CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

It's common to have some form of outside-of-CiviCRM preprocessing that makes directly importing contributions possible. Often, that requires decoding bank statements of manually inputting data, filtering of certain types of transactions from the input stream, and completing the data until it fits the needs of CiviCRM. Alternative approaches use the API to directly feed Contributions into CiviCRM.

I'm trying to get as much feedback as possible on this specific part of how you use CiviCRM. I think we usually start from payments, and do a sort of interpretation prior to inputting it into CiviCRM, which I would like to do INSIDE Civi and automate or support, so the human user would have an easier job.
You can help out by answering these questions :

1. where does your input to create contributions come from : bank statements, accounting system exports, manual input, other ?
2. do you need to filter the incoming data, and in what way ?
3. do you do some form of interpretation of the data, or do you feed it directly into CiviCRM as Contributions ?
4. how do you feed this data into CiviCRM : manually, by importing it, by code using the API ?
5. how much time do your users spend on getting this data into CiviCRM ? Please include the preprocessing, and express the time as in 'three hours a day'
6. how much of the interpretation is nontrivial, ie. requires a trained user to detect certains patterns in the payments which help define what type of contribution is involved ?

Thanks in advance !