HELP! :) How to delete contributors

[liz]

I have a question that I have not been able to find the answer to in any forum or in the manual. So hopefully someone out there in powerchurch land can help me. I need to delete some of our contributors who no longer attend. Their contributions are from at least 1 year prior. When I try to delete their profile, I get a warning message that there are posted contributions, and then it tells me that the persons posted contributions will be moved to a shared envelope. What does that mean? I don't need any of their information on the computer. What should I do. THANKS!

[NeilZ]

I have a question that I have not been able to find the answer to in any forum or in the manual. So hopefully someone out there in powerchurch land can help me. I need to delete some of our contributors who no longer attend. Their contributions are from at least 1 year prior. When I try to delete their profile, I get a warning message that there are posted contributions, and then it tells me that the persons posted contributions will be moved to a shared envelope. What does that mean? I don't need any of their information on the computer. What should I do. THANKS!

OK .. the system is telling you that there is contributions data for the contributor. If you delete them, any contribution information that was credited to their envelope will no longer be available.

The only time we clean out contributor data here, is one year after an end-of-year statement has been printed and mailed. In this way we can be reasonably sure that these people have filed their taxes, and they are no longer needed in the database. Of course, before we do such a cleanout, we do a full backup to CD and store it offsite just in case this data is needed in the next few years.

For example:

At our church, if someone leaves a check in the plate, and they are new to the system, we create an envelope number in the 1000 or higher series of numbers. Our member range is 101 through 999 right now. Lets say John Jones drops a check in July 2004, we give him a number 1234.

At the end of the year, all statements are printed for tax purposes and mailed to the contributors. John Jones gets a statement for enveloper 1234 in January 2005.

In January 2006, we create statements for anyone who has contributed in 2005. We then do a full backup to CD. For those contributors with numbers over 1000 who have not contributed in 2005, these are deleted from the database. Either by Deleteing the family record with all the personal profiles, or by chaning the envelope number to zero.

In order to insure that the amount of the contributions made to the various funds remains the same, any contributions that were made by these purged contributors are credited to an internal envelope number that does not print out in the statements, but whose amounts show up in the history reports.

Does this help ??

[liz]

Thanks Neil - That does help! I just wasn't sure what was gonna happen to the contributions when it said that about a shared envelope. Thanks again! Liz

[Zaphod]

By the way, that shared envelope number is 99999. You can include that in some reports if you want to get a correct total of contributions, but you can't use it for seeing any individual information.