Contribution Import Utility experience

Take infinite care getting your xml set up to your desired spec and document to the user who will be creating the import files. I provided a sample excel template with the details in a second tab (pretty much copied from here https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System/Tessitura.htm#Contribution%20Import/Preparing%20the%20Import%20Data.htm). We had a few hiccups at first, but it's been working great once everyone got the hang of it.  It's especially been a boon for regular paycheck or giving day contributions that are provided in a spreadsheet format to the organization that uses it most, and the user's figured out how to take advantage of that to simplify their process and make it more efficient. 

We're on RAMP, and one thing that helped was to place the data file in LIVE, but map to there in TEST for review run. That way there are no oopsies getting the correct updated file in place for LIVE since it's the exact same file that was used in TEST.

Something I have found out the hard way is you cannot use Windows Authentication on the user that is doing the importing. At least that was an issue I ran into as a RAMP user. 

--Phillip

I found this to be the case as well on RAMP when running directly in the client, but I found a workaround: if you schedule the utility to run, Windows Authentication works just fine (or rather, doesn't come into play).

I love the Contribution Import Utility and use it all the time. I use it for any sort of complicated wire transfer that is a collection of gifts - payments from Facebook fundraisers where we want to track all the individual gifts separately, payments from workplace giving sponsors like Benevity, and at my last organization I used it to process all of our online gifts that came in through a custom Stripe form.

I cannot recommend enough building some sort of template to process your data. I like to use Excel and Powerquery to take the output I get from a given funder and format it to fit the import utility the same way every time. This takes some set up but means I can import 100 gifts in just a few minutes once it's done.

My number one tip is to ALWAYS check over the review mode carefully. I recently accidentally imported a handful of gifts to a closed fiscal year and had to manually back them all out - no fun!

Hi Maery- I was so excited to see that you're enthusiastic about the Contribution Import Utility! Do you have any time to talk to my colleague about how this works? We're hoping to use it for GivingTuesday, but looking at the documentation feels daunting (then again, so does manually entering all those gifts...)

Is there a template you use for this that you can share? Or any guidance? 

Thanks!

Cara
CSchmidt@thetech.org

We have used this with good effect in the past. A couple of notes:

• make sure you liaise with your Finance Team about this. For our team, I set up a specific Payment Method, using a GL account they provided so that they knew precisely how to deal with the monies reported on
• I also set up a specific Appeal (don't forget to update Campaigns/References/Acknowledgements!) to associate a specific letter and so that a receipt number would be generated so we could use the Print Acknowledgement Letters utility as we wanted to issue our own receipt (the funds were collected by GoFundMe)
• if you're on RAMP, another way around the Windows Authentication issue is to have a user that doesn't have Windows Authentication to log in using the username and password
• ALWAYS run it in TEST first. Always.

Martin