Some organizations choose to enter each donation twice, once in their donor management system and again in their accounting system, as a way to provide checks and balances in their system. The upside is increased protection against errors while the downside is increased time by both development and finance to reconcile their records on a regular (usually monthly) basis. Little Green Light always allowed for the basic export of all the gift information you’d need for this kind of reconciliation, but we recently got a request from a customer to help her make the whole process a bit easier and more efficient.

Instead of the usual export in CSV format (that required extra cleanup and formatting in Excel), Megan Farkas, the development coordinator at the Sant Bani School, wanted to be able to pull a particular month’s deposits in a format she could just print or email without alteration. On the surface, those extra steps might not seem like a big deal, but they fly in the face of our belief that Little Green Light should give you the information that you want in the format you need without requiring you to jump through hoops. To that end, we worked with Megan to create a custom PDF export format that provides her with exactly the information she needs. Here’s what the new workflow looks like when she wants to grab the previous month’s deposit report from Little Green Light:

1. Go to the Fundraising Tab and select “deposit date” on the date filter, then choose “Last month” from the dropdown
2. Click the “Export results” button and select the “Deposits” export type; save the export
3. Download/print the results

Just like that, in about 30 seconds flat she has a nice-looking PDF with all of the information she needs in a format that she doesn’t have to re-create every month. Here’s what it looks like with some test data:

The only thing that’s missing now is automating the process so Little Green Light will email her the report at the beginning of every month. That’s a feature we have in the works, and it should be ready (along with a slew of other reporting updates) within the next month or two. We’d like to thank Megan for working with us to provide her with a better report. We encourage all of our customers to do the same, so please don’t hesitate to let us know when you’d like to do so.

We came, we saw, and we met a lot of great people! One thing that stands out in the nonprofit market is how amazing all of the people and organizations are. Take, for example, the Ragdale Foundation, and Leslie Brown, its Director of Communications and Programs, who stopped by the booth to chat about Little Green Light and donor management systems, and ended up winning our Flip HD camera giveaway. Here’s a picture of Chris and Leslie at the conference:

We couldn’t be happier that Leslie won. She can put the camera to good use capturing how wonderful the Ragdale Foundation really is (by all accounts, it is an awesome place–it’s an artist’s retreat just outside Chicago).

We also have a less exciting picture of us standing in front of our booth (that’s me, Nick, on the left and brother Chris on the right):

Donor management was a big point of interest this year; one guy said to us, “Man, donor management is where it’s at this year!” He was a cool guy too, so it must be true. We were happy to reap the benefits of being one of the simplest, and the most affordable, donor management systems on the market and at the conference.

A big thank you to the folks at NTEN for putting on such a great event, and to all the attendees who stopped by to talk to us and helped make the conference such a huge success for us.