Name: Ask the Expert about Reporting with Summary Fields and Aggregates
Uploaded: 2026-08-26T18:30:46.513Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 12 s
Description: Ask the Expert about Reporting with Summary Fields and Aggregates

Transcript for "Ask the Expert about Reporting with Summary Fields and Aggregates": Hello, everybody. Good morning to those people out West. Good afternoon to those people out East, and good evening to anybody who may be listening over in The UK or in the, European area. Welcome to the ask the expert session of, of eTapestry webinars for this, for this month. Happy to see people starting to kinda fill in here. Looks like we've got a couple of dozen folks kind of, lining up here and getting in. Of course, most of you probably know me already. I'm Jeff Arbuckle. Ready to do the, you know, ready to talk a little bit more about what we started the conversation with last week. The, the ability to do things with, like, summary fields and with aggregates. I know that there may be a little that might be a little bit of a thin topic. So what I want to do is also make sure that, you know, if there are any other questions about potentially, like, you know, how, reports could be potentially formatted or something like that. Well, I wanna make sure I'll be able to, you know, to be able to to talk about that. And, Cindy, I think that's an excellent question because I actually had somebody else who had a similar question reach out to me, yesterday, talking about funds. So, I can definitely talk about that here in just a moment. While people get settled in, if you will indulge me for a moment here. I know it's been, been a little bit of a rough week here. You know, yesterday, we lost Dolly Parton, one of the most iconic people maybe ever. And today, we we lost Tim Curry. You know, these are two people that have always been around and things that I watched growing up, and I'm sure I'm not alone here. So, you know, one is to just say rest in peace to a couple of real icons. And, it's been it's been a rough cup last couple of days for me and some of my teammates here at work. So, hopefully, hopefully, everything else, goes well for us here today. And, oh, yes. Dolly Parton's America. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. She she's just an interesting person to listen, talk to just about her experiences, about how she, you know, how she kind of became who she was. Very, very interesting person. And, of course, when I was growing up, nine to five was on TV all the time. So I watched that movie probably 20 times as a kid. Always found that funny. So, looking forward to, revisiting some of that maybe this weekend. And I just recently watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, actually. So, yeah, these are these are two pretty big, pretty big passings in the entertainment world. So, you know, just wanted to say rest in peace, though. So to, you know, about that because it's, it's been rough for a lot of folks, I think. Alright. So let's dive in. We like I said, we've got a couple of dozen folks here. So, wanted to let me pull up my eTapestry here. That should be coming up here now. So, yeah. So one of the things I did wanna kind of circle back around to, I'd mentioned it last week, when we were talking about aggregates in particular because one of the things that I had mentioned was how aggregates can be, a little bit, and I don't remember if yeah. Here we go. Aggregates can be a little bit, it can be a little bit grumpy when it comes to things like date. There are only certain fields that date can work with. Like, for example, like, you know, received has all of these options for, like, average, minimum, maximum, and so forth. But if I wanted to say, you know, let's put in received here, and we'll put in a date field also. And I wanted to put in, you know, like, I wanted to find out what the largest was. Right? I'm gonna put it down here for date as well. One of the things that we will see here, and this is what I want this is something that I mentioned last week that, does create a little bit of an issue here for these aggregates, is when we run this report and we utilize that query that I had, Just kinda wanted to to to show this again here. You'll see that the largest received date, the it it ends up blank. What that means is is that the system, because it's collapsing those fields and, it already has an issue with, like, fund and date and some of those specifics when it collapse when it collapses a a column like that, It it carries over for whatever reason on the, aggregates for, like, the minimum, maximum, and so forth. I will say that that is something I would like to see get changed in the system. I do have, I I do have some things that I'm I'm trying to get done behind the scenes to kind of help about, you know, like, some of these things that where it's like, you know, why can't we have the aggregate work for that, for that date field and make that a little bit more usable when you want to do a report like this where you have, like, specific journal entries or specific, you know, entries that deal with fund or or approach or whatever. You know, I want to make sure that people are aware that I am trying to get some things done behind the scenes to try to expand the abilities there, in some of these areas like reporting and and stuff that you use most often, I would really like to see, you know, the aggregates kinda get reworked so that they can include that date information as well. So that's a that's a project that is just, just starting for me. So hang tight on that, but there are several, other kind of little, idea bank type stuff in the community that I would also like to, to to work with folks, you know, on the products team on as well. So more to come, hopefully. Project is just getting started, so I am trying to get some stuff done behind the scenes to kind of, you know, really kinda bring eTapestry into a more, you know, into an even more modern place as well because, you know, we know a lot of folks want to continue to use eTapestry, wanna be able to, do all the things that they want to be able to do. And within, you know, reason, what can we do to help bring the system up to that standard? So just wanted to mention that because that is something that is, something I'm going to be, kinda getting on people's cases here behind the scenes, might end up becoming kind of annoying to some folks. So, I'm used to being thought of as sometimes being annoying, so I'm ready I'm ready for the challenge. So, more to come. So, you know, we'll we'll talk about that a little bit more later, I'm sure. But, so to go to, Cindy's question here about, you know, can we go over how to remove one fund from a report? Now, Cindy, are you just saying just in general, you're running a a list of of transactions that you're going to ultimately report and you wanna make sure that it is removing the entries from a particular fund? Or are you saying, I wanna remove the donors to a particular fund entirely from a report? Annual donations to remove capital campaign. Okay. Yeah. So the way that this would be done now this is one of those situations. Now if we think back a little bit, I did talk about, like, compound queries and how sometimes compound queries can end up, becoming it can have a little bit of an issue when it when you're dealing with trying to subtract out journal entries from other journal entries. Right? Because the key thing when it comes to doing compound queries is that you want to have matching sets of data. Right? So, it it's very easy with accounts. If Jeff Arbuckle appears in query number one and Jeff Arbuckle appears in query number two and I'm subtracting, Jeff Arbuckle will be removed from the results. Right? But if we're dealing with saying, okay. Well, we have a a set of journal entries that have, happened in, say, 2026. Right? So let's go over here. Let's go into queries. Yeah. We'll just use this category here. And so, like, let's say we wanna find, you know, the 2026 gifts to fund a or or or we can just say 2026 gifts, in general. Right? Oh, actually, that's what we wanna query number one will wanna be we'll just say, here are all of our twenty twenty six donations. Right? We can make this say, okay. Now we're gonna make this journal entries, and we come down here, and, of course, we do all of our individual transaction received in journal entry date. Okay. So this is gonna give me all of my gifts from the year. Right? Now, of course, if you have other things that you wanna put into it, like, you know, specifically to a campaign or specifically to, you know, whatever, It you know, you can do that as well. But you see here, we've got, you know, like, all of my, you know, twenty twenty six gifts. There's just a couple of them. Again, this is just my test database, and you'll see the list. I, you know, I have the fund listed here and so on. But now let's say I want to you know, this is a report that's just saying this is everything that's coming in for 2026, and that that has its own usage. Right? But sometimes you could say, okay. Now I want to remove a very specific type of fund or a very specific, approach or campaign or whatever. Well, what you would do then is you would basically make the exact same query. So exactly the same query as this twenty twenty six one, but it will just say, well, and, actually, you can do it one of two ways. Actually, you can say this is gifts to fund a in 2026, or you can just say gifts to fund a in general. Right? It does not necessarily because if we were just to say it does not matter what year it came in as long as we have journal entries here, and we say, okay. Now we want to find all of those unrestricted funds. We'll notice here that my two my 2026 gifts have that fund. Right? It does not matter that it has all of these 2025, 2024, 2023 gifts. That doesn't really matter. What matters is that now we know this list has some twenty twenty six transactions in it, and we can remove it from another list that we've already created at some point that has all of our other twenty twenty six gifts in it. So now this is where, oh, yes. Let me go back to that criteria here for you, Cindy. For this, all I did was let me just go right here. Oh, that was the previous one. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. So all I did here was just select the fund that I want to remove. No date range because it's going to include not only everything in the past, but everything this year as well. I didn't and now you can include the journal entry date if you want it to be specifically these are the gifts to that fund in the year. You can do that. Yeah. Absolutely. But I just went ahead and said, you know what? I it doesn't matter what year the journal entries come from as long as there's some from 2026. I'll just choose the fund. So you can do it one of two ways, Cindy. You can do it where you say, I want the fund and just let it roll with that with journal entries as your data return type, or you can do it with the fund and you can include the specific date range too. So so, again, I could do this as, you know, 01/01/2026 to 12/31/2026, you know, and and still get those funds that I or those gifts with the funds that I ultimately want to remove from my list. Okay? So now with that query actually, easiest thing to do is just say save and view queries. Now I've got my two queries. I've got my this is just my general 2026 gifts. It does not matter what fund they went to. Now if I want to remove a specific fund, from that list, I can do that by doing a compound query and saying, okay. Now I want to do a subtract. Query number one is going to be my larger group, my twenty twenty six group, the people I want to keep, minus the people I don't want to keep, which are those gifts that include that specific fund. Now what we should see here, because when we looked at this and I was just using, you know, my my test data, I only had two gifts. They both have that fund that I selected in query number two. My preview should show as blank because they've been removed. Now what I just showed you is I wanted to show you this way for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's a way that you can use a compound query where you're subtracting journal entries from journal entries. Two is, you know, I wanted to show you just that, yeah, you can take a you can take a preexisting list of your twenty twenty six gifts and then say, without making a change to that query, I wanna remove the gifts from this particular fund. Okay? And with that with that subtraction, you are accomplishing that without having to change any of the you know, if if you already had that query that had your twenty twenty six gifts, you're not changing that that query that could ultimately affect other reporting or other queries or what have you. If you are starting absolutely from scratch, technically, you can remove the fun from the results within the query itself. And to do that, you would just say, okay. Now I have not created a query that says, you know, here's the twenty twenty six transactions, you know, and I and I need to use that for other reports. I I'm just saying I'm starting from scratch. I wanna create a query that says, here are the gifts from this time frame with only the funds that I want to see. So to do that, I come down here, name it, whatever. You know? Base all constituents is fine. You could also if you were are going to do this every year, you could potentially constituent journal entry date this year or last year or whatever. But I normally say just start with base all constituents. That'll be fine. Data return type of journal entries. And now I'm going to say journal entry date and funds. And I can say I only want to see these two funds. I don't want the unrestricted, and I'm gonna put in 2026 dates. And what this will do is it will only pull the the gifts that have those two funds. So if you are wanting to you know, like, if you're starting from scratch, this should work just fine. However, if you are if you are saying, I have this existing report. Now I just wanna remove specific funds, then you could do it as a compound query. One more thing to consider when we talk about compound queries. If you're saying, I wanna find everybody who gave to these specific funds, but I want to exclude the actual accounts of the people who gave to the fund that I don't wanna see. So, therefore, all I'm seeing are the people who only gave to these two particular funds. Anybody who gave to compound query because what you would do then is you would say, okay. This query would be set up with the with the exact fund you wanna see with the accounts, and then you subtract the accounts from the list of your twenty twenty six transactions. Hopefully, that made sense, Cindy. Let's see. Gifts, not accounts, because some folks donate to general and some to the campaign in the same year. Okay. So you wanna see the you wanna see the actual gift still from the general fund even if they gave even if they gave to the capital, you still wanna see their general donation. Right? Yeah. Okay. So yeah. So at that point, what I would probably do is I would probably go with just this route here and just say, you know what? We'll start from scratch. We'll build a regular query, make it journal entry return type, and select only the funds that you want to see. And that will keep the so, like, if for example, if in my account, I had made three gifts to general and, you know, and and two gifts to unrestricted, it would still show my three general gifts. Okay? And then that way, you know, it will not display the unrestricted transactions. I would probably just start from scratch here and just do it this way and say, okay. Now I have a lift list of all the transactions that are just the general operating and the restricted. None of the unrestricted or whatever other fund that I may want. And regardless if somebody gave to multiple funds, it would only show me the the gifts that they made to the funds I do wanna see. Yeah. And, know, I mean, like I said, it's the the one thing about the reason why you can do this with funds and you could potentially do it without a compound query, same thing goes for approaches, the same thing goes for campaigns. The reason why you can say just query on exactly the funds that you want to see, you know, in that date range and display the journal entries is because when you go to a gift screen, these fields are all drop down menus. Meaning, when you say I wanted to, you know, display this, this, but not this, the drop down menu will say, oh, well, there's only one answer for this gift, and it's this one, so it will be included. And for this other journal entry, it's the other one, so it won't be included. The drop down menu makes it possible for us to do, you know, to do it like you know, to do it where we are are only finding the specific fund that was selected per transaction. So then we could say, give me only unrestricted, but it doesn't give me anything else. And, you know, I or I could say give me general and restricted, but not the unrestricted. So that way, you know, anytime you see anything that's a drop down menu, it gives you the capability of being very specific about that because each transaction has only one answer for that field. Or, if it's a user defined field on the account, each account can only have one answer for that field. So you could potentially, you know, just do it all in one query. And like I said, the reason why I wanted to show the the compound query side of things is because sometimes you're working from a preexisting list of all of your donors for the year, and you say, well, I can just find the people I don't want and do a do a subtraction. That is also a possibility to get you to the answer that you want. Hopefully, that helps. Alright. What other questions do people have? It could be about the the summary fields or the, aggregates or it could be about, well, anything, really. And if I'm able to answer it on the on the time that we have, I'll be happy to do it. Oh, okay. How do I pull that into a report with the right column? Yeah. Absolutely. So once you have everything, set up, then what you can do is, you know, you come in here, you build your report. What I would probably recommend is to one of two things. So when you do your report, I'm just giving you generic, generic names for those funds because it it doesn't really matter. You can you can say whatever whatever you want the, you know, those funds to be. One way you could do it, probably my first recommendation would be when you get to this group results section, I would say group results by account. And then I would say show group totals because then what you can do is you can do, account name if you want all of the address information, what have you listed. You can put in the date. You can put in the received and the fund. And then when you run the report I'm just going to use this, this gifts to fund a because it will show something here. What you can do here is you can when you run this report, the grouping is going to be the key thing here. So you can see here, it's like, okay. Well, here's name of account, you know, all of the names, and then it lists all of their giving here. And then it gives you a total as well, and it will also say what fund they gave to. The other thing you could do or a couple of other things you could do on the report is, you know, if you group it like this, you can say, okay. Now I want to open up the options for the date, and I want to use the sort order of a to z. Oh, wrong. Yeah. Wrong category there. K. So now when I display the results on screen, it still groups by account, And now I've set it to give, you know, in in date order. Now, of course, these are all of my gifts from all of all of time, to that fund. Of course, it will be limited to whatever it is that you're needing there. The other thing you could do by default, this would be my recommendation, sort it by or group it by account, sort it by date. It will give you all of that. It will show you a group, a grouping total here. The other option that you have, especially if you have multiple, funds that are going to be reported on, the other option that you could do is once you've selected fields, it changes what you can group by. Instead of it just being account and household, now you have all of the fields that you've selected. So now I can say I wanna group it by fund. And at this point, I probably don't want it to be sorted by, by the date. Instead, I might put in something like sort name so it can sort it by alphabetical order by last name. And when I save and run now and, of course, this is still going to just show one fun, but you'll get kind of the idea of what we're going for here. The fun name becomes the top thing, and then all of the accounts that gave with the date that they gave, the amount that they gave, and then the total for that specific fund at the bottom. So it really kinda depends on how you want it to be grouped. Do you want it to be grouped by account, or do you want it to be grouped by the fund so that you can see, oh, here's the totals per fund, but I'm also seeing the people's names and when they gave and so forth. So either way but it's it's basically the same report regardless of how you sort it. It just comes down to selecting how you want to group the results and then whatever fields you want to include, the account name, the date, the received amount, the fund, the approach, the campaign, whatever. Does that give you some some ideas there, Cindy? And while I wait for a response there oh, okay. Yes. Another question. Can you add things like one year ago and things like yeah. Absolutely. Now here's the thing about about those aggregates. Whether you use aggregates or you use the the summary fields. Remember that if we were to do aggregates, we would want to to collapse the groups. Right? Because now this report here is going to be possible because I have so many years of of information. So I can now what I'll lose here is I'll lose the date, and I'll I'll lose the, you know, the the the individuals because everything's just collapsing under the fund. I could also say, okay. Do it by account, and I can put account name back in there. But what I what I can do here is once it's got the collapsed groups, yeah, I can go in here and I can say, yeah, I wanna see year to date. I can add another received and do one year ago, do another received, do two year ago. Right? I could do that with this type of report because I've got journal entries here. If you were to choose the summary fields, you're gonna run into a little bit of trouble here because the summary fields, remember, looks at everything within the account. So if you do add the summary fields of, like, one year ago, two year ago, or whatever, it will, it will include potentially the funds you don't want to include. So just keep in mind that because we are working specifically with a group of funds, that you do want to see excluding some others that you don't want to see, you would want to do the aggregates, and you'll wanna make sure that you collapse groups instead of show group totals. Because if you did show group totals, each person individual gift would be listed, but it will repeat the aggregated columns for each line. So I I would say whenever you're working with the aggregates, you'll wanna make sure that you're collapsing groups. And I can show you how that will work. Let me come back here to summary fields or I'm sorry, to commonly used fields, And I'll just put in a couple of aggregates here one year ago. Let me put one more in there for two years ago. Now when I save and run now remember, I'm also I'm grouping by the account now, not by the funds because that's you could group by the fund and just have each year for each fund, but, I decided to group by account in this case so you can kind of see, a bigger list here. But now when I display the results on screen, each person listed once their year to date, which, you'll only see information for myself because that was the only person who had gifts for that, and then 2025, 2024. And then each person's year, you know, that year aggregate will be there. So, yeah, you could do that. So if you have just a if you just have a, a group of all of your transactions minus a particular fund, or would not using a particular fund, just the specific funds you do wanna see and there's no date range for it, you can absolutely show and use those aggregates on each of those received to show year to date, one year ago, two year ago, three year ago, what have you. You're welcome. Alright. What other questions do folks have here? And while I wait for any other additional questions to come in, has anybody since last week who's attending today, have you played around with any of the summary fields or or any of the aggregates? And, what what did you see when you did that, or or how was it working for you? Was were you kind of, you know, seeing a little bit more about what you wanted to see, or was it were you still maybe having a little bit of, struggle with with, you know, kind of parsing out which one to use when? I'm kinda curious. So always get curious about if, you know, if people, you know, would come to a session and then they they try some stuff, you know, afterwards. And, oh, okay. Yeah. Cindy's been playing around with it. Yeah. I've been, Oh, okay, Abby. Yeah. I'll come back around that here in just a moment. Cindy, have you been, were you kinda getting into, like, what all the different summary fields, or what are the the different types of aggregates you could use, or what were some of the things that you were kinda playing around with that you found most useful? Okay. I see I see Meredith. Yeah. I'll, I can speak to that here as well. Because that because that's an excellent question. I think there is something there to be, you know, said about, like, you know, what's the difference when it comes to that, you know, ability with with queries and reports. I I can certainly talk about that in just a moment. So, oh, okay. Yeah. I, yeah, I understand. So, hopefully, you know, hopefully, you'll you'll have a little bit of, some more based on what we had talked about here and see, and see how that might be able to to help you out there, especially when it comes to, like, being able to remove certain funds or or whatever. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Let me go to Abby's question since she came in just ahead of Meredith's there. Abby, what are some of the struggles that you're having with the head of household reports? Always use the counts. Okay. Yeah. So when it comes to so there's a couple of different ways. So I guess yeah. I'll I'll back up a little bit here and say, you know, when it comes to head of households and and household type reporting and stuff like that, there's always going to be a couple of ways that it can be kind of gather that information so that it only displays, like, the head of household, as opposed to the in the each the individual members and and all of that. Especially when it comes to mailings and stuff like that, it can become very, very important that you only are sending one piece and and, you know, and you're not having a bunch of extra, you know, a lot of extra stuff like that. Okay. Yeah. So business owners donating online, creating new accounts. I'll circle back around to that here in just a moment. Just to kinda give everybody a a little bit of a, of a of a quick kind of refresher of a couple of things here. If you're, you know, if you're building a query, one of the things that you will find is, when it comes to the data return type, more often than not, unless I'm hearing that somebody is specifically talking about finding household information, finding household, you know, only wanting the head of household type stuff, and and then making sure that everybody's giving and all of that stuff is included. Unless I hear specifically that that's what somebody is looking for, more often than not, then I'm going to say, oh, well, the data return type for your queries are going to be accounts or journal entries. Right? But there is a way to to get a data return type of simply the head of household accounts. Okay? What that will do is let's say, we have Jeff and Sally Arbuckle. And, you know, your primary relationship may be with Sally and not necessarily with Jeff, but Jeff is, you know, somewhat active, but, you know, Sally is maybe a board member or or whatever. Right? So Sally may be designated as the head of household. Okay? And Jeff may just be a member. But at some point, throughout whatever time frame that you're looking at, they have both individually given. Maybe Jeff gave online on giving Tuesday, Sally gives a monthly gift or something like that. So what this will do is with the head of household, it would say, okay. Well, if I wanna find everybody who made a transaction in 2026. Well, if this was accounts or journal entries, you would see both Jeff and Sally regardless of, you know, whether Jeff or Sally is the head of household. They both gave individually. But if I were to say I want to show head of household accounts that gave in 2026, then the results of that query would only show Sally. That's one way that you can say, okay. We wanna make sure that we have all of the, you know, just the head of household people, especially if it's for a mailing or something like that. Okay? The other option that you have, and and I'm only gonna talk about reports, although there is an option to be able to group it this way in communication templates too. So if you're creating a letter and you only want to create a letter for the head of household, then, you know, it would there was there is a grouping option for household there. But in a report, when you group things, and this is especially helpful if you are working from a journal entries return type query, and it's just simply journal entries and you're seeing everybody's individual transactions. It can also be handy if you're working from something like just as simple as base all constituents for the report and you just wanna see the head of household account, there is a grouping option here for household. Oop. Did not select it. There it is. So there is a grouping option for household, and you can say show group totals or you can say collapse groups. And what it will do is it will just it will take all of that information from the query and say, okay. Now group it by household, and Sally and Jeff's transactions will be added up and shown on one line. Another thing that you will have, fields for are these household fields. Now here's a little bit of a tip and or trick. Household fields are just summary fields but for the entire household. So instead of you saying, okay. Well, if I were to use summary fields in this setup where I'm grouping the report by the, household accounts and I use summary fields. It's only going to show the head of household's summary information, but the household fields have household, you know, one year ago, two year ago, year to date, whatever. So it's the summary fields but structured for the entirety of the household. So that is another way that you can potentially get some information from the household side of things. Now Abby here mentions, recently, we've had business owners donating online and creating new accounts. So let me ask you this, Abby. When that happens, do you then connect them in a household relationship with their business? Okay. Good. So at that point in time when you are, you know, grouping you know, if, like, if you do a a a head of household accounts, return type query, it should show the business name. If you have everybody individually listed and but you come into a report and you do a household grouping, it should pull that individual's, information up with the head of household, which would be the business. Now another question that I have for you, Abby, is the business owner making a donation on behalf of the business? Yes. Okay. So a couple of things here that we can take into consideration. One thing you could do instead of, there are two things you can do. Instead of connecting that individual as a member of the household with the business, you could, if you know that this transaction is specifically from the business and not from a personal account of the owner of the business because that would be a completely different topic. Because if it was a personal donation just made happen to be by the owner of the business, you would want him to have his own account in his own household. Right? But if it's on behalf of the business, I would almost say to yeah. It's a sponsorship donation. So it's on behalf of the of the business. I would almost say to, merge the transaction into the business account at that point because it's not really the individual making that donation. It's the business, but he's the representative and owner or whatever. It doesn't matter if he's the owner or just the representative of the business. It's on behalf of the business. I would probably just simply merge the transaction into that account. Now another thing you could do, because if the if the business owner has his own personal account, you could and I can show you this here. If you go into the journal of the person who made the gift, that's contact entry. That's not a gift. Helps if I actually read what I'm clicking on here. You can actually move the transaction to a different account. So I can say, I wanna move my transaction to ABC organization. And when I do that, I get this, you know, do you wanna move this $1,500 gift to that account? I can I can do that? So what I would recommend is either merge the account. Like, if if you don't think that person's ever going to give personally or if they've never given personally and you're not sure if they will, now if, you know, that I would say merge it into the business account. If they have given personally before and the gift is in their journal entry because they filled out the form, And then what you can do is you can say move the transaction just from the individual's account into the business account. And, you know, like, if I were to say move transaction, now I don't have that gift from I think that was from the sixteenth or seventeenth of of, June, but can't spell either. There we go. But now if I go into the journal of ABC organization, there it is. My fifteen hundred dollar transaction is now in their account. If you merge the account as a business persona under a person, the journal entry list under the individual versus the business name. Right? Yes. That is that would be it it depends on if you were to merge the account. So, like, here's here's the thing here. Let me go back to my account here. If I say, okay. I made one single gift. It was on behalf of ABC organization. It's not a personal gift. I can go into the account settings, and when I say merge role, I can find a b c organization. And now what I have the choice is to say, okay. I want to merge the information from this person, you know, from this individual's account into this business account. And the options here would be, okay. Well, what's the account information? Well, the account information is gonna be an individual account with my name versus a business account with business name. Merge would just simply say, okay. Well, Jeff Arbuckle's name is not gonna be, it's not gonna replace the name of the account. It's just gonna fill in any empty information, which there really won't be any. Defined fields will merge and fill in where need be. When it comes to the business persona or the personas, you can choose to say, okay. I wanna merge this information into a business persona on the other account that it's going to, But you want to be careful and you wanna make sure that you have the right accounts listed as the duplicate versus the target. The target is where everything's going to. So what you would not want to do is you would not want this to be the other way around where a where a b c organization's merging into my account because I'm not the business account. Right? I'm I'm the individual who made a gift on behalf of the business. So what we would want it to really go into is the account that is labeled as ABC organization. My guess is is that what's being filled out as far as the address information is going to be the same information as the business's information. If it isn't, but it's still a business donation, then it you would, you know, you wouldn't probably want to merge that or replace the business's information with anybody's personal information. So it's just a matter of knowing, okay. If I if I take this stuff and I move it over here, make sure things aren't being replaced or changed to display the individual's information or name. Okay? But if it's, you know, Jeff Arbuckle makes personal donations, he's just making a donation on behalf of his business this time, then you have the ability to, at that point, like I was showing you, in the actual journal entry itself, moving the transaction from Jeff's account to ABC's account. The other thing that I would also recommend, Abby, is if this is being done on an online form Let's, oh, I gotta find the here we go. Let's just use this donation form option here. One thing you would want to make sure you are doing in the settings of your form is, let's see here. Under basic, this checkbox allows for people to put in business names instead of individual names, and you'll see that it appears now above the contact information. So if we were to look at the preview here, I have the choice now to say, oh, no. I'm from a business, and here's the business name. Here's my name, you know, because that's still part of the, probably, the credit card that I have from the business. But, you know, I'm putting in the address lines and all of that information from the business. So once you kinda you know, if you add that, you'll want to save, and then you'll wanna click go live so that it it makes that change for you. And then when businesses come to make a a sponsorship or any kind of business related donation, they have now the ability to select the business so that they can put in the business name, and and that should help cut down on those duplicate accounts. Hopefully, that helps you, Abby. Great. Okay. So going back to Meredith's question about, fairly comfortable using queries with summary fields and hardly ever use the reports, I'm still a bit confused about the advantages of using reports versus query previews. Excellent question because this may not be something that you necessarily have to change. There are a couple of instances, though, that I would say you would definitely wanna do a report for, but this is going to be something that might come down to personal preference depending on the report or the circumstance that you are utilizing the information. Right? So let's go into a couple of queries here. First of all, let's say this is, just the accounts of the people who gave to a particular fund. Okay? If I preview this, one of the things that you can do is this button right here allows you to export this just the way it is. You know? And you can say, yeah. I wanna I wanna pull everything out. I don't need anything more than this, or I don't need anything special about anything. I just need to see the account information for these accounts. I can also add some columns here, and there are some summary fields here. Right? Like, I've got my first received date, my first received amount, my largest, my, received total, let's say, lifetime and this year. And when I apply those changes, it gives me that information. Right? So, you know, regardless of, you know, whatever the query is for, I can add some additional information here. And, again, I can export this, and I can get that information. It will have all of this additional information. Now where things can get a little messy here is if this query was a journal entries return type query. So now if I preview this as a journal entry return type query, I've got all of this additional information here. Right? So it's like I've got each individual gift. I know what the amount was. I know what the date was. I know what type of journal entry it was and which fund and all of that. If I were to add some additional fields here, I do have additional journal fields that I can include, which might include things like information from a check or what the, credit card expiration date is. That might be something you wanna see for recurring gifts or or something of the like. You know, you can see other information here that might be key for what you want. Like, transaction type would tell me, you know, is it you know, well, transaction type is not much different than the, type here. It's pretty much the same field. It's just we added something more specific title. But you can include all sorts of different stuff here. You can export this. That's fine. But you'll notice here, we've got a b c, Jeff, Jeff, a b c, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Dan, Jeff, you know, and so on. Right? The power of the report versus the summary or the, the, preview of the query is the ability to say I want to without having to do anything in Excel once you export it, you know, collapse it or group it by the account so that it it's not just kind of based on the date. It's more based on the person's name or just gives the total for the person's name or whatever. The query preview again, if this was all if you just wanted to see the raw data and export the raw data, that's fine. You can do so. But one of the advantages of the of the reporting is the ability to say, okay. I wanna group it by accounts. I wanna collapse the groups, or I wanna group by account and I wanna show all of the transactions and get a grand total underneath the person's name before it goes to the next person, before it goes to the next person, next person, next person. Right? So there are times where you can just say, oh, the the query preview gives me exactly what I need. I'll just export it, and I'm I'm good to go, you know, or whatever. And that's fine. That's perfectly fine, especially if you're dealing with accounts. The power of the reports come from when you're dealing with these journal entries and these individualized journal entries. On top of that, while there are quite a few fields here that you can choose from, including, you know, all of your user defined fields are pretty much going to be made available to you. Not all of the summary fields. If you wanted to see more than year to date and last year, the report gives you up to five years in the past. It also gives you more different types of, you know, information as well in the summary fields. It also the report also gives you those household fields, the the household versions of the summary fields. As far as the journal fields, largely all of the journal fields would be there. So, again, if you're just wanting the the the raw data, the the query preview can work for you. But that's the main difference between the query preview and the report is just there are more display options and more column options in certain categories here that would be made available to you. So that's, you know, that's that's the primary difference there. You know, there's nothing wrong with just saying, oh, the the query preview gives me what I need. I'll just export it, and I'm and I'm done. And that's, you know, that's that's fine. But it's just the matter of the report gives you more more capabilities in terms of, like, manipulating how the data will look when you get the end result. Basically cutting out any kind of Excel work that might need to be done. Okay. Well, we are right about at time. One thing I wanted to say before we go here is we're kind of getting into the, to the last few, months that I do these these webinars for. I always skip December and January for a couple of different reasons. December, a lot of people take time off. January, a lot of people are kinda getting back up and started again. So I usually just kind of skip those two months. But I did wanna talk about that the September, October, and November sessions have been posted on the page here and just give you that link in the chat here so you don't have to wait for any invites. So what do I have coming up? Well, next month, I am going to talk about soft credits. And that was something that gets questioned. You know, I get a lot of questions about is what are soft credits? How can they be used? How can you report on them? So I thought, well, let's just talk about soft credits in September. In October, I'm going to go into a little bit more of the tips and tricks around, like, the funds, approaches, campaigns, and something that we have in the system called goals and how they can be used in various reports and how they can be used in, in other ways that might relate to, like, your bookkeeping side of things, particularly with funds. So I am going to talk a little bit about that and go into a little bit more detail about how these can actually end up becoming very useful analytical tools for you, as well as the goals. And then in November, I'm gonna get into more of, like, the the various different dashboards and the tiles and how you can have each user have their own customized way that they're displayed or how you can restrict some users from being able to see certain tiles. So some more tips and tricks coming your way. A lot of these come from suggestions that you yourselves have made, and I appreciate that. And like I said, I think, you know, when I get into when I return in February and start doing the webinars again, that's what I really would like to do a little bit more of is talk about those kind of little things that can make some difference in how you are reading data or utilizing, stuff for you know, stuff from within the TapStreet database that you maybe didn't know was there before. So, hopefully and I see Cindy's already signed up. So, hopefully, that, gives you something to look forward to in the coming months, and, I look forward to talking about those things. So let me just stop sharing there. Oh, wait. I did not mean this to completely and totally stop sharing. I just meant to switch over to the slides here. Yeah. Again, always recommend taking advantage of the various, resources that are available to you. I also recommend, getting signed up for the Blackbaud community. I think we are about to make some changes to the community, and and, I'm gonna actually be in a meeting tomorrow about, things that we might wanna see in the community and and how they might be displayed. So, there is some, some some construction work going on over there. But still, as it is, it's a great place to for you to be able to, connect with you with, your fellow etapstree users and and, pick some brains and and maybe get some ideas from other people in how they've been using things. But just wanted to say, again, thank you so much for attending. Look forward to, to getting with you next, next month to talk about, to talk about soft credits, and, hope everybody has a great rest of their day, great rest of their week, great rest of your, August, and let's look forward to the fall. Thank you.