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| Dashboard > CRM > Community Feedback-- START CONTRIBUTING HERE > Churches | ||||
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One thing I see that needs to happen is the ability to "split" contributions by "funds". Right now a contribution can only be applied to one (1) "category" (if I am understanding the system correctly).
Here's an example: John Doe (a church member and a civiCRM contact) writes a check for $250.00 which he puts in the offering on Sunday. The church uses an envelope system which allows members to indicate how their offering should be split between funds/projects. In this case, John Doe wants $100.00 to go to the "Building Fund", and the other $150.00 is his regular "Tithes & Offerings". "Building Fund" and "Tithes & Offerings" are both "funds" which the church uses to categorize income - other common funds could be "Missions", "Alms for the Poor", etc.
Suggested Changes/Enhancements to CiviCRM:
1. civicrm_contribution_detail table -> used to track the contribution "details" such as the contribution_id, fund_id, sub_amount, etc.
2. civicrm_contribution_funds table -> used to track information about the "fund accounts" that a church/organization has, such as fund_id, fund_name, acct_balance, etc.
3. Updated contribution pages to allow data entry to new fields.
Improved "Flow" for Adding Contributions
It would be good to have a better way for adding offline contributions. I realize that CiviCRM is focussed on online contributions, which is great. However, most churches will receive the bulk of their contributions offline -- in an offering plate on Sundays.
The current process of having to go to a contact record, click the contributions tab, and then add the contribution is not a very good solution for churches.
Suggestion: Provide a way to add multiple offline contributions in a row, one after the other. As the first step in this process, allow the user to select the name of the donor from a drop down list, or use an AJAX text box to find the donor who made the contribution. One the user provides all the detail form the contribution (same as currently available - but with enhancements such as split contributions per previous post), they click a button to "post" the contribution and then are returned to the same page ready to add the next contribution.
Offline Contribution Deposits
We need a way to group contributions into "deposits". Again, since CiviCRM is designed primarily for online contributions, this is not needed - when a contact makes a contribution online, it gets "deposited" automatically into the right "bank" account.
However, this is not the case for offline contributions (at least it doesn't seem to be). When a church processes the collection plate from Sunday, there will be multiple contributions from multiple people to enter into the system (see previous post re "flow" for adding contributions). After entering multiple contributions, the total amount needs to be "deposited" into the churches bank account.
Suggested changes/enhancements to CiviCRM:
1. civicrm_contributions_deposits table -> used to collect information for the deposit such as deposit_id, deposit_date, total_amount, deposit_account_id, etc.
2. civicrm_contributions_deposit_account table - used to store information about deposit account such as deposit_account_id, account_name, account_number, account_balance, etc.
3. Pages to add/edit/update deposit information.
4. Deposit reports.
Currently, we support the concept of 'fund allocation' with the "Contribution Type" - which allows organizations to specify and accounting code. The ability to split a contribution across multiple "types" (funds) has come up a few times and I suspect we'll get to that at some point. Also, providing a more streamlined workflow for entering offline contributions is "on our radar screen" for a 2.x release.
If these are critical for your organization(s) - consider engaging a developer to work on them as a code contribution. We'll be happy to work with them.
As far as the last suggestion - I'm thinking that tracking deposits is more of an accounting package feature. There is some discussion currently about integrating CiviCRM w/ LedgerSMB (ledgersmb.org) - an open source accounting package. If you want to join in or follow - the discussion is happening on the civicrm-foundations mailing list. (see http://civicrm.org/node/239 on the blog).
Hey David
Stephen and I are working together on this project and have some coding experience (although with different languages ) What would need to be done in order to best start the development of the "ability to split a contribution across multiple "types" (funds)" should we be using CiviCRMs cvs or just working on our local servers also what do we name the tables so that our changes wont conflict with anything in the works for future releases
Basically, What next, we would like to get the ball rolling in this direction asap. We dont have too much time but would be willing to get started and work as fast as our other responsibilities (and Families) allow us to.
craig:
1. please work on your local servers and repository. once done, you can release your modifications as a set of patches. I would consider making changes on the 2.0 branch since there are significant schema changes from 1.0 in the core tables
2. with regard to table naming choose an appropriate name that does not conflict with our names currently. We can deal with conflicts if they arise. There are no changes planned for CiviContribute in 2.0, so i'm not too worried about conflicts.
Please continue this discussion on the forums, under Developer Discussion
I would like to use CiviCRM for my synagogue. Many dates need to be tracked according to the Jewish calendar instead of (or in addition to) the Gregorian calendar. For example, people's date of birth, date of death, bar mitzvah date, holidays, etc. A common weekly task for the office staff is to notify families if there is a death anniversary in the coming week. A common yearly task is to create a list of all families with babies born during the last Jewish year. Often we need to know both dates, i.e. send a mailing showing both the Jewish date and the Gregorian date for an occasion
We also need to look ahead. For example, for a 10 year old child we need to be able to look ahead on the calendar and see when their 13th birthday is on both the Hebrew and Gregorian calendar in order to schedule their bar mitzvah.
I also posted this issue to the forum for Internationalization and Localization.