What's new in Shepherd's Staff 9.1?

Shepherd's Staff's latest upgrade, version 9.1, is here!

Version 9.0 wrapped up a multi-year project of updating the interface, with the release of the new Finance module.  This new upgrade will not involve the major overhauls that the last several upgrades included, with brand new modules to learn, but there are some significant changes.  Full details are below, but here are a few highlights to look out for in the list:

Membership

• Enhancements to an Individual Person record will allow you to report on Subgroups and/or Activity/Skill/Training lists that apply to the person in question.
• The process for updating records when a member passes away has been streamlined.

Contributions

• The Vanco import has been improved and better represented in your batches in several ways.
• You can now post multiple Offering batches at once.

Finance

• There are improvements and new format options for several reports and analysis tools.
• The ability to reconcile a charge account has been added.

Other

• The installer that you run through for upgrades and installing Shepherd's Staff has been updated.
• Improvements are being implemented for screen readers for visually impaired users.

Full Feature List for Shepherd’s Staff 9.1

Membership

• You can now view the Subgroups a person is in from the Church folder of the Person record and can also print a report of that information.
• You can now print a report of the Activity/Skill/Training lists a person is on from the pop-up that appears from the Church folder of the Person record.
• The Touchpoints grids now have Who filter options for “everyone”, “For a list or grade”, “For one household”, and “For one person”. Note: These filters only apply to individual touchpoints, not household-level touchpoints.
• The Touchpoint grids (Planned and Completed) now allow you to select multiple rows for deletion at once. Use CTRL or SHIFT plus the mouse or keyboard to select rows. Each touchpoint deletion is recorded in the Audit Log.
• The Completed Touchpoints grid has a new “multi-add” feature. This allows you to add a completed Individual touchpoint to many people at one time, such as after sending out bulk mail or email to a group of people.
• We’ve made the following time-saving automation improvements on the death/removal of a person:
  • If a person is dead and is Removed By “Death”, and there is no “Death date” yet filled in under the Personal Info section, it automatically inserts the “Date removed” in the “Death date”.
  • When someone is dead or “newly removed”, it automatically unchecks the "show in Church360 Unite" checkbox and sets the flag for sync.
  • If the person was just marked as removed by any method (death or otherwise), it prompts to remove the person from any Static subgroups; if you answer, “Yes”, it deletes the person from all Static subgroups.
  • If the person is dead, it removes them from any enrolled Attendance events.
  • If the person was just marked as removed and is also dead, and a “Head of Household”, and “Married” or “Separated”, if there is a “Spouse” in the household who is also “Married” or “Separated” the following occurs:
    • Marks the spouse as "Widowed"
    • Sets the spouse’s date widowed to the Head’s date of death (auto-filled above)
    • Changes the spouse’s household position from “Spouse” to “Head of Household”.
    • Changes the Head’s household position to “Deceased”.
  • If the person was just marked as removed and is also dead, and a “Spouse, and “Married” or “Separated”, if there is a Head of Household who is also “Married” or “Separated” the following occurs:
    • Marks the Head as “Widowed”
    • Sets the Head’s date widowed to the spouse’s date of death (auto-filled above)
    • Sets the spouse’s household position to “Deceased”.
• On the Anniversaries grid, the “in x months” column has been increased to show the age/years in 12 months instead of just four months. This allows you to print fewer reports (one per year instead of one every quarter).
• There is a new Edit button on the Photo Manager. Clicking it launches the original version of the photo into the default Windows photo editor. Once you have made changes in the editor and saved the photo, when you return to the Photo Manager the image refreshes, and you can then recreate the large and small images and Save. 
• Speed improvements made to the Household/Person edit window.
• Simplified the “move person to different household” utility; also added and audit log entry for the move.

Attendance

• When adding enrollees to an event you can now filter the list of possible names to only show the people in a list, grade, or subgroup. You can then click “add all” to move all the names across.

Contributions

• Update the Vanco import and batch posting process to achieve the following:
  • Allow givers who are in Vanco but not in Contributions to be assigned to Other Giver so that they can be dealt with at a later time.  (The name and address information from Vanco is stored in the Other Giver details, and you can then create a Contributor record later on and edit those offerings, changing them from Other Giver to the new contributor.)
  • Allow the user to override Vanco funds and point them to specific funds in Contributions. You can also combine Vanco funds into a single Contributions fund. This helps in cases when the church changes a giving fund to a new one with a new number; the church doesn’t have to ask contributors to go out and modify their Vanco giving setup.
  • Create offering batches based on the Deposit date instead of the Process date, so the resulting deposit in Finance is dated the same as the deposit made by Vanco into the church bank account. This helps when reconciling Vanco reports with Finance deposits. (Note: The offerings will be posted to the individual givers using the Process date, as before.)
  • Allow the user to include transaction fees in the deposit, either as a debit against the offset account or as a debit to a separate expense account. This will make it easier to reconcile Finance deposits with Vanco reports.
  • Allow users to post multiple offering batches all at once using a new “Post all” button on the Batches grid.
  • This feature posts all batches displayed in the grid. You can filter the grid using Search to post a subset of batches.
  • You can print a report for all of the batches before completing the post.
  • If any of the giving funds are attached to a Finance account, then a deposit is automatically made using the batch date as the deposit date.
  • The process does not create Attendance batches because additional decisions must be made on a batch-by-batch basis (such as the Attendance event and attendance date). Furthermore, with electronic giving the benefit of auto-creating attendance batches is of little relevance.
• The Batches grid in Contributions has a new report, “List of batches in grid”, that prints the contents of the grid and provides a total of the batch amounts.
• The Batches grid has a new “Source” filter that displays just the batches that were imported from Vanco, from WebTools, using the generic digital giving import, or entered manually using the batch window. You can then print reports for just those batches.
• We’ve added several new calculations/statistics to the reports that print from the Pledges grid:
  • In the grand total for the four non-label formats (default, By giver, By fund, By frequency):
    • Median total pledge amount
    • Highest total pledge amount
  • In the group subtotal section for the “By frequency” format:
    • Pledge count
    • Contributor count
    • Fund count
    • Median pledge amount
    • Most common (mode) pledge amount (i.e., the amount that repeats most often)
    • Median total pledge amount
    • Highest total pledge amount
  • In the group subtotal section for the “By fund” format:
    • Pledge count
    • Contributor count
    • Fund count
    • Median total pledge amount
    • Highest total pledge amount
• We’ve updated the Recurrent Offering generation process, giving customers the ability to pick and choose the offerings to generate (similar to how Recurrent Transactions are generated in the Finance module).
• The Top Givers report now has the option to hide giver names, for confidentiality.
• On the Contributors grid, there is a shortcut under the Print button for printing a giving statement for the selected contributor. It switches to the Reports tab, picks “Giving statements”, fills in the giver’s envelope number in the range, sets the date range to the current year, and clears certain filters that might prevent the statement from printing.
• Speed improvements made to the Contributor details window.

Finance

• The navigation tree on the AR account window can now be filtered to show just Active or Inactive accounts.
• On the AR student window, the navigation tree can now be filtered to show just Active or Inactive students.
• On the Vendor window, the navigation tree can now be filtered to show just Active or Inactive vendors. 
• The General Ledger report has a new version that includes budget information.
• Modeled after the Bank Statement Reconciliation, there is a new “Charge Statement Reconciliation” feature that lets you reconcile credit card and other charge statements. You can also undo a posted reconciliation and reprint a charge statement reconciliation report.
• When adding Payments and using the “Get last payment” feature, if the last payment was to a different bank or charge account you now get a warning. This mitigates accidentally creating a payment against the wrong bank or charge account.
• There is a new version of the two-year comparison Balance Sheet that includes columns for the change each year, and then the difference between the two change amounts.
• We’ve modified the following Finance reports under “Other Reports” to improve their formatting and column alignment when exporting them to Microsoft Excel from the Print Preview window:
  • • Account and Trial Balance
    • Balance Sheet
    • Dedicate Accounts
    • Income Statement
    • Payment Register
    • Treasurers Reports
  • Reports that support this change have a special short-cut icon to Excel in the lower right of the Print Preview window. (This shortcut saves a little time for the user).
• When exporting the General Ledger report using the Export button, it now automatically loads the data directly into the default spreadsheet program.
• The Payment Register reports now display the Payee before the Description, to assist with verifying data against the bank statement. Also, for payees who are people, we now show the payee name in First Last format instead of Last, First.
• There is a new “top of page” format for printing checks.
• When adding lines to a payment and entering an invoice number, the program now warns you if you already have a payment for that invoice to that same vendor. This mitigates accidentally paying an invoice twice.
• Allow searching on Invoice number in the Ledger Line Search tool.  (Note that the Invoice number is an alphanumeric field. Therefore, if you are searching for a numeric invoice number you should prefix it with the “@” symbol. See the tooltip on the grid Search label for details.)
• Under the Period Analysis tool, there is a new Account type option for “Income and Expense”. This allows the customer to show both income and expense at one time for exporting to Excel.
• Under the Period Analysis tool, there is a new dimension that groups the results by Account Type. This supports the new “Income and Expense” option and also expands the ability of the “Income and Dedicated In” and “Expense and Dedicated Out” options by letting you split out by account type within the “Aggregated by” period.
• Add a variation of the customized Treasurer’s Report with a new calculation for column 5 that divides column 2 by column 4.  This allows you to create a format where column 2 is last year, column 3 is this year, column 4 is the change from last year to this year, and column 5 is the percentage of that change.
• The Budget vs. Actual analysis tool now has printed reports that display all of the budget and actual information broken out by account and month. You can also group the report by Responsibility or Church Body code.
• The Budget vs. Actual analysis tool now has a search so that you can search on account number, account name, Responsibility or Church Body code, and budget total.
• Speed improvements made to the Vendor edit window.
• Certain formats of the Treasurers reports have a new option to “Use ‘this year’ and ‘last year’ in heading”. Checking this option replaces the finance year in a column heading with “this yr.” or “last yr.”, adding clarity to reports printed for non-calendar finance years. For example, if running from 7/1/24 to 6/30/25 (fiscal year 2025), and today is August 15th, 2024, the July column reads “Actual as of July 2025”. The “2025” can confuse readers who do not grasp how non-calendar fiscal years work (since July was in calendar 2024). Checking the new option makes the column heading read “Actual as of July this yr.”, instead.
• When entering budgets, the filter on the Budgeting grid is now used on the Budgeting
  window to limit the accounts that appear.

Subgroups

• We’ve added a "send e-mail" button to the Subgroups "People" grid. It launches the "send e-mail" window and prepopulates the "To" field with all the e-mail addresses displayed in the grid.
• You can now view the Subgroups a person is in from the Church folder of the Person record and can also print a report of that information.

General/Other

• We have upgraded our installer technology, switching from InstallShield to Advanced Installer. One of the benefits is the new ability to create a taskbar shortcut at the time of installation.
• To save some steps, on the Print Preview windows, you can now pick Microsoft Excel as an “Export to” option. The report export will automatically launch in Microsoft Excel.
• We have improved support throughout Shepherd’s Staff for screen readers so that graphic-only buttons now get recognized by the reader software. (Note that this change was released early in a service pack to benefit 9.0 customers who use screen reader software.)
• You can now share favorite views and reports with other users within the same module.
• By using Microsoft Word, you can now load or paste images and formatted text (boldface, italics, underlined) into the body of a message when sending e-mail from within Shepherd’s Staff.