11.1H Release

If you're part of the Preferred Client Program, you can download the latest desktop version in the Client Portal.

PDS Formation Office 11.1H, released for desktop and OnDemand 9-26-24, offers the following enhancements.

New and Improved Features

PDS Emails using Gmail

There's a new option for sending emails via PDS if you have a Gmail account. To use this method, update your Email Server settings. And make sure you authorize access so PDS can send emails using your Gmail account.
Note: If you previously set up a Gmail App Password, we recommend switching to the new Gmail OAuth 2.0 API method. This method is more secure and recommended by Google.

Improved Data Cleanup

We expanded the Clean Up Data process with more options for data efficiency! In the Members section, you can now see how many are marked as "Child" but are 18 years old or older. View the list of members and decide whether you want to set their type to "Adult" instead.
In the Financial Information section, you can now select a date for consolidating fund periods. It defaults to 7 years back.
For Duplicate Keywords, we added a worksheet that prints each keyword, the count, and the duplicate values. You can use this worksheet to determine which keywords need to be combined, if any.
For more information about each step of the process, see Clean Up Your Data.

Find Invalid Dates and Filter Fund History Entries

In the last release, we introduced a way to find invalid dates (before 01/01/1970) in your fund entries. We've expanded that feature to look for dates after 01/01/2100. It's likely that those were entered by mistake and need to be corrected.
To do so, go to the Tuition & Fees window, click Find History Entries in the navigation menu, and select the Find Invalid Dates checkbox. Click Find Matching Entries to locate any invalid date entries, and double-click an entry to go to the record and correct the date.
Additionally, when you filter the list of entries, the drop-down options now include only the values that are available in the current list. That way, you can more easily filter your list based on the current entries rather than all of your data.

eGiving for Church Budget

If you use Church Budget for online giving, you can now post those contributions in PDS. Once you receive the file with your donations and payments from Church Budget, follow the procedure in Post eGiving, making sure to select the Church Budget transfer type in step 2.
$eGiving quick posting showing the Transfer Type as Church Budget and an example of the File Name as C:\PDS\Files\ChurchBudget.csv$

Lock Columns for Payment/Donation Entry

When you add a new batch of payments/donations to post, you can now lock the column order. This is helpful if you typically click through the fields and want to ensure you don't accidentally reorder the columns. To do this, in the Quick Posting Options dialog box, select Lock Column Order.

We fixed issues that were reported internally to our team, as well as the following issues that affected some of our customers:

An error displayed when trying to print the report after a quick posting.
An error displayed when splitting amounts over $1,000 in the Payment/Donation Entry quick posting.
In the Address Export report, the default city/state was printing in some mailing and alternate addresses that should have been blank.
When modifying larger batches, it could take several minutes to complete. Now, it takes a matter of seconds to return to the batch list after you post changes.