saving copies of receipts- best way?

Laura Marcinkowski
Laura Marcinkowski
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in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Good Morning! What is the best way to track copies of receipts when sent via snail mail? I'm running the query in database view and then using mail merge. Do I need to manually add via attachments in webview? Or is there a better way? Thanks!

Comments

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
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    @Laura Marcinkowski - If you were to use Power Automate to merge your acknowledgement letters/receipts you can add an attachment to a record in RE directly from the workflow, automatically.

    Here's additional information on this option:


  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
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    @Laura Marcinkowski
    snail mail mail merge generally means there is 1 file to send to mail house, so, attaching to a constituent (or gift) would not make sense.

    here's a few suggestions:

    • save the file in some cloud folder storage location that your company has, and then add the link to the file as attachment (link type) to this URL for each gift that is receipted in this file
      • the only reason to do this method would be to use Power Automate as suggested by Austen, as there is no “import” you can do to add this attachment to the potentially hundreds of gifts
      • if you do not/cannot use Power Automate, then you don't want to use attachment, you can create a gift attribute in database view, that way you can use attribute import to import the link to the attachment.
    • if your company doesn't have a cloud storage solution, then you could create a single constituent record where you will attach all mail merge document to, then you can take the link to the file and do the same as mentioned above.
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
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    @Laura Marcinkowski Neither of the orgs I have been with felt the need to attach receipts to RE records. One org all gifts done by batch and generated receipts saved to file using batch #. Current org letters are saved on a shared drive by date. Folder for each FY and sub folders for each month. We are not currently doing ereceipts except for online transactions.

  • Dariel Dixon
    Dariel Dixon Community All-Star
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    @Laura Marcinkowski My org does what @Austen Brown advises. However, @Alex Wong has a good idea as well if you have a cloud storage system that may not play nice with Power Automate.

    I think it's worth mentioning that it might not necessarily be worth the expense to save a massive amount of receipts. Storage has a cost, and finding a storage provider (cloud or local) and developing an indexing strategy might not be within your time constraints. I've seen organizations that file them in monthly folders somewhere. I think the biggest takeaway is to have a system that you can easily find the receipt when needed, and it's documented and easy to follow. How it's done can be determined by your budget.

  • Faith Murray
    Faith Murray Community All-Star
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    @Laura Marcinkowski
    Ditto what @Dariel Dixon and @JoAnn Strommen have said. We do not save receipt copies in RE. We simply mark them “acknowledged”, with the letter type, and then we retain that generic mail merge template in our server files for a year or 2.

    For more significant bulk communications, where all the letters are the same, you can Global Add an Action, with the letter content pasted into Action Notes.

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