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On 6/8/07, Skier <ldsskier at rusticate.net> wrote:
> On Fri, June 8, 2007 1:29 pm, Don Fairchild wrote:
> > I agree with Jeff on this. What would happen if all the members used a
> > bill pay service that just cut a check and sent it to the bishop? The
> > financial clerk would get stuck writing up all the donation slips every
> > week.
>> It would be trivial to create a donation portal that accepts EFTs while
> prompting for the slip information.
>
This is already in place. I don't know how it works on your end, but
when I login to my bank's website I get a list of boxes to type dollar
amounts in for Tithing, Fast Offering, Humanitarian Aid, General
Missionary, Book of Mormon, Perpetual Education Fund, along with my
gas bill, my electric bill, home mortgage, and credit card bill all on
one list. All I have to do is fill out how much to pay to who or what
all on a single page and click "pay now" at the bottom. Very easy.
The way the bank sees it is that each donation category is a different
"payee" in their database, even though they all belong to the church.
All this really means is that they are sending the ACH or EFT funds to
different bank account numbers depending on the fund category. The
membership record number is attached to the bank transaction and when
headquarters gets the funds they already have it received in different
bank accounts for the different categories, and they know who donated
it because the membership record number is part of the transaction
details. I don't know the details of how it works at the receiving
end, but I know they get fussy over whether the bank sent the
membership record number with or without its dashes present. So I'm
sure it's some sort of electronic batch that downloads the transaction
amounts from the bank and parses them out to post to the year end
reports for each member.
The church has all the information it needs as far as a membership
record number of the donor and the amount donated to fast offering
funds. I don't see why they couldn't generate a monthly report to
query the membership database to determine which unit number someone
is in, and summarize all of this information in the form of a credit
back to the appropriate unit or stake fast offering fund allocation.
For that matter they could setup another account to collect local ward
missionary fund donations at headquarters from the bank bill pay
services. When a bill pay transaction is received, they could just
setup their system to query the membership number for the member's
unit number, and then credit the transaction on the appropriate unit
financial statement. If they do that, I'd encourage them to also set
it up for "other" local donations as well -- they can reconcile it
with their local leaders what the money was for (ie, scout camp, etc.)
when it arrives.
But even in addition to the bank's online bill payment services, the
church also already has its own donation portal setup on
www.ldsphilanthropies.org website. They even take visa and mastercard
donations. However, this website only takes money for the following
fund categories:
Perpetual Education Fund
Humanitarian Services
Temple Missionary
Church History
BYU
BYU-Idaho
BYU-Hawaii and Polynesian Cultural Center
LDS Business College
Of course with this the church would have to pay the transaction fees
being the initiator of the transaction. Note that you can't pay
tithing or fast offering through this website which seems intentional.
They probably don't want anyone using a credit card to pay their
tithing, while using the bill pay service ensures that the member is
paying from the available funds in their checking account, and
provides the church with receiving the full amount with no fees. Also
with this site the member doesn't have to specify their membership
record number, so donations won't show up on their typical year end
receipt. They would just get a separate receipt for the donation by
its self on this site.
-Jeff
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