So, we proceeded and added another fix to solve the new problem just this past Sunday afternoon. That is when things went from being just a nuisance to being really annoying.

Then today, we applied yet another fix which made things far worse. At this point, we kind of wished things were like they used to be when life was good and there were just minor nuisances every now and then.

So, we turned the clock back a couple of weeks and started over again. But it took us hours to figure out why we needed to do that. And then another hour and a half to figure out how to turn the clock back.

All seems to be well and good at the moment.

While we never want to bring the database down in the middle of the day, that’s just what we were forced to do today–twice. We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience and confusion.

We will leave this blog post out there for a few days, then we will remove it. We just believe in telling you what’s going on and why.

Thank you in advance for your grace and understanding. David says he now knows how it feels to be “hoisted on his own petard!”

And I asked “how does it feel to be stuck on stupid?”

However, there is also a Help Article devoted just to reports. In this article, we have grouped the list of reports and exports by type – Attendance, Church Membership, Finance-Contributions, People-Organizations. This makes it a little easier to see at a glance the reports that are available in each category. These are links to articles about those reports.

Check it out! Click HERE.

Those who attend your church or events sponsored by your church are better described by the later word. They are indeed guests. We invite people to attend, whether it is by personal invitation or through our advertising.

While their actions are visits, it just seems more suitable to call them guests. We all want to appear warm and inviting to those attending our church, so it makes sense to use a warm and inviting term to describe them.

This idea of referring to people as guests rather than visitors has been a tradition at our church for a number of years now. I know that is the case at other churches as well; because, in our conversations with you about BVCMS and assimilation, that is how I hear you refer to them.

I’m not sure why we did not do this earlier, but we recently made a global change inside BVCMS. Where you formerly saw the word Visitor, you will now see the word Guest. This is in places such as lists that show Members and Guests; on the tab on an Organization; even on the meeting page where you click to Add Guests.

For now, at least, Help Documentation (including the screenshots) will still contain the word visitor. This will gradually be changed. Also, at some point, we will change the terminology on the iPhone (Attendance – Add Visitor) as well.

I felt that it was important to take the time to explain this change to you. I hope that you realize that we do not make changes just for the sake of change. We want changes to have meaning. And I believe this change does.

The visitors are listed in a section below the absent members and will have their last attended date. The alphabetical list will include any visitor who would have been on the roll sheet for the most recent meeting.

We have received a lot of positive feedback to the recent enhancements we made to this email and I know you will love this new addition as well.

The changes to this little email notice are perfect examples of why we work so hard. We always want to provide and improve tools in BVCMS to enable you (staff and lay leaders) to do ministry to people. That’s what it’s all about! (not the Hokey Pokey as previously thought)

If you are not sending these to your leaders each week, click HERE to read how easy it is and to see a sample.

Thanks, Mark, for that great idea!

The default Enrollment Control Report is the same PDF as always. You just generate it from a different location. Select the Program/Division/Schedule on the Organization Search page and then select the report from the Exports and Reports drop down menu.

After you select the report, you will be presented with a pop up box offering the two new options, as in the image below. Click Run with nothing selected to run the PDF report.

However, you can select the Excel Export if you prefer that to the PDF report.

The other option – Filter by  Active Tag – is really why we made this change. We wanted to be able to run the Enrollment Control Report for only a selected set of people (a Tag) who are in the Program, and then be able to sort the list by the Organization (selecting Excel Export).

Click HERE to read more and to see our use case for these new options. This may be just what you need!

A couple of the newer fields that can be updated relate to the Volunteer tab on a person’s record. These are Approval Codes, Background Check Date, and Volunteer Status. Churches who have been keeping this information off-line (that is, not in BVCMS) can easily update these fields for a lot of records at the same time.

Click HERE to read the Help Article about the batch process Update for a Tag and see the entire list of fields that can be updated.

For those of you in lands far away who use the DD/MM format in your BVCMS database, this will work for you as well. If I were emailing from Malaysia, for example, today’s date would display as 8/5/2013 using this replacement code.

I love that I can insert this simple code and not have to change the date in my saved drafts or templates! Remember – the curly braces are important. Type it just like this – {today}.

If you are not familiar with email replacements, click HERE to read more.  These are handy little codes that allow you to personalize emails and more.

Here is what you will be interested in:

• Activity status – This displays on people records and automatically updates nightly based on your church’s definition of each status.

• Drop down menu on People Search – You can now search for Status Flags on the People Search page – and then Convert to Search Builder.

• Search Builder Condition – This allows you to select from a drop down, one or more of the special Status Flag Saved Searches that are used to set the Status Flags, thereby finding people who fit any or several of these statuses.

Some churches have been using the church Member Status to flag people based on their activity – such as Active Member, Visiting Attender, etc. This means that they have to manually keep track of when these change.

We prefer to keep the Member Status simple. In other words, a person is either a Pending Member, a Previous Member, a Member, or is not a Member. These do not require upkeep once you record their membership decision and any membership requirements, such as Baptism or New Member Class.

There is a lot I could say about Status Flags, but a blog is designed to be short and to the point. So, here’s the point - you will want to read about Status Flags and take full advantage of them at your church. Trust me, you will be glad you did!

Click HERE to read more.

REMEMBER, UNTIL YOUR SYSTEM ADMIN CHANGES THE SETTINGS IN YOUR DATABASE, THESE FEATURES WILL NOT BE VISIBLE TO USERS!

• Online Bundles - We now automatically create a new online bundle each day. We started by creating a new one just at the beginning of the month, but decided it just made sense to create one each day. If there are no recurring gifts that day or if no one makes a one-time online gift, a bundle will not be created for that day. Click HERE to read about Bundles.
• Move Contributions – Rarely, you may need to move one or more contributions from one Bundle to another one. We now have an easy way for you to do that. Click HERE to read more.
• Change Individual Contribution Date - This is another case that would be rare. But you may have a need to change the contribution date (which displays on the Contribution Statement) for one or two contributions within a Bundle without changing the date for all of the contributions within that Bundle. Click HERE to read how.
• Posted Date – Also, we are now displaying the Posted Date for in the individual contributions in the Bundle. This is the date you closed the Bundle.

As always, we hope you enjoy these new features and that they help make your job just a little bit easier.

A word about duplicate small group names:

When you are looking at the registration, you see these as separate groups because they are in different sets of checkboxes. However, once you leave the registration, you are left with one small group named, for example, Other. You will not know which set of checkboxes that came from. That is why having duplicate small groups is a bad thing.

Once we did this, we noticed that there were already some existing online registrations that had more than one small group with the same name. This was causing some errors when people tried to access those organizations.

So, here’s what we did:

We have gone through every BVCMS database and found every organization that fit the above scenario and we fixed those small groups that had the same name. So, you may notice that where you previously had a couple of small groups named Other in your registration, one of those now has something added to name – such as Other Staff. In some cases, there were multiple sets of checkboxes/drop downs and there were multiple small groups with the same name. If those cases, we added numbers at the end of the small group name. Example: Not Attending Friday1; Not Attending Friday2; etc.

This new Name label will be just what you need! You can find this on the green toolbar under Labels…duh! Oh, and we named it Name Label. Yeah, we are pretty creative!

Enjoy!

Some churches have reported that meetings were getting created by app users who were enrolled in the Organization but were not leaders in that Organization. They had made them leaders in specific Organizations in order to take attendance, but did not want them to be able to take attendance in Organizations in which they were regular members. This is actually the way we intended for this work – that leaders would take attendance only for their own small group.  

To alleviate this problem, we decided to enforce the original intended behavior. Now, in order to take attendance using the app, a user must not only have Access and Attendance roles, they must also be a leader either in the specific Organization or in a Parent Organization. 

By leader, we are referring to the Member Leader Type that is assigned to those enrolled in an Organization. Your Admin can view the list of Member Types to determine which ones are considered leaders. Examples of Member Leader types: Teacher, Director, Secretary, Outreach Leader, Inreach Leader, etc. NOTE: These vary for each database as you have the ability to customize this list.

This change was published last Friday evening and we apologize for not notifying you of the change prior to the weekend.

David & Karen

Registration History:

On the Transactions Log (under the Admin menu), you can now get more information about each transaction by clicking on the link in the description column. This will take you to the Registration History. Notice the links and the information provided. An Admin can also click the date/time link to see the xml file from the registration.

Totals by Batch/Description Report:

The other new feature is the Totals by Batch/Description Report. This basically combines the Reconcile Report and the Totals by Description Report. On this new report, each Batch Reference (which represents each deposit into your bank account from online transactions) is broken down by Type (EFT or Bankcard) and by Description (Online Giving, Recurring Giving, or specific events such as payments for Adult Soccer, Ladies Retreat, etc.) with a total amount and a count for each one. NOTE: This new report applies only to those using Sage Payments for their transactions.

Click HERE to read more.

At our church, every year around this time, we send an email to the parents of children between the ages of 4 and12, who have attended anything in the past 450 days and live in our local area. We include a RegisterLink2 to make it really easy for them to register all their children. Click HERE to read about register links.

After sending an email such as this, we will have about 300 children sign up within the first 24 hours. That’s pretty effective, if you ask me! Because we will have somewhere around 3,000 each year, we LOVE using online registration. It really makes the back office work so much easier.

You can use any type of registration that works for your church. We use a Master Org with Compute Org by Birthdate type of registration, and we have individual organizations for each grade. Org Members Management makes it easy for us to move the children from, say, the 1st Grade Registration org into one of the several 1st Grade classes we will have available.

There is even a feature in Org Members Management that allows you to click a button an send an email to all those that you have moved into a class, giving the parents the name of the class, the teacher’s name and the location. Click HERE to read about Org Members Management.

Even if your church has one class per grade, you may still want to use the same type of registration. You would just leave them in the organization in which they are placed.

Click HERE to read more about online registrations.

By the way – if you haven’t already enlisted your workers, you may be interested seeing a sample online registration for enlisting your workers. Click HERE to read more.

We have added an option for a new level of security in our checkin software, and we  recommend that you take advantage of this. The purpose of this new security feature is to limit the use of the Magic Button and the 411 name search to only those trusted volunteers who will know the PIN number.

The new feature, as you see above, is an option on the checkin login screen. There is now a field for an Admin PIN (a numeric password that  you create) and a PIN Timeout (the number of seconds you can continue without entering the PIN # again).

You will need to read more about how this works HERE to give you information about how it works and how best to roll the use of this out in your church. If you are not the person at your church who is responsible for checkin, please refer that person to this article. Also, be sure to communicate this to all of your checkin volunteers.

If you are not using the newest version of checkin (which pushes the updates automatically), click HERE to download it.

Select Both in the drop down and the report will run just as it always has. However, if you need to report the online giving separately in your general ledger, you will run this once with Online selected; then run it again with Not Online selected.

Thanks, Kelley and Kim, for helping us understand the need for this. It is another small feature giving big benefit.

Click HERE to read more about the Totals by Fund Report.

So, any of you using IE9 that had problems with the new Quick Search should be fine now.

Remember, if you had changed the toggle to turn off the new Quick Search, you will want to turn it back on.

You will want to say goodbye to IE8 and upgrade to a newer version if you want to use the new Quick Search in BVCMS. Or, you can use a different browser such as Chrome or Firefox. Both of these, as well as IE9 or later, work great with our new Quick Search.

We hate for you to miss out on the new features, so weigh your options carefully. But, if you just can’t part with IE8,  you can change the toggle to New Quick Search is OFF in the Welcome, User drop down.

What’s so special about the new Quick Search? Read more HERE.

Now that we have been using this new Quick Search for a couple of weeks and have received such positive responses about it, we decided the time had come to make this the default for everyone.

So, if you hear your co-workers commenting on the change you can, very smugly…but in a nice way…let them know you already knew about it and had been using it because you read about it on the BVCMS News blog. You may want to refer them to the above-mentioned post which describes the features in this new Quick Search.

By the way – now might be a good time to gently remind those co-workers that the blog is where we notify our users about all our new features; and, if they don’t want to miss out, they should start reading it.

PS – If you are one of those people who do not like change and want to continue using the old Quick Search, you can select it from the Welcome, User menu. The toggle is still there.

Click HERE to view the video. Or you can go to Youtube.com/bvcmscom to see all of our public videos. If you haven’t ready, you may want to subscribe. Then you will be notified whenever we post a new video.

For Help Documentation about Tasks, click HERE.