Online Express Automated Receipts

Margi Baker

Would any of you who are using the Generate receipts option in OLX please share your experience with that feature and any best practices, both technical and pertaining to donor centricity? We would like to enable that feature in order to speed up the gift acknowledgment turn-around and reduce our footprint. Thanks!

Crystal Bruce

Hi! Discussion moved to Online Express forums. Thanks!

Aldera Chisholm

We use it quite a bit! We have our online gifts coming in from a few sources, we use OLX primarily for our EMail appeals, which means high frequency of smaller gifts.


My favourite things:

1. I have it set to CC me when it sends a donor receipt. This serves as a nice alert for donations, but also helps keep it top of mind as to what the donor is seeing.

2. The fact that the receipt it automatically done and we get the link to download a receipt makes is super easy for donors who call back and can't open them, or had them go to spam.

3. I like that they get a confirmation screen, which we have it say they can expect a receipt via email alerts folks to expect a receipt, and to look for it.

4. Donors get the confirmation screen, the TY message and the tax receipt. It feels like a nice stewardship package. We follow up with Thank You phone calls.


Downsides:

1. It's hard to make the receipts pretty, but... small issue considering the amount of work it saves.

2. I have no idea if these emails "count" toward our annual number of emails cap in the subscription - customer service couldn't answer that question.


Sometimes, I've had donors complain they had trouble printing the receipt in that it ends up on multiple pages, but we think this their particular email service settings.


Hope that helps, but do send any specific questions my way!

Cheers

Aldera

Elizbeth HubbleRadosa

Hi Aldera


Wondering if you or if anyone else has this issue, We are trying to use OLX receipts but because the receipt numbers dont 'talk' to RE our offline gifts and online gift receipt numbers don't run in sequence. While this is not a legal requirement, its a requirement for some reason in our accounting department (trying to figure out the reason as well) but just wondering if other orgs have had this problem or how others have gotten their accounting teams on board?


I would like to just have the starting OLX receipt number something super high compared to the RE receipts but im getting push back that they need to be in sequence....

Aldera Chisholm

Hi Elizabeth,

We use a separate receipt stack for our OLX receipts, then there is no issue at all with sequencing. There are a lot of good reasons to keep a sequence, if only for doublechecking to find missing receipts, that is likely what your acct department is thinking. By using a separate stack, OLX runs it's own number series and the ones "we" run are in their own series. That is also helpful for looking at a gift and seeing instantly where it came from or was receipted. Hope that helps!

Elizbeth HubbleRadosa

Thanks Aldera!

yeah that's how I was used to using OLX when I was a consultant in Australia, but seems the US database doesn't have receipt stacks - at least ours doesn't (im an Admin in RE, so not a security thing). So when I told me team here 'yeah it will work just fine!" and then it didn't I was taken aback! ?‍♀️


Won't be automatic, but I think I have found a way to use the NXT gift receipting tool, which we also have Luminate Online so will work for all online donations from OLX and LO.


Thanks for your response though!

Margi Baker

Hi Aldera,

Lots of helpful information here. I will share this with the rest of our team and circle back if other questions arise. Thank you for taking the time to reply. -Margi