Generating acknowledgements

[alterbentzion]

I'm trying to help a nonprofit streamline its workflow for handling and processing donations. I'd like to set their database up so that a user can generate and print an acknowledgment right after recording a donation. But I'm not sure of the best way to incorporate this into the design of the database.

Some relevant points:

• I assume that the acknowledgement letters will contain text generated by a script. The script will be drawing on data from at least two tables (donors and donations), and certain elements of the text will vary from letter to letter, depending on the donor's locale, the nature of the pledge, etc. Also, some letters will contain Hebrew text. Currently, the organization uses no less than five Word templates to generate acknowledgement letters.
  
  Once generated, the content of these acknowledgements must remain static, only changeable by a direct action from the user. The director of the organization wants to be able to browse through all acknowledgements, past and present, on demand. (He currently maintains several drawers of paper copies for this purpose.)

Should I simply add a calculated field to each donation's record, containing the text of the acknowledgement? Is there a good way to do this without make the size of the file swell like a balloon?

Should I create a third table which contains those elements which are constant in each of the five current acknowledgement templates, as well as any other templates that might be needed in the future? One advantage of this would be the ability to format non-English text when filling out the records in this table. But I'm not sure how to tell my script how to draw upon this table. (I also don't know if the Hebrew formatting would survive a merge into a mostly-English field.)

Thanks for any and all suggestions!

[Lee Smith]

Have you looked at the Donation File on FileMaker's Web Site. Link

Lee

[comment]

I'd suggest you study methods to generate "merge letters" from Filemaker. Here are some threads (out of many) that could get you started:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/99166/

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/184154/

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/191143/

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/196663/

[alterbentzion]

@ Lee Smith - Thanks for the lead! I've printed out the User Guide, and we'll see if that shoe fits.

@ Comment - When do you find the time to be so helpful? Thanks again.

[alterbentzion]

This is another follow-up.

@ Lee Smith:

As far as I can tell, FileMaker Donations doesn't come with some functions that this organization is looking for. They want to be able to store images of the checks and other documents associated with every donation. (Donations only has built-in storage of files associated with contacts and organizations.) Ideally, they would like to be able to scan these documents and have them automatically inserted into the appropriate fields in each record. (I know there are scanner plug-ins out there.) And they want to be able to browse through their entire archive of acknowledgements, formatted as printed.

The question is, how hard would it be to add those capacities to Donations? Is it going to be difficult to make sense of whatever's going on underneath its hood and then modify it? I am a novice.

On the other hand, Donations can do loads of stuff, right out of the box, that I hadn't even dreamed of incorporating into this project...

@ Comment

Assuming that I do end up creating something of my own, I see that character formatting does survive the merge process. I'm thinking of something along the lines of Ender's implementation (topic 143833 - a table dedicated to storing the variables in each template, etc.). The concatenated acknowledgement text would be stored, so that it wouldn't be affected by any subsequent changes in the template it was originally based on.

I still have that concern about file space, though. Is there any way to address that?

Thanks again to both of you.

[comment]

I still have that concern about file space, though. Is there any way to address that?

I am not sure you need to store ALL instances of a particular letter. If all the recipients of a letter are receiving the SAME letter (differing only in the contents of merged fields), then it should be enough to record the contents of the letter once - along with a list of recipients.

The contents of the letter should be stored separately from the template, so that you can modify the template without affecting your history. Similarly, it may be necessary to lookup the contents of the merge fields, so that your records reflect that a certain letter was sent to a certain address - even though the recipient's address may have changed since.

In any case, you need to store the information you might possibly need in the future, and not worry too much about file space. Text storage is cheap, and compromising here would be false economy.

[Lee Smith]

This is another follow-up.

@ Lee Smith:

As far as I can tell, FileMaker Donations doesn't come with some functions that this organization is looking for. They want to be able to store images of the checks and other documents associated with every donation. (Donations only has built-in storage of files associated with contacts and organizations.) Ideally, they would like to be able to scan these documents and have them automatically inserted into the appropriate fields in each record. (I know there are scanner plug-ins out there.) And they want to be able to browse through their entire archive of acknowledgements, formatted as printed.

The question is, how hard would it be to add those capacities to Donations? Is it going to be difficult to make sense of whatever's going on underneath its hood and then modify it? I am a novice.

On the other hand, Donations can do loads of stuff, right out of the box, that I hadn't even dreamed of incorporating into this project...

.

I would ask the developer of the file these questions, and note: I said look at the file, not buy it.

Lee

[alterbentzion]

I said look at the file, not buy it.

Of course! I was just thinking aloud, so to speak, in the hope that someone would tell me if I were misunderstanding something.

Thank you again.

[alterbentzion]

In any case, you need to store the information you might possibly need in the future, and not worry too much about file space. Text storage is cheap, and compromising here would be false economy.

I'm sure that the text involved will take up much less space than the check images this organizations wants to keep.

I guess my main concern is that Filemaker not get bogged down after the file size grows too large. But I get the impression that FMP's performance is affected more by script complexities than by file size. Is that true?

[comment]

Yes and no. True, file size has little to do with performance. No, scripting is not a major factor either (unless it's really bad scripting ).

BTW, if you have a lot of images to store you may consider putting them in a separate file. Not because of performance issues, but you'd probably want to back up this file less often.