We released the new FEC tools to be compliant with the 1/14/2014 deadline.
With the new release the FEC has made some changes to the upload locations. They provided this table to us:
In Trail Blazer you MAY need to make these changes here when doing your FIRST upload:
In case you missed it, it's a New Year.
If you are a nonprofit or PAC customer, it's time to update your default Cycles/Elections in Trail Blazer. It will speed up your contribution and expenditure data entry.
With last week's release of our software we added a new enhancement you can include on your donation page.
Our legacy donation iframe looked like the left side picture (click to enlarge). The right side is the new style.
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The new iframe can be colorized to match the coloring on your site. |
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I recently assisted a customer in upgrading their donation page. Take a look!
You will need to add ?ver=2 onto your iframe text.
My old iframe text looks like this:
<iframe src="https://www.trailblz.info/DemoNonProfitMark/Donations.aspx" style="width:500px;height:1200px" width="500px" height="1200px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" onload="scroll(0,0)" ></iframe>
Here's the ever so minor change needed:
<iframe src="https://www.trailblz.info/DemoNonProfitMark/Donations.aspx?ver=2" style="width:800px;height:1200px" width="800px" height="1200px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" onload="scroll(0,0)" ></iframe>
The only change is the additional text shown in large letters. The width change to 800 will allow a side by side donation page layout as shown in the screen shot above.
Give support a call to match the coloring on your site. Currently that option is not yet released to our customers.
In a prior release we added the Voter/Donor Relationships list
In this release we added a proper search panel.
Bank Reconciliation Enhancements.
You can now print the reconciliation. (Ya, that's been a long time comin')
When a transaction is cleared, we now add a bank statement date to the transaction. This will allow you to go back and see WHEN you cleared a particular item.
We did finally come out of the middle ages and make consistent the column PriorLastName. It's no longer referred to anywhere as MaidenName ( I hope we found them all).
Payroll Contribution Imports
Some of our customers import payroll contributions regularly. If you added the Trail Blazer id to each record in the payroll file, it was nicely merged with the correct individual. However, if you had a new person you had to import them separately or manually add them. You can now have records with missing Trail Blazer id's. The program will create a new person in the database.
Signature date added to FEC reporting. This will allow you to run your report days before it's due, but still set the signature date to the due date (or any date you wish).
If you file FEC reports for several Trail Blazer customers, the FEC upload tool will load the proper committee number on the upload screen. You need only enter your password.
Bank Account list now displays the account balance instead of 0.
In the voter/donor table, the Notes column now allows editing right from the list without opening the voter/donor card.
If an attribute was deleted, and if immediately afterward the import utility was started and the New button was pressed to create a new source attribute, an error occurred. Fixed. How does one find these things?!
Added linkable fields to the Event card's Order lines. Also the Event card's Ticket tab has a linkable order line and order line items.
If you had your Include column removed from the list and you attempted a drag n' drop merge, you got an error. Fixed.
Bank Reconciliation - standard Export and Print buttons added to tool strip.
The Email Links search unit was not honoring the 'Not' setting. Fixed.
Improved exception handling in the search panels. This will aid us in determining where a search did not perform as expected.
"The Commission resumed operations on Thursday, October 17, 2013. Accordingly, the Commission will not pursue administrative fines against filers whose reports were due during the federal government shutdown and who failed to file on a timely basis as long as they file their reports by 11:59 p.m. on Friday, October 18, 2013. See 11 CFR 111.35. This deadline applies to both electronic filers and paper filers, including those that file with the Secretary of the Senate.
Staff in the Reports Analysis Division (202/694-1130) and Electronic Filing Office (202/694-1307) will be available to assist filers. "
On Tuesday we made some enhancements to the integrity of the data in the Payments section of TB. One of those enhancements caused the Memo tab to have focus when attempting to pay an invoice instead of the Payments tab. This version corrects that.
You access the name badges from the REPORTS button in the lower right of your screen:
It should run about 50 times faster with today's release. That will save you some time!
A new item was added today. For political customers it will read Voter Relationships.
Partnership was added to the Payment Methods drop down in the Contributions list:
A feature was added so that from the Household list one can set en masse attributes for all members of the household for all included households in the list.
Audit Count
You can add to the format 3 new columns. Audit Count, Audit First Date and Audit Last Date. The Audit Count column is linkable. You will be able to see the Trail Blazer audit trail for how frequently that record has been updated.
These columns have been added to the following tables:
Address
Contribution
Expenditure
Household
Invoice
Payee
Payer
Voter/Donor
In the picture below, if I click on the 10 in the Audit Count column for Vickie Hull, I will see the following:
This will give me the edit history for this particular person.
We had to make some changes for PAC's the file both federally and non-federally.
Also our non-monetary expenditures were not being given a unique transaction ID. That's corrected.
A SQL Query walks into a bar. In one corner of the bar are two tables. The Query walks up to the tables and asks: - Mind if I join you?
SELECT * FROM [Users]
WHERE [Clue] > 0
No records found.
So, we've had this category in our knowledge base named Best Practices for some time. However, it's been empty. Not any more. Tom has written a few articles and promises more to come. They can be viewed here.
Have you been storing images on your voter/donor records?
To prepare for some future enhancements, the images have been moved to the Gallery tab:
Stay tuned for more.
If you would like to experiment in this area, be aware that a images and documents placed into the System Gallery...
...are available to other parts of the program including Events, other Voter/Donor records, and soon emails.
Would you like to de-active some of them so they won't show up in your dropdown lists?
With our release today you can do that.
Have you ever wanted or tried to delete a saved query from Trail Blazer? It's ah.... quirky. But I've got a video that will show you how to do it!
The Call Book Report will now printed INCOMPLETE reminders in the log notes area of the report.
To run the Call Book Report:
Someone asked via the comments box: Is there a keyboard shortcut for switching between open windows?
Yes: Ctrl-Tab
Someone asked via the comments box: Can you search for PACs by FEC ID?
Yes. It's not a built in search so you will need to use the SQL tab.
Enter the following:
EntityFilerID='Cxxxxxxxx'
Be sure to replace the x's with the Committee ID number.
If you were experiencing slow opening of existing email campaigns, today's release corrects that.
With today's release we have corrected the problem of Log Notes not printing on the Call Book report found in the File menu of the Voter/Donor Search tool strip.
I got this question from a customer over the weekend:
Is there a report that we can run that will tell us donors who have increased their donations calendar year 2013? We would like to check out increased donations from current donors. Thanks
Kathy
Yes, you can do that. It will require a few extra steps as outlined here. In my demonstration database I have 961 donors that gave more in 2012 than in 2011:
