Help - managing large number of contributors

[Robin]

We have a large number of contributors. Some are regular attendees and some are one time givers for Mission Trips, etc.

The large number makes contribution posting cumbersome. With a new year starting we would like to be able to remove the one time contributors from last year.

We found that we can just delete the person from the family mailing list which would reassign their contribution to envelope #99999. But this also gets rid of the individuals record of contribution, which doesn't seem wise from a record keeping point of view.

Any ideas?

[Randy B]

I live in a small rural community. It is easy for me to identify the one-time contributors. Instead of establishing envelope numbers and everything, I would just count those contributions with loose cash and handwrite a manual cash receipt that you can buy in any office supply store. The other option is to do a system backup when the year end is done and keep that disk.

[NeilZ]

We have a large number of contributors. Some are regular attendees and some are one time givers for Mission Trips, etc.

The large number makes contribution posting cumbersome. With a new year starting we would like to be able to remove the one time contributors from last year.

We found that we can just delete the person from the family mailing list which would reassign their contribution to envelope #99999. But this also gets rid of the individuals record of contribution, which doesn't seem wise from a record keeping point of view.

Any ideas?

We isolate these types of contributors with a contribution number outside the normal range.

Say if your range is 100 to 800, use numbers from 2000 on up. This way you can identify this type of contributor immediately. If you want, you can alternate a number series from year to year. Say for 2005 you use 2000-2999, for 2006 you use 3000-3999, then you can delete the 2000 series after you create the end-of-year statements.

[foxygramps]

Making a year end backup is a good thing to do, but don't forget to also make a full backup of the Power Church program, or keep that version of the program on your computer. Might also ba a good idea to give it a slightly different name, as current versions cannot restore files from previous versions.

By the way, is anything happening with my request to be able to download the maintenance upgrades from older versions than I'm currently using?

[Zaphod]

By the way, is anything happening with my request to be able to download the maintenance upgrades from older versions than I'm currently using?

Actually, yes! Since Jan-Feb is a super busy time for us (our call volume doubles or even triples), not much time can be devoted to other projects right now. This project is at the top of my list come March. It's going to be a pretty drastic rewrite of the whole process.