CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Please forgive me if this use case has been posted elsewhere, but I could not find it.

Our accounts team tend to enter contributions into our current system as batches, rather than as individual contributions. That is, if they have (say) N contributions totaling £Y, they set up a new batch of N expected items totalling £Y, and then are presented a grid to put in the individual contributions (name, type, source, amount, etc.). When the total of the contributions put into the grid matches N and £Y this is flagged up. There are a few reasons why this is good practice:
 - The main reason for this is that it enables accurate reconciliation with the bank account. Individual contributions do not show up on the bank account statement, only the total amount of the paying in slip for the batch of cheques. So this is checked against the batch total in the system.
 - It also enables the data entry clerk to have a simple check and balance of what they keyed in against what they were expecting when they totalled the pile of cheques. You know accountants - always love to have checks & balances.
 - It ought to be marginally faster than putting in contributions individually as batch ref (and any other defaults held in the batch definition are already entered.

I can already see that without any coding we could put a batch reference as a custom field on every contribution, and then a report/query could give a listing and total of contributions. This hits the first point quite well. But points 2 & 3 need some kind of batch grid.

Do others see a similar need? Could we collaborate on a spec and jointly work on this in some way? I'd love to hear thoughts

Marcus

i've been playing around with some batch ajax widgets (data table) for my sfschool project and i think using that to build a "simple" batch contribution import is potentially not too hard

if folks have a developer that they are willing to donate to help take this to the next step, we'd be happy to work with them and get something going

Getting a spec out there would be great. I'd urge you to keep it pretty simple to begin with

lobo

This is exactly what we will need as well, though it's too early for us to commit to anything yet.

Lobo, could you update the status on this?

I am interested in this functionality and may have a paying client for it. The only tweek to the spec is that they need to have clear distinction in the UI between creating a batch, and entering the cheques for it. Their workflow involves one person doing mail and making deposits, and a different group entering the cheque info from photocopies.

Seems to me this is kind of "lite" Quickbooks integration.  In that financial departments always want things done in batches.  I have seen interest in being able to enter a batch and then export individual batches and import them into financial software.  Of course it's missing thing like incremental payments and true Accounts Receivable integration but it's a start.

On the Batch entry we also need to stage the batch before they are entered as there will be scenarios where the data entry person will need to save and come back to the batch in order to ask a question (ie can't read someones writing, not sure of this check is a payment on a pledge or simply a contribution). 

We would need to think through pledges, can this be used to apply payments to pledges or outstanding "pay by check" contributions/event registrations? 

It would be good to have someway for the deposit slip info, like a deposit number or journal number to be affiliated to the batch.