User Support Forum

New Vanco import process: Donation dates are wrong when donations are made from a checking or savings account!

PowerChurch is importing the Vanco data using the “processing date” instead of the “settlement” date for banking donations, as if they were credit card donations. The downloaded EFT datafiles from Vanco show the correct (settlement) dates for the donations. Vanco support confirms that Vanco has not changed anything – the settlement date is the date the donations are withdrawn from donors’ checking/savings accounts.

We only caught this because it threw off the monthly accounting – a number of people who are set up for monthly donations at the beginning of the month (October) had their imported donations show up with a donation date at the end of September.

Unfortunately it’s a mess to clean up (which can be done by downloading/importing the files via the old process, and reversing all the imported donations with the incorrect dates). But, we need to do this in order to correct our monthly accounting report!

John Staudt wrote:New Vanco import process: Donation dates are wrong when donations are made from a checking or savings account!

PowerChurch is importing the Vanco data using the “processing date” instead of the “settlement” date for banking donations, as if they were credit card donations. The downloaded EFT datafiles from Vanco show the correct (settlement) dates for the donations. Vanco support confirms that Vanco has not changed anything – the settlement date is the date the donations are withdrawn from donors’ checking/savings accounts.

We only caught this because it threw off the monthly accounting – a number of people who are set up for monthly donations at the beginning of the month (October) had their imported donations show up with a donation date at the end of September.

Unfortunately it’s a mess to clean up (which can be done by downloading/importing the files via the old process, and reversing all the imported donations with the incorrect dates). But, we need to do this in order to correct our monthly accounting report!

Have you installed the new 10/12/2015 MR ?? There is a Vanco fix in this edition that may correct what you're seeing. If you did, then I'd call Powerchurch Support directly, I suspect that this will not be a charged call .

The issue is that with scheduled repeating contributions like this, Vanco processes a couple of days early, to allow for processing time, so the money can hit your account the day that is specified by the person who set up the repeating contribution.

Because the process starts earlier, that is essentially the day the contribution was made, the equivalent of someone logging in to their Vanco account and making a contribution. It processes for a few days, then hits your account. They get contribution credit for the date the process was started, not the date the money hits your bank.

You can work around this behavior by moving those recurring contribution dates to the 3rd or 4th of the month, so that the processing will start on the 1st and will show the way you want.

We have documented this as something for the developers to look at, but I don't know that there will be anything in the Vanco data coming down to tell the software to handle these contributions any differently than individual ones that people made on the site.