my finance department wants to investigate the idea of getting membership renewal data from our lockbox provider in electronic format rather than paper.

The hope is we can then import the renewals directly into RE rather than manually entering the information into RE.

Is anyone doing that?? Would you be willing to share your process, your import specifications, etc.??

any help would be appreciated.

Diane Humphries

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

dhumphries@pennhrot.org

Hey Diane,

I'm not familiar with using the electronic lockbox for Membership Renewals, but if you check out knowledgebase solution BB113307 you can find what you need in terms of required fields for the Import.

Hope this helps!

Diane,

Sorry I did not reply to this earlier.  My only advice is to look into the cost.  Any time I have looked into having a lockbox do the data entry it was too cost prohibitive as they were charging by the keystroke.  So the more you normally add in a batch (campaigns, funds, appeals, solicitor, blah, blah, blah) it adds up to be a significant cost. 

They may be able to create a basic spreadsheet for you for a small cost but typically it might only contain check amount, check number and ID/last name.  You would then need to pay them extra for any additional information which is where the fees add up. 

You can maybe get that basic spreadsheet from them and do your data entry in it and import the gifts but it still requires similar data entry which is often easier in batch than excel (because of the lookups that batch provides).  You will need to weigh the pros and cons yourself based on the costs/advantages.  

The only advantage I could see was that the money was deposited more quickly which was a great cashflow solution but had no advantage for Development and since the cost would come out of the Development budget we did not do it.