Question

Photo of Josh Maiorino

0

MICR Check Scanning(MAC)

I've got an MICR check scanner that I'm using to remote deposit to a BOA account from a Mac computer.  Has anyone done any work to integrate Check Scanning from a mac?  Or import Deposit data from CSV?


The Check scanner is made by Digital Check Model CHEXPRESS CX30



  • Photo of Michael Garrison

    0

    Joshua,

    I haven't seen anyone talking about check scanning from a Mac, but the API is there so I'm sure all it would take would be funding to pay a programmer's time to build it. And this would almost certainly be the "easy" solution, since the concept of check reconciliation is already built into Rock. The trick is in finding out whether your scanner has a driver that allows it's data to be called for by an external program like the Ranger driver does on Windows.

    There have been some in-house solutions that churches have used to import deposits from files like a CSV, but there's a lot of per-church customization that has to go into it ... my understanding is it's pretty hard to maintain. You'd have to create a batch for the deposits to go into (manually or programmatically) and reference that ID for each transaction to import, have some way of referencing the correct Rock Person Alias Id for each transaction (turning "Ted Decker" into PersonAliasId=32, "Brian Jones" into PersonAliasId=64, etc), and likewise have some way of referencing the correct Rock Account ID for each transaction (turning "General Fund" into AccountID=1, "Missions Fund" into AccountID=2). If you want to save the check images, those would need to get tied in to the records you create, into a different table as well.

    As an example, our church uses SecureGive to take contributions online. They push the day's transactions directly into our Rock instance each night. But before they can do so, we have to go into their interface and set up the Financial Account mappings and person mappings for every contributor and every fund, so they know how to rewrite the person IDs on their side to match the correct person ID in Rock, and likewise the account IDs. They then "hold" any transactions from people (or to accounts) for which we have not yet set up such a mapping, only importing them into Rock once we've provided the links. To import a CSV (or any other file), you'll have to maintain such a system yourself.

    It's not at all that it's impossible, it's just that it's a lot of work which is custom for each individual church, and must be maintained as such as new people start contributing and new accounts get made. So there hasn't been any widespread tool published to handle this to date.

    I know it's not the answer you were hoping for, but I hope the explanation helped. Let me know if you'd like to dialogue a little more about details regarding what such a system would take; I'm not the programmer you'd need but I've messed around enough on the database side of the Transactions part of Rock, that I can help you find what would need to be done.

    If you'd like to chat instead of posting, hop into the RockRMS Slack team at http://www.rockrms.com/slack ...there's a #giving channel in there with lots of helpful people!

    • Michael Garrison

      Per a discussion in Slack right now, you might also consider using a supported scanner with a virtualized Windows environment instead, or get one $100 PC for this one task and a supported scanner. Just to provide you a few more options