How would I send our staff a monthly (or weekly) TntMPD DataSync file?

Extremely useful for our Finnish Campus Crusade ministry. We use a commercial online database, which allows you to extract data in Excel format. We cannot handle the fuzz of an extra data server in between. This way of importing csv-data will provide an important step in adopting the TnTware in our organization. Thank you Troy!

I downloaded the "sample" .tntmpd file and tried to open it. It would NOT open.  I have TNTMPD 2.1 r9.

Am I doing something wrong?

Also,  are the Field descriptions specific ... by that I mean, for address, could you use "ADDRESS" as opposed to the field header listed, or does TNTMPD only look for those field names?

The field names must be exactly the same.  That is what TntMPD is looking for.

The sample.tntmpd worked fine for me.  Remember, you don't [File|Open] it.  But you can double-click on it.  Or you can open it under "Tools | Address and Gift Input from File".

Roger ... the fields names must be exactly the same.

I tried your suggestion. The "double-click" did not work, but the "Tools | Address and Gift Input from File" DID work.  (I am not sure what happened with double-click).

Now I just need to work on getting the data from the Quickbooks (non-profit - desktop) .csv file FORMATTED so it will work for this method. I am a medium-level VBA/MS-Access programmer, so I might try to format it using that approach. Do you recommend that?

Thanks for your help!

-- Tom

Sorry to be a bother ... Do you have to have ALL field headers represented in the header row (even though you might not have any data in it)?

Let me regroup ... what I MEANT to say is:

1)  Are all fields required?

2)  Must all headers be present regardless of whether or not their columns contain data?

3)  Is the order that the headers appear important?

Each column (header) must exist, but you don't always need to put data in each column in each row.  The order of the columns is not important.  If you only have a first name and no middle name, that's OK.  TntMPD doesn't expect everyone to have a middle name, for example.  But everyone should probably have a last name (or an organization name if PERSON_TYPE = "O").

Troy ..

I have successfully used MS-Access to manipulate the standard QuickBooks .CSV export to create a Sync file to use for the Gift import. I chose to go this route because it seemed that you have a number of safeguards build into your import process and I didn't want to bypass them.  

After I import the .CSV into MS-Access, I run a query where I join your Contact table and the .CSV where your "SaveAs Name" matches the CSV Account Name, from which I obtained the ContactID to use in my Sync file for PeopleID. The problem I had was that for some reason, I was not getting all the records to match, therefore, I had no ContactID to become the "PEOPLE_ID" in the Synch file.

Example: a existing contact in TnTMPD is "Jones, Sam" with ContactID 12345. The gift record coming in lists him as "Jones, Sam H." so my matching fails and I have no ContactID to become the PeopleID in the Synch file.

For the gift records that did match, I was able to successfully import them

One quirk I ran into, was that the second and subsequent imports, It would say its going to import, for example, 50 gift records, but on the next screen, it says it wants to remove the 1,500 existing records that were imported previously. Manually removing the checkmarks so that those records were not removed when I click "sync" was a major chore. On each subsequent import, it tries to remove all exisitng records. I am not sure what I am doing wrong.

I had a couple of thoughts and would appreciate your comments:

1) I could search for the MAX(ContactID) in the Contact table, add one, and assign it and  consecutive numbers for the PeopleID in the Sync file for the records that didn't match the "SaveAs" name in the Contacts table. What I don't know is if your ContactID is an autonumber and how the import would respond if it got an unknown People_ID.

2) If I knew more about how your tables work, I would attempt to add the data directly to the Gift table. I assume that ContactID and DonorID are required fields. I don't know if there are any other required fields. Could you give me some pointers on what to look out for?

Again, I am very impressed by TnTMPD and once I get my QB to TnTMPD flow more seamless, I plan to push our Board of Directors to adopt its use.

As always, thank you ahead of time for any help you can provide.

God bless,

-- Tom

Does QuickBooks NOT have donor ids?