importing donor payments into RE NXT

Ghazaleh Kad
Ghazaleh Kad
Third Anniversary Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone has any useful insights/ advice to share in relation to a procedural gap we have on using RE NXT. The existing procedure is that Finance Team provides a monthly report (excel) on donor payments to Fundraising Team who then use this spreadsheet for manual data entry into RE NXT. The issue is that Fundraising Team has no visibility of monthly donor payments on its own fundraising tool which is Raiser’s Edge NXT unless data is entered manually. The ultimate goal is to optimise this process through import/export, data migration, data mapping or any way that can improve the manual process.

The current procedure is not automated. Therefore, the data integrity and human error are key risk areas in this process.

Anyone with any advice on how we can import the donor payment data (excel) into RE NXT is greatly appreciated.

Comments

  • Rachel Bailey
    Rachel Bailey
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 4 Name Dropper Participant

    Manual data entry is evil! I would recommend starting with this Knowledgebase Article and playing around with the Import features in Database View. It's definitely not automated and you have to import Constituents first and Gifts second, but with some trial and error you should be able to get a standard import process up and running without much difficulty.

    Another option (especially if you have Constituent, Gift, or other record info coming in from other sources) is to get ImportOmatic. It's a lot more customizable and user-friendly than RE: Import and we use it for a TON of stuff at my organization. Not free nor is it fully-automated, but probably a better long-term solution than RE: Import if you're going to stick with your current gift accounting practices.

    The other thing to check out is SKY Developer which might allow the creation of an API between RE NXT and your accounting software. This would be the truly automated option but requires that your accounting software provider do some coding if they haven't already developed an API.

  • Ghazaleh Kad
    Ghazaleh Kad
    Third Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Hi Rachel, thank you so much indeed. I will certainly explore the proposed options and see where it gets me to. I'll look into esp SkyDev as it sounds very promising. So helpful thank you so much!

  • Mathew Howarth
    Mathew Howarth
    Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    Hi, we were in the same position here. We started by using the built in Import functions in database view but found they were slow, complicated and resulted in a lot of duplicates for us. As we needed one import for constituents, then another for gifts and it required us always filling in fields manually.

    I second the other comment about using ImportOmatic, the profiles are really useful and can help tidy up the data on the way in by applying what they call dictionaries, basically allowing you to transform data. It also has quite a good inbuilt duplicate checker, which has really reduced our duplicate count.

    I'd also say it's fairly reasonably priced considering the time it takes to run the imports, once set up all our admins have to do is get whatever CSV they need to import, select the profile in ImportOmatic and press import.

  • Karen Diener
    Karen Diener Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    Are the monthly payments from generally the same constituents, or is it a new group every time?

    If it is the same - or mostly the same - you could use a recurring batch (NOT a recurring gift batch). You could hypothetically just make the small number of changes each month to the recurring batch and commit it with a new batch number. The next month, you open the recurring batch and start over. I do that every other week with a payroll deduction batch.

    Karen

  • Larry Wheeler
    Larry Wheeler
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    ImportOmatic all the way! As others have mentioned, it is a quality tool which will save you time and minimize errors. I use it for rolling graduates into RE, importing actions/notes/attributes and more. The Omatic support team are GREAT and very helpful during implementation and after.

    The software can also handle split gifts, if your org allows them, as long as you have the same “ID” but separate row for each “split” in the worksheet you get from Finance.

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge

    Thanks for the post @Larry Wheeler ! We use it for our graduates but not much else. I had not considered it for actions. That would be quite helpful when global add wouldn't be an option.

    LOL I'll probably need another how-to class as not using it often I forget all the functions.

    Great tip.

  • Warren Sherliker
    Warren Sherliker
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Just to let you know - SmartSYNC does a lot of this and more for RENXT users. It also comes with pre-built direct real-time connectors to tons of apps as well as the basic spreadsheet to RENXT with gifts, people, attributes and duplicate protection. Just chucking that one into the mix for you!

  • Christine Robertson
    Christine Robertson
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    If you don't have constituent IDs or Import IDs in your file, then you'll likely want to look at a third party tool. SmartSYNC, Importomatic, JMG Importer Exporter or Importacular are all options. Depending upon what you need to accomplish and what your skill level is with importing, you may be able to achieve your needed results with the free version of Importacular (as it imports constituents and gifts).

Categories