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. With a standing order import process, you can import standing orders from a data file to generate a revenue batch of payments for recurring gifts and pledges. When you import standing orders directly to a new revenue batch, the program imports the payments in the standing order file into the revenue batch you designate.
Before you can import standing order payments, the constituents must contact their banks and 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 pledge payments. After this schedule is set up, 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, you can import the file to apply the payments to the existing recurring gifts or pledges in your database. To ensure that payments are applied to the correct recurring gifts or pledges in your database, the program automatically generates a unique reference number when you add each standing order transaction. The standing order export process includes these reference numbers to identify transactions in the information sent to the bank. The bank can then include the reference numbers in the transmission files they return to your organisation to be imported.
On the Import Standing Orders page, you can view and manage the processes your organisation uses to import standing orders from the data files from your organisation’s bank. To access the Import Standing Orders page from Revenue, click EFT. On the EFT page, click Import standing orders.
The Import standing order processes grid lists the standing order import processes in the database. For each process, you can view its name, description, batch template and number, and import file name and format. You enter this information when you add the process to the database. To update the information that appears in the grid, click Refresh on the action bar.
You can view additional information about a standing order import process, such as the status of its most recent instance or a history of previous instances. Under Import standing order processes, click the name of the process to view. The status page of the process appears. For information about the items on the status page, refer to Standing Orders Import Process Status Page.
Note: If your organisation configures multiple nominal ledger account systems and implements site security, and you have rights to work with multiple account systems, the Account System column appears in the Import standing order processes grid and displays the account system you selected on the Add an import standing order process screen.
Depending on your security rights and system role, you can perform multiple functions to manage the standing order import processes.