taken from the church). In your example, the donor made a $10.30 donation, but the net deposit is $10 because the fees were taken from the church (not the donor) by Tithely before they are deposited.
For reconciling bank deposits, we recommend using the Bank Deposits section within the Tithely admin area.
As Adam mentioned, Elvanto is meant for working with members/donors. It was not designed as an accounting platform to be used with your bank. This means that the amount that comes over from Tithe.ly to Elvanto is the exact amount that has come out of the donor bank account.
If you are using Elvanto to generate giving statements for your donors as well, by editing each transaction to deduct fees from the total, you may actually be taking away from the amount the donor should be getting credit for on that statement. Our giving statements are meant to reflect what the donor gave, not just what your organization received after fees. This will matter far less if you are not generating giving statements in Elvanto or showing donors their giving history in the Member area there. Just wanted to let you know in case!
I hope that helps somewhat! If you need any help accessing the Bank Deposits area in Tithe.ly, please email support@tithe.ly.
Sabrina
Sabrina Sherman
Merged in a post:
Memo/Note and Fee/Deposit data to ChMS Reports
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Daniel Seaborn
This is really important and would be so helpful. The top two needs are memo/note field data and fee/deposit detail data. The ChMS reporting tools are fantastic. It's so good to be able to customize them, set up automatic emails, etc. BUT, if they don't include key data points that treasurers and bookkeeper need to do their work, the ChMS reports aren't complete and they have to go find those important data points from tithely giving statements too. For example, When someone puts a note or memo in their gift (such as a specific designation of an "other" gift), that memo needs to show up in the memo field of the ChMS financial report. (Right now it only says "Tithely," whether there is a memo written or not). Based on the ChMS report, we have no way of knowing that a note was provided unless always cross checking the ChMS financial report and the tithely giving statements.Same with fee details as well as deposit amounts. Unless the fee details and deposit amounts can be included in ChMS reports, it doesn't work to just auto-email them to treasurers and bookkeepers each week. They have to go in and cross check to find out what fees were paid and determine the actual deposits etc. All this is available in the tithely giving statements, but since it does not come over as an option to show in ChMS reports, none of the great ChMS reporting tools such as filtering, sorting, customizing, emailing, etc can be used to provide this really important information.
Sabrina Sherman
Merged in a post:
Giving Fees are not broken out when sent to ChMS
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Thomas Woods
When a user makes a payment online or through the app and chooses to cover the fees, this information does not come across into the ChMS reports. So the financial team does not know what the person actually is trying to give. For example, a person is paying $10.00 in tithes but what comes across is $10.30 for tithes in the ChMS. This makes things very difficult because deposits don't match up.
Adam Barry
Hi Thomas Woods! The Financials section in ChMS is meant for allocating donations to people within ChMS. Donors receive full credit for their total donation (gross amount before fees are taken from the church). In your example, the donor made a $10.30 donation, but the net deposit is $10 because the fees were taken from the church (not the donor) by Tithely before they are deposited.
For reconciling bank deposits, we recommend using the Bank Deposits section within the Tithely admin area.
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Robert Buford
Adam Barry:
Your reason for not providing a separate account label for tithely fees is not justifiable IMO. Our Elvanto giving statements have the ability to include or not include the tithely fees - BECAUSE we manually edit the gifts to add another transaction line listing Tithely Fees as another account that donors gave to. So the donors get full credit and we get to spend hours each month (now paying an accountant) making this possible.
The proposed solution to use Bank deposit reports is not helpful when we have cash and check gifts (every week, with substantial amounts regularly). Either we have to manually add cash & checks to the Online Giving side, or we have to edit each online gift on the Elvanto side to add transactions for the tithely fee. Either way - how is this helpful to us?
Technologically speaking this should be easy to do, IMO, unless there's something with your database that I can't imagine. You already tag the amount deducted for the fee; why not just read that flag and have it add another transaction for "Tithely Fee" account? Bonus points if your team codes to consolidate all the fees for those gifts involving multiple accounts.
Thank you.