Hello,
I'm curious if anyone out there does e-mailed tax acknowledgements for donations. Our typical practice has been mailing out acknowledgments, but I don't want to see our acknowledgements back up too much while we are working remotely.
I know that Tessitura has e-mailed confirmations out of Ticket Orders, but is that a function that can be set up for Contributions?
What other techniques do people use to stream line this?
Any advice would be helpful,
Corri
We've had good luck generating email acknowledgments using Wordfly. I adjusted the stored procedure we customized for acknowledgments so it also stores its output to a local table, then I built list and output elements pointed at that table for use with Wordfly. This way the acknowledgements process is the same regardless of whether we're doing them electronically or physically—running the acknowledgment utility generates all the data in a useful form regardless of what we want to do with it.
We are currently using Wordfly as well, its a bit clunky and can exclude folks you don't want to if they have opted out of receiving emails, though if your email is regarding a transaction you can email them. It would be great if this could be done through Tess directly. There is a utility that could work but needs modifications and I would love to be able to pretty it up. In light of our closure we don't have a lot of IT support so I can't do much on my own.
Hi All,
In 15.1 Service Pack 10 we will be releasing a new utility that generates and emails tax receipts to patrons using HTML templates. Currently that Service Pack is slotted for release in early May. This utility was originally developed by our consulting team, and released at no charge a couple of months back. We made the decision to work it into the core application, and you should have access to it when you install the Service Pack in May.
We'll have more information coming out toward the end of the month.
Thanks!
Chris Szalaj
Product Owner, Business Facing Products
Tessitura Network
That's awesome and a much desired functionality even without a pandemic. It would be great if it could be released in a way similar to the extra month utility that doesn't require a service pack. Many of our staff have been temporarily laid off so getting support to install this service pack could be difficult. Not sure if that is even possible, but I thought I would put it out there.
Hi Phyllis Sanders, Yes, this utility will work on all contributions that get a row in T_Contribution in the database. The only type of contributions that I think would not be included are tickets donated for resale.
Thanks
Chris
Hi Corri,
Mailing acknowledgements has been our typical process as well. Since transitioning to a remote-work format, we have been taking a two-pronged approach for emailing tax acknowledgments. Firstly, we created Wordfly templates for a few of our common acknowledgement types that only require data fields for email address, donation amount, and donation date, which we import using a CSV built from our typical output set.
Secondly, we have started generating PDF acknowledgements and emailing to donors individually for receipts that require customized and/or more detailed information. Like Michael Joyal mentioned, you can use the paid version of Acrobat to easily split a PDF containing multiple tax receipts. If you don't have the paid version of Acrobat but have access to a MacOS computing environment, you can use the Preview app to accomplish the same task; simply click-and-drag individual pages into their own PDF files or use an Automator macro that does the task automatically. Neither is the most elegant solution, but it has been reliable for us so far.
I'm looking forward to the comping service pack--hoping that will help us streamline our process further. In the meantime, I hope this helps!
All the best,
Sean
Hi Chris,
Is there somewhere we can read about how this new function works? Is it live now? We would like to see if this works for us.
Hi Valeri Estrada, It isn't released yet, and it will be included in the 15.1.10 service pack in early May. We don't have documentation on it to share as of yet, but will post a link to them as soon as they are updated. I'm glad to hear this could be potentially helpful!
Our organization has been doing the same thing and are hoping to switch to emailed acknowledgements as well. I'm so glad to hear that a new utility is coming out for emailing tax receipts. My only concern is how the signing process will work, as tax receipts here in Canada need to be signed either by hand or digitally.
Hi All, An update regarding this functionality:
Previously I had posted this would be in both 15.1 and 15.0, and that was incorrect. We actually have always planned to only release this in 15.1, and I apologize for the oversight in my posts. I've corrected them to avoid future confusion. This utility will only be released in 15.1, and so in order to take advantage of it you will need to upgrade to the latest service pack in being released early next week, 15.1.10.
Many thanks, we're excited to release this functionality to the community.
This should be in the current version, correct? Is there any documentation where we can read about how this utility works and how we can implement it? I haven't been able to find anything when I search so far, but maybe my terms are wrong.
Hi Valeri Estrada,
Yes - If you are on v15.1.10 or later, you can find documentation on the Cumulative Giving Summary Receipt utility in the Tessitura Help System. If you search for that term you will find all of the documentation on the feature. Thanks! Let us know how it goes if you use it.