I was prompted to write this after seeing a tweet highlighting Altru’s history function. The tweet pointed to the Blackbaud Know How article about how you can see who changed what and when on a record. For those of you unfamiliar with Altru, it is one of the more recent applications released on the Infinity platform.

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UK Fundraising are reporting the release of  Zeidman Development’s latest release – Audit Trail Free. Nice to see the company in the NP Tech media (even if it was a press release – but still!)

Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release (well re-release) of our Audit Trail customisation. The Audit Trail tracks changes made to records on The Raiser’s Edge. The three versions come in varying degrees of complexity.

Audit Trail Free – tracks constituent deletions and reports them to a log file

Audit Trail Basic – tracks constituent deletions, additions and updates and records them in a table that can be reported on, filter by, sliced and diced etc

Audit Trail Professional – does all of the above but also tracks gifts, relationships, actions and participants.

All three versions tell you who made the change and when. They also tell you the previous values and the updated values.

Audit Trail no longer requires the VBA module – so the free version is truly free!

Check out an overview video. Warning –  it’s cute.

For more information including a breakdown in the differences between the versions and to download Audit Trail check out the product page on our website

A few days shy of the end of the year, I hearby present to you the top visited plugins of 2008 (unless of course there is a sudden rush on any of them before midnight in which case the list will be adjusted accordingly). This list is based on the top number of clicks through to the more information about each plug-in supplied by each plug-in author.

Audit Trail
Blackbaud NetCommunity Integration
Bank Checker Solution
Clear Invalid Spouse IDs
Constituent Document Linker
Code Insert Custom Part
Convio DataSync Connector RE
ID Lookup
Action Reminder Updater
CanadianUpdateRE

Thank you to all that have added to the directory during the year and to those that have rated the plug-ins.

Here are the top 10 visited plugins for the month of February. These are ordered by plugins whose follow through link as been visited.

1 Convio DataSync Connector RE
2 Create Preferred Address
3 Action Reminder Updater
4 Alternate Address Deleter
5 Bank Checker Solution
6 Clean Static Queries
7 AFP
8 Audit Trail
9 Add Constituent ID
10 Custom Reports

This is perhaps more of a rant than anything else but after being so pleased with the way Blackbaud introduced Batch into the RE:API I now found myself stuck with another piece of Raiser’s Edge functionality that I am less than pleased with.In the UK Gift Aid is big business. In the States (and possibly elsewhere) the donor can claim tax back from charitable donations. In the UK it is the charity that can claim the money back from the government for

UK tax payers so this can amount to a very large sum of money if it is handled properly. There have been several changes to Gift Aid over the past four or five versions of Raiser’s Edge. One problem that was not addressed until recently was when Gift Aid had been taken in error and then claimed back from the Inland Revenue. If a gift was given in error then the Gift must be adjusted or written off and the Gift Aid must be reversed. If the Gift Aid was claimed in error (for example the donor was not a tax payer) then the Gift Aid alone must be reversed.
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Here are the most popular plugins for the month of November from the plugin directory. This is based on the click through for more information link.

1. Audit Trail
2. Action Reminder Updater
3. Convio DataSync Connector RE
4. Blackbaud NetCommunity Integration
5. Constituent Document Linker
6. Bank Checker Solution
7. Create Preferred Address
8. Alternate Address Deleter
9. AFP
10. Custom Reports

Cannot find the plugin that you are looking for? Get in contact with us and find out how we can make your Raiser’s Edge processes more efficient and make savings in both time and money.