Monday, November 19, 2018

DonorPerfect Hack

This post will probably have zero interest to most people who read our blog.  I'm posting it as a community service to a few of my colleagues.  First a bit of background:

A year or two ago, FEA Ministries started using DonorPerfect to track donations.  This software is a powerful, online app that lets us see who supports us, who gives to what projects, how much, their contact details so we can thank them, etc.  All this is pretty much in real time, too.  It's a TREMENDOUS improvement over the way we used to get these reports--well over a month after some of the donations had been made.  In spite of the great improvement, there are a few little niggly things that could be improved.  One is that you always have to set the date to the current month.  I don't know why this couldn't be done automatically instead of defaulting July 2017--the month we started using DonorPerfect!  But, I guess that's a part of the software development process.

I came up with a hack to make this a little easier, and wanted to share it in case some of my coworkers are frustrated by the same thing.  From the Dashboard, you edit the report by clicking "Edit" like in this picture:


You may need to click the picture to actually get it big enough to see!

Once the edit window loads, you click on the calendar icon where you set the "end date" for your report. (I circled it in red).  Advance the date to sometime well in the future.  (I have mine set for 31 December 2019).  Don't forget to actually click on the day to set the date.  (I circled this in blue.)
You will also want to set the "begin date" to the beginning of the current month.  When you have finished, click "Save."  (I've circled this in green.)


Now, when you run the report, you only have to set the begin date which is easy--click on the arrow (circled in orange) to advance to the correct month, then click the day.  It's not perfect, but at least it speeds things up for me!

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