After Your Data Conversion

If you have had your data converted from a different version of Exceed or from another product, this section will help you get started with reviewing your data in ExceedFurther and learning to use your new software.

As you go through these steps, keep a list of questions that come up. You can give this list to your trainer, or you can call Tech Support directly with your questions.

Step 1 - Explore the Interface

To understand the basics of ExceedFurther, read the How it Works topic and click through to some of the underlying topics. Be sure to include Navigation and the Icon Bar.

Review the topics on How to Add a Household, How to Add an Organization and How to Add a Gift. These will introduce you to the structure of the data and give you a sense of some of the codes and data fields that you will need to define for your organization in Steps 3 and 4. If you are familiar with Exceed! Basic or Exceed! Premier, you will recognize many of the field names and concepts.

Step 2 - Add Users

You have been supplied with a single user name and password for accessing ExceedFurther. Your organization has been added, with one contact person defined as the user. To see your organization in ExceedFurther, use the People and Org Navigator, Quick Lists to open the All Households and Orgs list. Your organization should appear at the top of the list. Note that you might see some odd Household names near the top of the list. In Step 3 you will deal with these.

Each additional person who is going to access ExceedFurther requires their own user login and password. As a first step, you need to add your staff members to your organization's record in ExceedFurther. Each user must have a different email address to use as a login.

Your license includes an unlimited number of users. For each one, you will need to decide if that user should have unlimited access to all parts of the system or should be restricted to only certain screens and tasks. If you expect to restrict certain users, you need to set up user roles. After you have defined roles, you can add users to the system.

You do not have to set up all of your roles and users now. You can define roles and add users at any time. For now, just add the users who need immediate access.

If you wish to have added security, consider using Multi-factor Authentication when your users log in.

Step 3 - Merge Solicitors

This step only applies if you have converted data from Exceed! Premier or Exceed! Basic and you had Solicitor codes attached to either Biographical or Gift records in your data. If you did not have any Solicitor codes established, or if you asked that your Solicitor codes not be converted into ExceedFurther, please skip to Step 4.

In Exceed! Premier or Exceed! Basic, solicitors for prospects and gifts are defined as Solicitor codes. These may refer to a person or to something else, like a team, or they may just indicate that someone needs a solicitor. When these codes refer to a person, there is no way to link them to the corresponding solicitors' bio records within Premier or Basic.

In ExceedFurther, there are no Solicitor codes. Rather, each solicitor is entered as a person within a Household or Organization. There is an "Is Solicitor" check box that you check to indicate that this person should be included in the list of solicitors for prospects and gifts.

When your data was converted, since there was no link between the Solicitor Code and the corresponding solicitor's bio record, it was not possible to make this connection. Instead, for each Solicitor Code in Premier or Basic, a Household was created with one person with a name to match the description for that code. This may have caused some strange looking Household names.

For example, if Sally Jones is a solicitor with the code "SJONES", and code description "Sally Jones", you should find a Sally Jones Household created for her. However, if the code description was just "Sally", then the Household will be just Sally. If you had a code of "NEED" with a code description of "Needs Solicitor", then you have a Needs Solicitor Household.

Since Sally is a solicitor for you, she undoubtedly also has a Bio record that was also converted. So now she is Beyond twice, once from the Solicitor code and once from her old bio record. All of Sally's prospects in Beyond are linked to the record that resulted from the Solicitor code. They need to be linked instead to Sally's bio record. This is accomplished by merging her two records together.

To find all of the records that were created from your old Solicitor codes and merge them each with their corresponding bio record, do the following steps.

From the People and Orgs Navigator, Quick Lists, open the All Households and Orgs list.
Your own organization should appear at the top, followed by each of the Households created from your Solicitor codes. For each of these that represent actual people, do the following:
Select the Household name.
Click on the Merge Household button.
Use the Search to look up the actual Bio record that was converted for this person.
Click on Merge.
Refresh the list of Households and Orgs by clicking on the circular arrow button at the top left of the grid. The record created from the Solicitor code is gone. It has been merged into the bio record and deleted.
Repeat steps 3 - 7 for each Household that has been created from your Solicitor codes.

Note that it is important to merge these Households rather than just delete them. If you delete the Households created from the Solicitor codes, you will lose the connections between the solicitors and their prospects and gifts.

Step 4 - Show Your User Defined Fields

In Exceed! Premier and Exceed! Basic, there were several user-defined fields; that is, fields that you could label and use for whatever you needed. In ExceedFurther, you can define any number of user-defined fields. When you define new fields, one step you must do is indicate where on each screen you wish these fields to appear.

When your data was converted from Exceed! Premier, the user-defined fields from Exceed! Premier were added to the following places in ExceedFurther:

Tab in Exceed! Premier	Page in ExceedFurther
Biographical Screen/Household/Org	Bio Overview Top
Biographical Screen/People	People Add
Biographical Screen/Actions	Activity
Biographical Screen/Campaign	Bio Campaign Overview
Gifts and Pledges Screen/Entry Detail	Gifts
Volunteer/Overview	People Add
Grant/Entry Detail	Bio Grants Overview
Guest/Entry Detail	Guest Stay Details AND Guest Stay Add

When your data was converted from Exceed! Basic, the two user-defined fields that appear on the Attributes tab of the Bio screen were moved to the Bio Overview Top page in Beyond.

If your data has been converted from Exceed! Premier or Exceed! Basic, and you were using any of the user-defined fields, follow these steps for each page in Beyond to make the fields visible where you would like to see them:

Click on the "Hello" drop down on the far right top of the ExceedFurther window.
Select Administration from the list to open the Admin tab.
Select the Customize Page Layout sub tab.
Select the Beyond page that contains your user-defined fields, as listed above.
Click on Go.
You should see your user-defined fields in the column at the left: Do Not Show. Click on each field and drag it over to one of the columns on the right.
1. You can return to this page at any time to move your fields around. For now, just put them in one of the columns so you can see them when you open the corresponding page in Beyond.

Step 5 - Look Up Some Donors

Use the Quick Search box at the top of the screen to look up some of your best known donors. Drill down on the name to open the Bio Tab. Take some time to explore the various tabs to see how the data was converted.

If you are coming from an Exceed product, the information should look very familiar. Affiliation codes have been converted into Tags. Other fields may appear in a different order, but they should all be there as expected.

Step 6 - Run Some Reports

We suggest that you run some reports to compare your data in ExceedFurther with your data from your prior system.

Count Only - to see a count of Households and Organizations. If you are coming from another Exceed product, group the report by Name Tags to see how your Affiliation codes converted.
Gift Transactions - select a specific gift date range, like last month, to see a list of gifts that were converted.
One Period All - select last year to see gift totals broken down by Reason or Fund. Consider running this report for each of the past 5 years to ensure that your totals look right.
Pledge Balances Report - if you have open pledges, select last year's start and end dates to verify that your pledges were converted correctly.
Member List - if you are a membership organization, select Expiration Date in the next 12 months to see a list of your members.

There are many other reports to explore. If you are coming from a prior Exceed product, almost all of the reports you are used to are available in ExceedFurther.

Step 7 - Explore the Gift Manager

The Gift Manager displays a list of all gifts and gives you easy access to review data entry, correct errors, create acknowledgments and receipts, send emails, export to Excel, create batches, and so forth.

Open the Gift Manager Gifts Tab. This tab may be slow to open the first time since it is opening without a date range. Set the date range to the current year and click on Go, and it will be much faster.

Read the Using Lists to learn how to manipulate the list of gifts. These same functions apply to every list, or grid, you will see in ExceedFurther.

There are two filters at the top: a Quick Filter listing most Gift and Pledge fields, and an Advanced Filter where you have access to many additional fields.

Use the Quick Filter to select gifts above a certain amount in the past year, for example, to see your major gifts. Or use the Tag filter to select your Board of Directors and review their gifts for the past five years.

Each time you select a filter, you must click on Go to refresh the list.

Step 8 - Add a Few Names and Gifts

Try adding a few names. Use the Quick Add Navigator to add a gift to the names you entered. If you discover that you need some additional codes to adequately record the gift information, save the gift, and open the Admin tab to add the needed code. The quickest way to reopen the gift to make changes is to open the Gift Manager Gifts Tab.

When you open the Gift Manager Gifts Tab, select today's date to see all of the gifts you just entered. Select the gift and click on the Edit button.

Step 9 - Create a Thank You Letter

Your Letter Templates that you may have created for your prior system have not been converted. You will need to use the Communications Navigator to create a thank you letter template, adding the appropriate merge fields.

After you have created the template, generate thank you letters for the gifts that you entered.

If you sometimes prefer to generate each letter as you enter gifts, add another gift to see how you can use the template to generate the letter as you add the gift.

If you use emails to thank your donors, experiment with adding a gift to your own record and sending yourself an email so you can see how it works.

Step 10 - Review Default Settings

There are a number of default settings you can use to speed data entry and improve accuracy. These include such things a setting automatic values for some fields when you add a new record, or selecting the form of name and salutation that you prefer for your organization's communication with donors. If you had default settings in a prior product, they were not converted. You will need to set them again.

These defaults are set on the Admin Tab, under Client Defaults. They apply to all users in your organization. You cannot set different default settings for each user. Many of the default settings are simply for filling in values when you add a new record, like a name or gift. There is no need to use any of these unless you are entering data where every record has the same value in a certain field, like state or county.

Other default settings refer to interfaces, like IATS for credit card processing, or WealthEngine for prospect research. This is where you put your user name for these other products.

Toward the bottom of the Client Defaults tab is a list of formats. These are important, and you should take a moment to review the settings. This determines how names and salutations are formatted as you enter new households and organizations. Note that you can select a different format as you enter each name, but you should select a default that matches your most common use.

This is also where you set your fiscal year dates and define how your giving total is calculated for each donor Household or Organization. ExceedFurther automatically calculates a Gift Total, adding gifts, dues, pledges and sales. On the Bio screen you can also see "Total Giving", "YTD Total Giving" and "Last Year Total Giving." These totals appear as zeroes until you define the criteria to use for their calculation. You do this at the end of the Client Defaults tab, using these steps.

In addition to Total Giving, you can define a series of custom totals and custom counts, each reflecting exactly what you want to add into each calculation. This option is only if you wish to create totals using different criteria from the Total Giving you have already defined. There is no need to set up these custom totals now. You can return to this tab any time to set them up. For more information, read User Defined Totals and Counts.

Step 11 - Ready to Go!

There are many topics that this Getting Started did not cover. Here are some ideas for further exploration.

When you have a lot of similar gifts to enter and wish to speed up the process, consider using Quick Gift Entry.
If you are going to enter pledges and pledge payments, read about adding pledges and using the Pledge Manager.
For recurring gifts, learn about the Recurring Gifts Tab.
If you have many gifts in memory or in honor of someone, read the Tributes topic.
If you are a membership organization, the Membership Overview topic should be reviewed before entering dues.
For information about entering Activities and using the Calendar, read Adding Activities.
Explore the on-line giving interface for information on setting up a direct link from ExceedFurther to import your on-line gifts.
Finally, if you have purchased additional modules, you can read the overview of each and drill down for more details:

Remember if you have questions, Tech Support is only a phone call or email away!