Tech Forum

Is there a way to generate a report that shows who in the ward has paid fast offering and how much. My Bishop has requested this info and I cannot find a way to do this unless I do it by hand going through each person.
I know that you can get a report of who receives fast offering help.
Any help? Thanks

From what I've been able to find, you're doing it the only way possible. Sorry I couldn't help further.

lancer wrote:Is there a way to generate a report that shows who in the ward has paid fast offering and how much. My Bishop has requested this info and I cannot find a way to do this unless I do it by hand going through each person.

One technique that might get you a little closer is to do an Income and Expense Report, Details by Subcategory, then choose Fast Offerings for the category. Also choose the right time period (e.g., Prior Year would show all of 2007). This will generate a report with three sections, the top of which is Donations. In that section, you can click on the Donor column header to sort by donor.

The result of this will be a list of all fast offering donations, sorted by donor. This doesn't group and add up the donations for each donor, and you can no longer copy and paste financial information to a spreadsheet to do the summing, but this approach should minimize the amount of manual work you have to do.

While the previos post is correct the income and expense report is the place to start and correct in that you can no longer cut and paste from the finance to a spreadsheet. I am a software engineer and did not want to type a multitude of entries in a spreadsheet so what I did was the following.

I downloaded a 'PDF PRINTER' definition from the web and installed it on the MLS computer. I then generated a PDF file of the income and expese report for fast offerings for the desired time period.

Opened the PDF file and cut and pasted from that to a document.
I did have to do some find/replace to make it a comma separated file but it save much time from retyping the data.
For example one of the lines may have been:
Donation number Date Name Amount
1 02 Nov 2008 Smith, Joseph & Emma $20.00

By replacing all of the ' 2008 ' with ' 2008, "' (so that the 2008 space is replaced with 2008 followed by a comma and double quotes.

By replacing '$' with '", ' ($ becomes double quote comma
the line above becomes:

Donation number Date Name Amount
1 02 Nov 2008,"Smith, Joseph & Emma", 20.00

Now the file can be inported easier to excel etc for use.

I wanted to have correct dates so I had to do a number of replaces for each day we received fast offering, but it did cut down on the errors and time of retyping.

Previously I had tried installing a generic text printer and printing to a file but the result had lost of control characters still so was not usable.

I was also thinking of downloading one of the free pdf utilities to extract the data from the pdf but our stake did not allow me to download that at the church.