Your constituents may use standing orders to donate to your organisation. A standing order is an instruction a constituent gives his bank or your organisation to initiate payments of set amount from his current account, on a regular schedule, to your organisation’s bank account. With a standing order, the constituent always controls the payment amount.
Before you begin to process standing order payments for a batch, follow these tips to help you get started:
| □ | Verify your system administrator has set up your organisation’s bank information. For information about how to set up your organisation’s bank information, refer to Add a Bank Account. |
| □ | Encourage your constituents to sign up to give through standing orders. |
| □ | When you add a new pledge or recurring gift to the database, the constituent can use standing orders to set up automatic payment. Under Automatic Payment, select Pay instalments automatically by and select “Standing order.” Also select whether a standing order is set up for the transaction. |
| □ | To export information about the transactions with standing orders not currently set up in your database, add and run a standing orders export process. For information about this process, refer to Export Standing Orders. |
| □ | After you run a standing order export process, download the output to send to the banks associated with the transactions. For information about how to download the output, refer to Download the Output of a Standing Order Export Process. The bank uses this information to create standing orders for each pledge or recurring gift in the file and returns a data file when these transactions are ready to be updated in your database. |
| □ | Constituents can contact their banks to initiate a payment transaction schedule. This schedule is set up so the constituent can give a payment to your organisation in intervals, such as weekly or monthly, or as a single instalment. The money transfers directly from the constituent’s bank account to apply to recurring gift or pledges. After this schedule is set up, or after you send the output of a standing order export process to the banks, your organisation begins to receive data files from your organisation’s bank. These data files contain the appropriate banking information about the specific payment to your organisation, such as dates, amounts, sort code, and account numbers. The bank can send data files to your organisation by mail, storage media, email, or the Internet. After your organisation receives the data file, import the file to apply the payments to the recurring gifts or pledges in your database. When you run the standing orders import process, the program creates a revenue batch with the payments created from the information in the data file. In Batch entry, you can manage this batch and commit its records to your database. For information about how to import the data file, refer to Import Standing Orders. |