Newest KB Articles in Transactions

In-Kind Donations

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:16:38 GMT

When somebody donates a non cash item to your organization, it should be recorded as an "in-kind" payment.

When entering a new payment, under 'Method:' choose 'In Kind'. (You can setup other payment methods as well - see Payment Methods.)
Enter the category and subcategory of the in kind donation, and then click the 'Item Desc.' button to enter the description of the item (and its estimated value).

A few things to point out...

In-kind letters have to be batched separately (when batching thank you letters in Tasks > Letters & Receipts).
Built-in thank-you letters will automatically insert the in-kind description on the bottom of the receipt stub. You can also choose to insert the in-kind description elsewhere in the letter by placing the < InKindDescription> tag in the letter (See Customize Letters).
Word merge thank-you letters can pick up the in-kind description using the <InKindDescription> field. Alternatively, you may use the transaction note with the <TransactionNote> field.
In-kind donations do not have a monetary value. The amount field is disabled when choosing method: in-kind. You can choose to write an estimated amount in the in-kind description filed.

Notice of Donation

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:43:03 GMT

Notify button
Clicking this button gets you to a popup screen where you can enter information to notify a third party of the donation made. Many times a person makes a donation in honor of someone else and requests that you sent that person a notification letter that a donation was made to your organization in his honor.

The fields you need to enter are as follows:

Notify
Specifies whom you want to notify. Select a person from your contact list.
If the person who is being notified is not on your list, add him to your list. Then come back to this section and choose the contact from the list.

Him/Her
Specifies, as its name implies, if you are notifying him or her, the husband or the wife.

Honor/Memory
Enter a description that describes the reason for the donation. For example: "In honor of your 30th birthday."
This automatically gets added to the notification letter, making the letter more personal.

Letter
Choose a letter from the list of notification letters.
To add letters to this list, use the Letters screen.
Note: for letters to appear in this list, the Letter Type needs to be "Notice of Donation." See Customizing Letters for more information.

Sent
Indicates that a notification letter was already sent. This field gets updated in batches after generating a batch of Notification Letters. You can manually mark a notify letter as Sent by checking the Sent check box. Letters that are marked as Sent will not appear in the next batch of letters.
See Batch Letters for more information.

Transaction Tab

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:46:33 GMT

The Chabad Management System is able to keep track of both the billing and payments of your contacts. A bill is defined as money that a contact owes your organization. A payment is defined as money that a contact paid to your organization. When you enter a bill, you are in affect entering a debit for the contact, whereas a payment is considered to be a credit.

Some examples of a bill:

A pledge to donate money.
Enrollment in Camp or School.
An ad placed in the calendar or journal.
An item ordered from the Judaica Gift Shop.

Some examples of a payment:

A contribution.
A tuition payment for camp or school.
A payment for the advertisement.
A payment for items ordered from the Judaica Gift Shop

Bills and Payments work together. Usually a bill is entered first. Later, when the contact pays up, the payment is entered. When a payment is entered for a specific bill, it is important that the payment is applied properly.

You can enter a payment without a bill. For example, if a person made a contribution without first pledging, you can enter just the payment.

An invoice is a sent in connection to a bill, while a thank-you letter is sent in connection to a payment. Pledge letters can also be sent in response to bills.
When entering a bill or a payment, be sure to choose a letter to be sent.

Invoices and letters can be printed individually or in batches.

When a payment is properly applied to a bill, the payment will appear on the invoice the next time its generated.

A Statement is a combination of outstanding invoices with any applied payments. Statements should be sent out monthly on a regular basis.

The bills and payments for a contact appear in a list on the Transaction tab of the Main screen.

The Transaction List is where the payments and bills are displayed.

The list displays either payments or bills depending on the Type chosen in the Transaction Filters.

Sorting

You can sort this list by any of the columns. To do this simply click on the column heading you want to sort by. Clicking on it a second time will cause it will be sorted in reverse order.
For example: To sort the list by Date, click on the date field header. The payments will be sorted with the most recent payment date first. Clicking on it a second time will sort it in reverse order with the earliest date listed first. The same applies to all other columns.

Setting Filters

Transaction Filters allow you to filter the list of transactions that appear in the Transaction List. When a filter is set, only transactions that match the filter's criteria will be displayed in the Transaction List.

Setting a Transaction Filter will also cause the Transaction Statistics to calculate their totals based on the filter. For example, if you are only showing payments in the last 12 months, the statistics will only reflect those payments as well.

Setting a filter means you are limiting the list to show only the bills or payments you want to see. Not always is it necessary to view all the bills and payments. At times you may wish to filter it to a certain date range or a certain category and/or subcategory.

Date Range:
Select from the drop-down list from a predefined list of date ranges. After selecting a Date Range, the From and To Fields are updated to reflect the date range you selected. Alternatively, you can select Custom Dates and enter the range yourself.
To show all transactions regardless of the date, choose All Dates.

Category / Subcategory:
In addition to limiting the Transaction List to a date range, you can also limit the list to a certain category and subcategory. For example, say you only want to see a list of Payments that were received for Category Tuition and Subcategory Hebrew School. You would select on the Tuition Category and then the Hebrew School Subcategory.
To show all transactions regardless of their categories and subcategories, click on the All boxes.

Type:
Payments and bills can only be viewed separately. To switch between the two views, select the appropriate option from the 'Type' drop down list.
When viewing Payments the Command Buttons will be related to payments; when viewing Bills, the buttons will be related to bills.
This was moved to the top of the Transaction List (not as pictured above)

Status:
If Bills is selected from the Type drop down list, you have an option to filter the bill list to the status of the bill. You can choose All, Paid or Outstanding. If you are viewing Payments, Status will be disabled (grey).

Transaction Statistics provide a quick summary of the person's transaction activity.

You can instantly see contribution totals and other important statistics for the current contact. These statistics are updated and calculated based on the Transaction Filter. This means that when you change the filter the statistics will be updated accordingly.

For example, you can change the date range to Previous Year to see the total that the person contributed last year. Changing it to Current Year will instantly update the totals to reflect this year's contributions.

The Command Buttons are buttons that enable you to carry out various tasks related to the transactions you are viewing.

The Command Buttons change depending on if you are viewing Payments or Bills. To change between Payments and Bills, change the Type in the Transaction Filters section above.

Category Manager

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:20:34 GMT

Use this tool to manage your income and expense categories, subcategories and to set a budget.

The power of reporting lies in the consistency of assigning Categories and Subcategories for each Payment and Bill.

CMS lets you define your own Categories and Subcategories. The list that you define here will be available throughout the program when entering payments and bills, running transaction reports or for the optional Banquet Module.

To open the Category Manager, click Program Setup > Category Manager.

Category Type

Choose to view Income, Expense or All. The list of Categories that is displayed is updated when you change the Category Type.

Subcategories

Check the Subcategories check box to show Categories and Subcategories.

Active Only

Check the Active Only check box to show only the Active categories (and subcategories). To deactivate a Category, see below.

Show Budget:
Check off this box if you want the Chabad Management System to show the budget for each category or subcategory.

Auto Budget:
Click on Auto Budget to have CMS auto-calculate the budget based on your transactions (both income and expense) of the past year.

Go To Category

Click the Go To Category button to open the View Category screen where you can view a list of Transactions for any category and subcategory.

You can also edit a specific transaction from this screen or change the categories for many transactions at once. To edit a specific transaction, select that transaction and click on Edit Transaction. The payment details screen will pop up.

To change the categories for many transactions at once, select all the transactions you want to change by using the Ctrl and Shift keys. Choose a Category and Subcategory. If the selected transactions are bills, choose a Subcategory Detail as well. Click on Cancel to Cancel or OK to change the categories.

Note: Use extreme caution when changing Categories for many transactions at once.

Click the Back to Category List to go back to the previous screen.

New

Click the New button to create a New Category or Subcategory. If you are viewing Categories, clicking New will create a new Category.

Name:
Enter a Name for the new Category.

Category Type:
Choose if this Category will be used for Income or Expenses

Active:
Used to deactivate a Category.

Send Thank You Letters:
Choose whether this category requires thank you letters. A category such as donation, will usually require a thank you letter, whereas a category such as tuition will not.

Default Organization:
You can have many sub-organizations under your main organization--such as Hebrew School, Camp, preschool, etc. Here is where you can choose a default organization for this category. For example, if you are making a category called Camp Tuition, your default organization can be Camp. For more information on setting up all the various sub-organizations, see Tools Menu > Custom Lists Setup > Organizations.

Budget:
You can manually enter a budget for a specific category for each month and year. You can later run reports to see budgeted income and expenses and actual income and expenses.

Auto budget:
You can choose to have CMS auto-budget a category based on transactions made during the last 12 months.
Note: When entering a new category or subcategory, Auto Budget will remain at $0 being that there are no transactions entered yet. Auto-budget would work when modifying a category and subcategory which uses the same form as new category and subcategory.

If you are viewing Subcategories, clicking New will create a new Subcategory.

Subcategory for:
Choose an existing Category for which to create the new Subcategory.

Name:
Enter a Name for the new Subcategory.

Active:
Used to activate/deactivate a Subcategory.

Budget:
You can manually enter a budget for a specific category for each month and year. You can later run reports to see budgeted income and expenses and actual income and expenses.

Modify

Click the Modify button to change the Name and Type of a Category and Subcategory. The same screens used to create new Categories and Subcategories are used to modify them.

Unchecking the Active check box will prevent new Transactions, made in the transactions tab or bank account register, from being assigned to that Category or Subcategory. Inactive Categories will still appear in report screen.

Delete

Click the Delete button to Delete the selected Category or Subcategory. You will be prevented from deleting any Categories if Transactions are assigned to that Category.

View/Edit Price

Click the View/Edit Price button to view or edit the list of available prices for a Subcategory.

This list of prices is used when entering bills. As with categories, you can also deactivate any price. Deactivated prices will not be available when entering new bills.

See New Bill for more information.

Close

Click the Close button to Exit the Category Manager.

Delete Payment / Delete Bill

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:07:17 GMT

To delete a transaction, first select the transaction you wish to delete. Then click the Delete Payment or Delete Bill button.

A message will appear asking you to confirm the delete action. After choosing Yes, the payment/bill will no longer appear in the transaction list.

If the transaction you choose to delete has more than one split a message will appear asking you if you want to delete the entire transaction with all its splits.

To delete an individual split, you need to edit the transaction and use the Delete button in the Payment or Bills screen to delete that individual split.

Viewing Transactions

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:05:45 GMT

To edit or view the details of a transaction, first select the transaction then click the Edit/View Payment or Edit/View Bill button.

The same screen used when entering the transaction is used for editing the transaction.
See New Payment and New Bill for information about the specific fields in the Payment and Bill screens, respectively.

When you finished viewing or editing the transaction, click the OK button to return the Main screen.

If you don't see a transaction that you entered, check the following Transaction Filters:

If you are looking for a Payment make sure you are not viewing Bills. Conversely, if you are looking for a Bill make sure you are not viewing Payments.
Make sure the Date Range includes the date of the transaction you are looking for.
Make sure the category and subcategory filter include the category and subcategory of the transaction you are looking for.

If you still don't see the transaction. Try running a report on Payments and Bills and see if your "lost" transaction comes up. If not, you either deleted it or only entered partial information. Enter it again and make sure you enter all information required.

Stuck in Subcategory While Entering New Transaction

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:07:47 GMT

If while entering transactions you somehow missed the category and went straight to
the subcategory, it will not let you do anything. It will tell you that I have
tried to assign a null value.
Just press Esc on your keyboard (top left)

Apply a Payment to a Bill

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:56:49 GMT

Clicking Apply Payment brings up the Apply Payment window.

What you see is a list of invoices that are unpaid or partially paid. It clearly shows you the original bill amount, how much was paid and how much is left.

The simplest way to apply is to check off the Applied field starting from the top. The system will automatically calculate how much to apply as you go down the list.

Of course, you don't have to start from the top, you can choose which bill to pay and how much to pay, using the Apply Amount field.

Note: If a single bill was split amounts different subcategories, each subcategory will come up in its own line. This allows for the payment splits to be created automatically when you click OK.

Definitions:

Total Payment: The total amount of the payment.
Total Applied: The total amount of this payment that is applied to various bills.
Total Other Items: The total amount from this payment that is not applied to any invoices. This would only be the case if category/subcategory information was entered prior to clicking Apply Payment.
Total Remaining: The total left to apply, (after deducting the Total Applied and Total Other Items from the Total Payment). This will never be more than that the Total Payment but it may be less. If its less when you click OK, you will have the option of manually entering a split for the remaining unapplied amount (this will become "Other items").

Version 8.3.4 Added "New bill" button to enter a new bill directly from the Apply Payment screen. Added Bill Date field to the list of fields.

Version 8.3.5 Bills associated with an AutoCharge payment on a Credit Card will not come up in this list. See www.chabadms.com/files/ccpi.pdf for more details on the CCPI module.

Bill Screen

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:42:13 GMT

Click New Bill on the Transaction tab to bring up the Bill screen.

Notice the following changes:

Letter is instantly available at the top-right -one letter for the entire bill.
Memory/Honor, Organization, Solicitor and Mailing are readily available at the bottom -one for the entire bill.
Hide Details button will hide these four fields.When clicked, the button changes to "Show Details".
You can set the default visibility of these fields under Tools > Options > Invoices.

Note: The "Use Simple Bill Screen" option has been discontinued. Instead the Show/Hide Details option should be used.

Set Default Date Range for Transactions

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:24:49 GMT

Tools > Options > Other tab.

Until now, the default of "Last 12 Months" was fixed. You were able to change this after the program started but when you exit the system, it reverts to "Last 12 months".

If you want a different date range to be the default, you can set this option.
Keep in mind that setting it to "All Dates" will have an negative impact in performance, especially with large databases and network/multi-user.