"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:

Looking for reporting of contributions that roll with the calendar date?  In other words a column named This Year means 2013 when the calendar is 2013 and 2014 when the new year rolls in.  This video will show you how to do this.

A new feature has been added to the import of CSV files. Before you can import the file, you must complete the Pre-Import Check.  More information about this check can be found here.

 Go ahead and give em' a spin.  

Click the CC button within your email:

Click the New button:

After a moment or two a familiar search panel appears for you to search to add more recipients. Be sure to use the Include checkboxes to turn OFF:

Can you believe it?  It's only taken 4 months for the counties to report their results to the SOS.  There is still one county that has not reported.  Email Tom at tschunk.trailblz.com if you need to know who that is (he loves email, so feel free to email him early and often <g>).  

A new version has just been released.

 

Events

We are still working on the Event system to tighten the bolts on it. These were added today:

  - Duplicate event feature.

  - Deletion of order lines, including tickets

  - Search panel on Product list

Odd/Even criteria has been added to the address search list.  Useful if you want to pull ONLY those addresses on a particular side of the street.