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Shepherd's Staff 9.0 Non-Finance Release Notes

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Kimberly Moon

Features

MEMBERSHIP

  • On the Touchpoints completed grid there are two new reports:
    • “Counts by category, made by”
    • “Counts made by, category”
      • These group the data by the category of visit and the person doing the visit and vice-versa, respectively.
  • In the Membership dashboard, if you click the People button, the resulting grid now includes the “Received by” date.
  • In the tree view of Households, there is a new filter under “Show” in the bottom-right of the screen for “With non-removed people”.
  • In the same location as above, there is now a total household count.  Both also show in the same place when viewing Individuals.
  • The global Labels report now has an Export button allowing you to send the label information to a spreadsheet for review or use in another program.
  • A new photo directory style is now available: “Standard A with photo for binding”, for a 2-sided directory with room for binding.
  • The Individuals grid now has new columns for first name, middle name, last name & suffix at the far-right end, to make it easier to sort and filter Excel exports.
  • Emergency Contact 1 and 2 have been added to the “Parents search” grid and reports.  Medical/allergy information will also now show, but on the reports only.
  • A new report is available from Print on the Individuals grid:  “All addresses” will give you the person’s household address and any personal alternate addresses in Shepherd’s Staff.
  • In the “Mass update Membership information” utility, a new field has been added: “Show in Church360° Unite”.

ATTENDANCE

  • The Event Summary report has two enhancements:
    • There are now calculations for average, median, maximum and minimum attendance for the time period in total and broken down by event type.
    • It also now has an option to include the names of attendees.
  • You can now select “More columns (landscape)” to print the Attendance Roster report in Landscape in order to include more dates.

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Batch entry & offering imports:
    • You can now mark an offering as non-deductible from within the batch entry window.  Once you’ve entered the offering, double-click the row to edit it and check the “nondeductible” box, then click Save.
    • When entering an offering batch, there is a new search button over the Description field.  You can click it to see the and select from the last 20 descriptions that have been used more than once, so you don’t have to type it every time you enter a new batch.
    • If you choose to create an Attendance batch when posting your offering batch in Contributions, any “other givers” you entered will now be added to the Visitors notes in the attendance batch.
    • When you start a batch, the batch date window will now list any unposted batches, along with posted ones entered in the last 3 months.
    • In batch entry you can now enter negative amounts, for cases where corrections need to be made and you want to post those corrections to Finance as a deposit.  The negative amount will be included in the fund total in the deposit record when posting the batch.
    • The lock button on the Description field now also locks in any text so you don’t have to repeat it.
    • There is a new checkbox to “Hide contributor names” should a user with access to see those names need to ensure giver privacy while entering offerings.
    • The Vanco giving import has a new “Copy ID” button.  It copies the Vanco Giver ID for the selected offering into the Windows clipboard so you can easily paste it into the correct Contributor record in Shepherd’s Staff.
  • Grids, Reports and Other Reports:
    • The Behavior analysis tool has new filters for:
      • “Gave for the first time”.
      • “Pledged for the first time”.
    • You can now print a contribution statement for envelope 0, “(anonymous)”.
    • The Who selection under Contribution Statements has a new option, “For one contributor”, allowing you to select a specific giver.
    • Users with permissions to view contributor names can now print the batch Checklist reports without the names if needed.
    • To comply with USPS bulk mailing rates, envelope box labels have a new option under Include that lets you add the words “or Resident” after the giver’s name.
    • The 5-year Fund Summary report from version 8.8 has been added back in the new version, available as an option under Other Reports > “Giving by month/year/fund” by selecting “Fund comparison across 5 years” under Format.
    • The Funds grid now includes the accounts listed by number first, as well as by name first, to allow for sorting either way.

SUBGROUPS

  • The Subgroup Cleanup utility has a new option for “Static subgroups with Removed people”.  It will scan all Static subgroups for people who are marked as removed in Membership.  Clicking Details shows the names of the removed people, and clicking Cleanup takes just the removed people off the selected Static subgroup. 

OTHER FEATURES

  • Each user can now choose what module for Shepherd’s Staff to start in under Utilities > “Set start up module”.
  • Non-supervisor users can now change their own passwords.
  • Under Help there is a new option for “Chat with Software Support”.  It displays a window with instructions for starting a chat session, along with a link to the Shepherd’s Staff support page.
  • On the print preview window, LibreOffice has been added to the Export options in the lower right.  We support both the 32-bit and 64-bit LibreOffice 7.

Changes

MEMBERSHIP

  • On the grids for Households, Non-households, and Individuals, when you click the “copy Address” button, it now splits out multi-line addresses into separate lines. 
  • You can now minimize the Household/Person Record window, as you can with Contributor Details.

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Batch entry & offering imports:
    • In offering batch entry, if you have started an offering row and have entered an amount, but you have not yet clicked Add to commit the row to the grid, clicking Save now displays a warning message.
    • In batch entry, the “Sort by number” checkboxes for Contributors and Funds have been renamed to “Enter by number”, for clarity.
    • Added precaution to make sure that, when deleting a posted batch and there’s an error, that the deletion process is rolled back to prevent leaving orphaned data.
    • Added a trap for envelopes that are missing or have a non-numeric value from the Vanco import, to prevent errors from aborting the entire import and creating empty batches.  It will instead warn about the bad/missing envelope number and continue to the next import record.
    • In the generic offering import, the “fund number” column has been moved back to the second position in the import file (as it was in version 8.8), to match the way such files come from Vanco.
  • Contributors & envelope numbers:
    • Checking the “Skip this envelope when renumbering” checkbox now sets the “Upcoming envelope” to the “Current envelope” and disables the “Upcoming envelope”. 
    • Checking the “Does not use physical envelopes” box now sets the Upcoming envelope to a six-digit number, but only if “Skip this envelope when renumbering” is NOT checked.  It does not change the Upcoming envelope if the contributor is set to be skipped when renumbered.
    • The envelope renumbering utility now excludes those who are marked as “Does not use envelopes”.
    • The “Envelope box labels” and “Envelope box export” reports now default to include “Envelopes skipped when renumbering”.
    • If you deleted a Contributor (or a joint Contributor) through Membership, the Contributions grids and Contributor Details window will now refresh immediately to show the envelope name change.
  • Grids, Reports and Other Reports:
    • A Pledge # column has been added to the Pledges grid.
    • There is a new option on Contribution Statements for “Do not split out nondeductible”. This prints a version of the Statement that only shows the total given, with no breakout between Deductible and Nondeductible giving.
    • Audit log (admin) entries for Pledges will now include the Contributor name.
    • Columns for the Vanco/digital giving Transaction Reference number and Transaction Fee have been added to the far right of the Offerings grid. 
    • The “envelope number hash” has been added back to the two Checklist batch reports.  This is a total of all envelope numbers in the batch, counted by offering.
  • Other Contribution change:
    • Added an additional button to the Contributions sidebar for accessing the Windows calculator. 

CHURCH360° UNITE SYNC

  • The Individuals tab in Membership and the household/person edit window now auto-refresh after accepting changes from Unite.  (Note that, on the household/person window, the tree will be reset to the first household.)

OTHER CHANGES

  • The validation process for adding a new user has been reordered so that data required for setting a password is filled in before the “you do not have a password” warning is displayed.  Focus also now moves to the missing or invalid data’s textbox.
  • To help with situations where the Shepherd’s Staff database is housed on a networked computer that is powered off or has lost its network connection, traps have been added to verify that the network path is still accessible.  If it is no longer visible to the workstation, a message appears describing the situation, and the program does not attempt to save any data, preventing the errors from occurring.
  • Traps have been added to help fix a rare problem with user window settings.
  • When upgrading Shepherd’s Staff to the new version, the following warning now appears at the top of the update window, in red: “NOTICE: This update changes the database structure.  If you use Shepherd's Staff on a network, be sure to also update the software on each workstation.”
  • The list of training videos has been updated.

Cosmetic

MEMBERSHIP

  • Fixed the date/time format on the Touchpoints grid reports (it was showing like this "Sep 1/23" instead of "Sep 1, 2023").
  • LCMS annual report:
    • Question 4 was missing the “total” caption (i.e., did not have “Total gains” or “Total losses” next to the bottom total in each column).
    • Questions 1 and 3 had “as of <date>” at the end of them; this is not needed (it is presupposed that the report is as of the year selected on the Church Info tab.
  • Fixed issue with Membership reports list not extending to the bottom of the window.
  • The “Add household” window now opens higher on the screen so that the Save button does not scroll out of view as quickly when adding households with more than a few people.
  • When printing the “(default)” version of the “Parents search” report, it was showing the tree to the left even though the report has no grouping.

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • When adding an offering batch, the batch entry window’s initial cursor focus was not starting out on the list of Contributors (requiring an extra clicking/tabbing before you could start typing the contributor name/number).
  • When adding an offering batch and entering the initial batch date, the window focus now starts on the date so you can begin typing without having to first click on the textbox or press the TAB key.
  • On the Behavior analysis report, the heading read “Who: Who” instead of the option you had selected in the Who choice list.
  • On the Giving Ranges analysis report, the heading read “Who: Who” instead of the option you had selected in the Who choice list.
  • Fixed typo in date validation messages / tooltips when adding/editing recurrent offerings.  It formerly had “must fall be on day”; now is “must be on day”.
  • The top section of the contributor record reads “Statement preference”; the caption where you set it is “Statement method”.  We changed “preference” to “method” to make clear what field is being referred to.
  • When the offering batch entry window was maximized, the “Hide contributor names” checkbox was not correctly adjusting position, appearing within the Search textbox.
  • To prevent confusion, the word "Switch" now appears in batch entry over the button that toggles between the “totals” and “free entry” methods, identifying what the button does without having to hover the mouse cursor over it to read the button’s tooltip.
  • If you try to post a batch that is currently being edited by someone, the warning message incorrectly stated that the batch could not be “edited”, rather than that the batch could not be “posted”.
  • In batch entry, if you checked the “Hide contributor names” box it was causing the grid to show invalid columns to the right of the Description column.
  • The amounts in the Pledge Mail Merge tool were not formatted with a comma for thousands.  Example: An amount of 1234.56 was being formatted as “$1234.56” instead of “$1,234.56”.
  • Under Tools/Settings/Customer field names, when typing a new field name in “Change to” the blue “save” icon did not appear on the Save button.
  • On the edit Recurrent Offering window, if a template has been used, the contributor cannot be changed, and is disabled.  However, the “By number” checkbox could still be clicked.
  • On the add/edit Gift-in-kind window, changing just the “Towards pledge” amount was not causing the save icon to appear on the Save button.
  • The “Giving by date” option on the Contribution Statements is really by week, because it groups by calendar week (Sunday).  (The “Itemized giving” option is the one that prints by date.)  It has been renamed to “Giving by week”.
  • Mouse cursor feedback to has been added to the following Contributions utilities:
    • Start using Next Year envelopes
    • Undo an envelope activation
    • Rebuild envelope names

SUBGROUPS

  • In the Subgroup Cleanup utility, the tooltip for the Start button incorrectly read, “Delete the selected empty subgroup.”  This button should have no tooltip.
  • In the Subgroup Cleanup utility, the tooltip for the Details button incorrectly read, “Delete the selected empty subgroup.”  This button should have no tooltip.
  • The Help button for Combined subgroups was not hooked up correctly.

OTHER

  • On the “Send e-mail” window, cursor feedback has been added when you click the “To…”, “Cc…”, or “Bcc…” buttons.

CHURCH360° UNITE SYNC

  • When sending data to Unite there was no cursor change to a wait cursor/hourglass.

Fixes

MEMBERSHIP

  • The following household Who filters were fixed to ensure Archived people will not show up:
    • "With a current member"
    • "With a confirmed member"
    • "With a visitor"
    • "With a non-removed person"
    • "With a non-removed member"
    • "With someone in Sunday School"
  • Church Register:
    • The grid will now prevent you from trying to open and print a Certificate if there isn’t one.
    • The event date will now show the event date when printing a certificate for “user-defined 3”.
    • First Communion (user-defined 2)’s heading has been corrected.
  • Church Directory printing for a subgroup has been corrected where it could sometimes include household entries for people not in that subgroup.
  • A problem with saving phone number changes in certain rare circumstances has been corrected.
  • Mass Update utility:
    • The data will now refresh after a mass update even in a record that was left open during the update.
    • Updating “newsletter method” has been corrected.
    • The field “person user option 2” was getting confused with “person user yes/no 3”.  (Both fields had the same underlying enum value.).  This has been corrected.
  • LCMS annual report:
    • It has been corrected to no longer show the prior-year’s baptisms if the current year hasn’t had any yet.
    • An will no longer appear if you clicked on the information button in a sub-count whose value was zero.
  • Anniversaries grid:
    • Corrected to show a couple where the spouse is a member but the head of the household is not.
  • Favorites saved for one of the below will no longer give an error if you click on it immediately after saving:
    • Church Register tabs
    • Touchpoints Planned/Completed
    • Deaths
  • People grids:
    • An error was eliminated in a rare case where an Individual record was detached from a household and saved.
    • When you set a person to Removed by Death, the Participation change to Deceased will also save with the Removed by status.
  • Touchpoints:
    • Time entered with a and p instead of am and pm will now be recognized and save correctly.
    • “Phantom” notes made of blank spaces will no longer save in Touchpoints Completed.
  • Help Center article buttons corrected:
    • “Move a person to a different household” utility
    • “add completed touchpoint” window
    • “add person” window
    • Participation tool on the Ministry tab
    • Person Record report
    • Household Record report
  • An error was corrected in the cleanup utility:
    • “The Microsoft Jet database engine cannot find the input table or query 'Contributor'.”
  • Under Other Reports, if you clicked on Church Statistics and then clicked on “Export membership information” and then back on Church Statistics, the following church stats settings were no longer visible until you exited and returned to the Membership module: Child age cut-off; Membership year; Month.

ATTENDANCE

  • Batch entry will now remember the form position in Advanced entry mode.
  • Other Reports:
    • Sort/group by selections will now save with your user-defined reports for:
      • Attendance Behavior
      • Attendance by Event
    • Attendance by Event “group by” will now properly distinguish between “distinct households” and “distinct people”.
  • WebTools Attendance import error “The given key was not present in the dictionary” has been corrected.
  • Help Center article button corrected for “Fix attendance posting mistakes”.

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Pledges:
    • Editing a Pledge to change the Fund will now ask  you to verify that you really want to make the change, and will update all previous offerings attached to that pledge to the new fund.
    • You can no longer create more than one pledge for the same Contributor/Fund within a date range.
    • The Giver drop-list is now disabled in either:
      • A Pledge that has Offerings assigned to it.
      • Or an Offering that is assigned to a Pledge.
      • A gift-in-kind in either direction as above.
    • Using Distribute after a giver had met or exceeded their total pledge was giving incorrect totals.  This has been corrected.
    • Changed a "division by zero" error that occurred when adding annual pledges and the date range is less than 12 months.  Instead of the error, the following message appears, the end date is cleared, and focus put on the end date textbox: "You are trying to enter an annual pledge for a period less than 12 months!"
    • In Contribution Statements, if you are showing the pledge summary section, and you choose to show the pledge difference as “Left to give” or “Remaining”, it was showing an amount if you were ahead on your pledge.  In these two contexts it should show as $0.
  • Pledge mail merge/Pledge Progress reports:
    • If you rapidly clicked the Export button on the “Pledge mail merge” for some reason, it would generate the following error: “The Microsoft Jet database engine could not find the object ‘Rpt_PledgeMailMerge’.”
    • The Pledge Mail Merge did not correctly calculate when searching for pledges that were ahead/behind/remaining by a given percentage.
    • The Pledge Progress and Pledge Mail Merge reports were not including Annual pledges (or other pledges with a zero total-due-to-date).  These are technically unfulfilled, even though they have a future period due date.
    • On the Pledge Progress and Pledge Mail Merge reports, if you printed for the following, it was incorrectly including Annual pledges that did not fit the category:
      • Behind by a certain percentage
      • Fulfilled
  • Grids:
    • When printing the pledges grid, the pledge date range could be cut off for pledges with date ranges in the last three months of the year (e.g., 10/1/22 to 12/31/22).
    • Searching for amounts with cents now works correctly in the data grids.
    • The default report from the Contributor grid, when sorted by name is now sorting properly all the way through the report.
    • The Gifts-in-kind grid, could not display descriptions over 50 characters long, and if you had such text in the gift-in-kind description the following error would occur “The field is too small to accept the amount of data you attempted to add. Try inserting or pasting less data.”
  • In Other Reports, the sort/group by selections will now save with your user-defined reports for:
    • Contribution statements
    • Envelope box labels
    • Envelope box export
    • Envelope reference
    • Giving by household/giver/fund
    • Pledge progress
    • Pledge mail merge
  • Contribution Statements:
    • It is now possible to sort labels from the Contribution Statements report by envelope number.
    • Pledge Summary section:
      • Year for pledge dates in the Pledge Summary section is now 2-digits to allow more space for long fund names.
      • The pledged-to-date was not taking the offering “to” date into account and was showing pledged-to-date for future periods.
      • The pledge given-to-date total was not taking the offering “to” date into account (and would include offerings given after that date).
    • A “Field is too small” error will no longer occur with a gift-in-kind for an “Other giver” statement.
    •  
  • Inactive or removed non-joint envelopes were previously showing as Active in the below locations.  This has been corrected:
    • Contributors grid
    • Behavior, Top givers, Giving patterns, and Giving ranges tools.
    • Reports
  • Contributors:
    • On the Contributor record, the Next button at the bottom of the tree is now disabled when you are on the last contributor.
    • In Contributor Details, Offerings section/grid, if an offering was marked as “non-deductible”, the checkbox in the “Non-deductible?” column was previously not getting marked.
    • On the “Add contributor” window, if you cleared the envelope numbers and then picked a contributor, you received the error, “Syntax error (missing operator) in query expression ‘EnvelopeNumber =’.” 
    • If you removed a joint contributor from an envelope (by clicking the pencil icon and selecting “(none)”, the joint giver’s name did not change to “(none)” until you clicked save.  It now changes to “(none)” immediately.
  • Recurrent offerings:
    • When generating for a semi-monthly frequency, and the first date falls on or after the 14th of the month, the resulting offering batch is dated in the current month instead of the next month.
    • It was not combining offerings for the same date into one batch.
  • If you floated the Contributions window and then tried to do one of the below, you received the following error: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”  This has been corrected.
    • Add or edit a batch.
    • View a contributor record.
  • Batches:
    • Batch import and export now support church names/database names that include an apostrophe.
    • In the “Other giving source” batch import, if you selected a file from a location with a name longer than 50 characters, it would give the following error: “The field is too small to accept the amount of data you attempted to add.  Try inserting or pasting less data.”
    • In the batch report summary section, the count of contributors was instead showing the count of contributions.
    • It was previously possible to unlock a batch and post it while it was still open/minimized.  Then if the batch window was closed, it would revert the status of the batch to unposted, leaving offerings that had been posted without a posted batch record.  This is no longer possible.
    • When posting a batch and making a deposit in Finance, if you either (1) backspaced over the date or, (2) clicked Post with a missing or partial date, you received the following error message: “String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.”
    • If (1) a user did not have rights to see contributor names in batch entry, and (2) you ran “Reset window sizes and settings”, when you added a new offering batch, the “Other giver contact info” window was appearing when you selected “anonymous” instead of for “other giver”.  (Once you closed the batch entry window and returned, it would work fine.  The problem only occurred the first time you entered a batch after running “Reset window sizes and settings” from under the Utilities menu.)
    • Pressing F1 on the Batch Entry window launched the Help article twice.
    • In the “Other giving source” import, if you import for Vanco and then close the window, it remembers your settings, as it should.  However, when you opened the import the next time, it would not import the Vanco file again unless you switched to “Envelope” and then back to “Vanco”.
    • If you imported from Vanco and created a batch, then viewed/edited that batch and either clicked Save or left the batch entry window open long enough for the auto-save to kick in, it erased all internal TransactionRef numbers.  This mean that the next time you imported from Vanco it treated those offerings as though they had not already been imported.
    • The Vanco import was classifying batches as from the digital giving import (source type = 5) instead of Vanco (source type = 6).
  • An error was corrected that was occurring when non-supervisor users with only rights to enter offering batches logged in.
  • Speed has been improved in the closing of the batch entry window, and the batches grid will only reload once.
  • A fix applied in the July 15th service pack to address Annual pledges caused a problem with Weekly and Biweekly pledges.  If you printed for a past month (e.g., “1/1/22 through 8/31/22”), the pledged-to-date for Weekly and Biweekly was being calculated using today’s date (e.g., “9/12”), rather than “8/31”.  In other words, it inflated the pledge-to-date by the additional weeks between 8/31 and 9/12.  This has been corrected.
  • The pledge summary annual pledges’ “pledged-to-date” field is now correct.
  • The link to Mail Merge in Other Reports has been corrected.
  • In the “Giving patterns” analysis tool, if you saved a favorite and then exited Contributions and returned and double-clicked that favorite, the following three errors were occurring:  “There is an error in XML document (1 1)” in SetFilter1FromXML; “There is an error in XML document (1 1)” in SetFilter2FromXML; “DataTable must be set prior to using DataView” in GotoUserView.
  • If a gift-in-kind is attached to a pledge, if you edit the record and TAB off of the contributor, it was clearing the selected pledge, forcing you to reselect it.
  • Tabbing through the dates was causing the save icon to appear on the Save button even when the date had not changed in the following add/edit views:
    • Gift-in-kind
    • Offering
    • Recurrent offering
  • The Help button was missing from the following utilities:
    • Vanco Import
    • Import from “Other giving source”
    • Shepherd’s Staff batch export/import
    • Clean up your contributions data
    • Combine contributions for two envelopes
    • Swap contributions for two envelopes
    • Undo an envelope activation
    • Rebuild envelope names
  • When adding a new offering via the Offerings grid, after picking a contributor and a fund, if there were multiple pledges to that fund by that giver, it was not always defaulting to the newest one.
  • On the “Envelope box export”, the “Envelopes skipped when renumber” option, under “Include”, did not include those givers if checked.

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Other reports:
    • Certain options were not being saved in a user-defined report:
      • Calendar: The “Person/contact”, “Room”, “Room type”, “Room location”, and “Month” settings.
      • Events: The “Sort by”, “Room”, “Inventory”, and “Contact” settings.
      • Inventory: The “Status”, “Room”, “Room type”, and “Room location” settings.
      • Room usage: The “Room type” setting.
      • Route details: The “Sort contacts by” setting.
    • If you saved an Events report, when you selected the saved report from under "My reports" the "Events between" date range was disabled.
  • The help buttons for the below were not working:
    • Add/edit Vehicle
    • Add/edit Maintenance
  • If you tried to access the photo file for an inventory item and the file was missing, you received an error message rather than a warning.  It now displays a warning that the file cannot be found.

SUBGROUPS

  • If you created a dynamic subgroup for Individual touchpoints completed “Today”, it was excluding the touchpoints completed on today’s date. 
  • The Help button for Combined subgroups was not hooked up correctly.

REPORT WRITER and MAIL MERGE

  • If you opened Mail Merge and there were fields listed under "Selected" but one was not yet highlighted, and you clicked the mouse in the area below the fields, you would get the error, "Object reference not set to an instance of an object.", Error: -2147467261; Routine: lboSelected_MouseDown.
  • Added missing “Military Status” field to Report Writer and Mail Merge.  (For version 8.9, run “Reapply query changes” from under the login window Utilities to apply the fix. The fix will be automatically applied during the upgrade process to version 9.0.)
  • The field “Title+first+last” was not putting a space before the last name. 
  • In Report Writer, the error “record is deleted” could appear with some Report Writer fields (such as “Amount given this year” and “Amount given last year”).

CHURCH360° UNITE SYNC

  • Shepherd’s Staff alternate address information for households and people was not getting recognized by Unite.  Furthermore, when you received data from Unite it could potentially overwrite the alternate address data in Shepherd’s Staff with blanks.  To prevent this from happening, alternate address information is now ignored if received from Unite during the sync.
  • If you cleared a data field via Unite and then received the change and accepted it into Shepherd’s Staff, it was putting a space into that field instead of setting it to null.  This could cause odd results in reports and other screens because the space was treated as data to print (whereas a null is ignored). 
  • When receiving address data from Unite it was clearing the country in Shepherd’s Staff.  The country is not changeable via Unite’s user interface.
  • When receiving address data from Unite, if an address had two lines (such as for an apartment number), the import would overwrite address line 1 with a combination of address lines 1 and 2, and clear address line 1, even if no changes had been made to the address via the Unite user interface.  For example, if you had someone living at “1234 Main Street, Apt. 203b” in Shepherd’s Staff, entered as two lines of “1234 Main Street” and “Apt. 203b”, after receiving data from Unite you would end up with “1234 Main Street Apt. 203b” in address line 1, and nothing in address line 2 – even though no one had changed anything via Unite.
  • If you edit a household address/phone from the Person record instead of the Household record, it was not flagging the people in that household to be sync’d with Unite.
  • When receiving data from Unite it was not recognizing any changes made on the Unite side to home phone, cell phone, or work phone.
  • When receiving data from Unite it was putting the first name into the preferred name in Shepherd’s Staff.  This is due to a difference between how Unite and Shepherd’s Staff handle preferred names.  Shepherd’s Staff appends preferred names if filled in.  Example: “Smith, Robert (Rob)”.  However, this problem was causing names in Shepherd’s Staff to appear like this after accepting changes: “Smith, Robert (Robert)”.
  • You had to click the Close button twice to get the sync window to close.
  • When sending data and the connection failed (such as due to the subdomain not being entered correctly), the following error would occur: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” Error: 613. Location: frmU_UniteSync. Routine: SendDataToUnite.  (It now continues and displays the actual connection problem message, with the likely cause/solution.)

OTHER FIXES and CHANGES

  • After someone logs in to Shepherd’s Staff, the “last login date” was not getting filled in under User Security.
  • When trying to print a report from the preview window, you had to click the Print button twice on the printer selection dialog box.
  • In some places in the program, you would get the following message when setting the sort order from the print preview window: “The sorting already exists.” Routine: SetReportSortOrder.
  • If there were backslashes in a report title (such as a date like "12/31/2022"), when you exported from the Print Preview window it included those backslashes as part of the filename, which Windows does not allow.  It now changes the "/" to "-" (backslash to a hyphen).
  • One customer had a data issue with two entries for Membership Code value 0.  This is normally “Full Member”, but there was a second value called “Active Confirmed Member”.  “Active Confirmed Member” was shown in the Membership Code list two times; the second value was the correct one (internally value 6).  The automated data repair in Shepherd’s Staff checks for and corrects this problem, but the correction code had a typo in it and was erroring out. 
  • Added trap to prevent the error, “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” (in the function “ApplyUserSettingsToDataGridViewColumnList”), which occurred in rare cases when opening a module.
  • When using the Export button to send data grid contents to Excel, it was stripping out commas in text that needed to retain the comma, such as “city, state zip”, or “last name, first name”.
  • If you tried to drag an Action, View, or Report to a different favorites section (which is not allowed because they are incompatible), you would get the error, “Value cannot be null. Parameter name: item.”  (This fix applies to the favorites panels in Membership, Attendance, Contributions, and Scheduler.)

UTILITIES

  • After running MDB-Xfer on a database, when you opened Contributions and selected the Pledges grid, and chose to only include activity in the past 24 months, the following error would occur: “No value given for one or more required parameters.”  Running “Reapply query changes” under the Login Utilities would fix the issue.  The problem was caused by a query in blank8.mdb that was not yet updated with the latest SQL.  The blank8.mdb database has been corrected in this service pack.
  • When you restored a database, it was flagging it in the Audit Log as a “Membership” activity instead of a “Utility” activity.
  • The check for updates/upgrades was not recording an entry in the activity table out in WebTools.
  • The check for updates/upgrades process was not verifying that the database was registered with WebTools (which, in 8.8 and earlier, was a requirement).

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