A big thank you to Bart Lont at g-company for putting together a nice explanation of how Guided Matching can help organizations reduce the time and manual effort needed to match donations to payments in Salesforce. The original blog post is in Dutch on the g-company blog. Below is a version in English.
Organizations that use Salesforce to handle donations can speed up the process with Guided Matching in FinDock. With Guided Matching you define a set of rules that is applied to all transactions coming into your system. This can significantly save time and reduce the need for manual matching of transactions to donations.
When there is a unique payment reference, matching is pretty easy. Absent a unique reference, there are plenty of scenarios where manual review and matching is necessary. For example, maybe you have collected donations for a housing project, but some donors have written “housing project” and others “housing projekt” in the transaction description.
Maybe a donor mentions “no thanks necessary” to tell you you don’t need to send a thank you letter. Maybe you don’t really want to see accounts payable payments in the list of transactions to be matched. For all these situations, you can create a specific Guided Matching rule to handle the transaction as desired. In other words, with Guided Matching you can not only match transactions, but you can enrich your data as well.
The result: less chance of human error and far fewer transactions that require manual intervention. For those cases where someone needs to take a look, FinDock helps with a Guided Review process to quickly fill the missing data.