Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By : Erik Hommel, Joseph Murray, Brian P Shaughnessy
Book Image

Using CiviCRM - Second Edition

By: Erik Hommel, Joseph Murray, Brian P Shaughnessy

Overview of this book

CiviCRM provides a powerful toolbox of resources to help organizations manage relationships with constituents. It is free, open source, web-based, and geared specifically to meet the constituent relationship management needs of the not-for-profit sector. Beginning with broader questions about how your organization is structured, which existing workflows are critical to your operations, and the overarching purpose of a centralized CRM, the book proceeds step by step through configuring CiviCRM, understanding the choices when setting up the system, importing data, and exploring the breadth of tools available throughout the system. You will see how to best use this software to handle event registrations, accept and track contributions, manage paid and free memberships and subscriptions, segment contacts, send bulk e-mails with open and click-through tracking, manage outreach campaigns, and set up case management workflows that match your organization’s roles and rules. With specific emphasis on helping implementers ask the right questions, consider key principals when setting up the system, and understand usage through case studies and examples, the book comprehensively reviews the functionality of CiviCRM and the opportunities it provides. With this book, you can help your organization better achieve its mission as a charity, industry association, professional society, political advocacy group, community group, government agency, or other similar organization and position yourself to become a power user who efficiently and effectively navigates the system.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Using CiviCRM - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Accounting Batches


Earlier we reviewed the process of exporting contribution records and discussed the importance of that process if you need to import those records into your accounting software. CiviCRM's Accounting Batches provide an improved workflow for managing that export/import process, along with additional tools that will help facilitate data entry for contribution records.

The underlying principle of accounting batches is the need to work with a set of contribution records and to have the ability to strictly capture and store the set of records worked with. Because we're working with financial data, it is critical that we don't skip records or duplicate records, especially when we need to be transferring them to bookkeeping/accounting software. Batches let us easily work with multiple records at once (improving data entry efficiency) and keep track of the sets of records worked with.

There are two workflows for working with batches that we will review.

Batch Data Entry

As the name...