Importing giving from your weekly report
Giving history comes in by uploading a report — your ParishSoft contribution export (xlsx or CSV) is the default source, or you can upload your counting team's own weekly report in the same shape. Vianney matches each line to a household and a fund, shows its work, and asks you to approve anything uncertain — then, and only then, are the gifts recorded.
How it works
- 1. In Stewardship → Import giving, choose your file and click Upload & match.
- 2. Vianney matches each line: an envelope number that's an exact, single match is recorded as matched; a match by email or name is offered as candidates for you to confirm; anything else is unmatched.
- 3. The review screen shows only the rows that actually need your attention — clean, confident matches are recorded without making you click through each one.
- 4. For each candidate row, pick the right household from the list (or skip it). Vianney never guesses an identity — an uncertain line always waits for you.
- 5. Click Approve & record gifts. That is the only moment gifts are written.
Large files
Anything much over half a megabyte is parsed and matched in the background: the screen tells you so and keeps checking on its own, so you are not stuck watching it. The work happens on the server, so closing the tab does not lose it — reopen Stewardship → Import giving and pick the batch out of the import history.
There is a ceiling: an upload has to come in under 7 MB. A longer history is refused before anything is read, with a plain message. Export it in date ranges — a year at a time, say — and upload them one after another. Every batch is deduplicated against what is already recorded, so splitting an export costs you nothing.
Funds
Each row's fund is matched to a fund you already have, or offered to map to an existing fund or create a new one right from the review screen — a ParishSoft fund that doesn't exist yet in Vianney is never silently dropped or misfiled.
Unattributed rows
Loose-plate collections and rows that are really a fee rather than a gift from a household (for example, a returned-check fee) are recorded but flagged as unattributed — they post to the right fund for your books, but are deliberately left out of any household's giving history, donor lists, and giving-based saved lists, since they were never a personal gift.
Re-uploading is safe
Every gift is keyed to a stable Contribution ID, and funds are matched by a stable Fund ID rather than by name — so re-uploading the same file, or a later export where ParishSoft renamed a fund, never creates a duplicate. Already-recorded lines are reported as skipped, not doubled. If you click Approve & record gifts again while a large commit is still running, Vianney refuses the repeat and asks you to wait rather than starting a second run; once a commit has already finished, clicking it again simply returns the same result instead of erroring. Vianney also refuses to record a row where the person you picked doesn't belong to the household you picked — a mismatch there is caught before anything is written.
Archiving old imports
Once a batch is committed (or failed), you can archive it from the import history list — a tidy-up, not a delete: an archived batch keeps its full stats and audit trail, it just steps out of the default list. A Show archived toggle brings archived batches back into view, and archiving is reversible any time. A batch still in review or mid-commit can't be archived — finish or fail it first.
Privacy
An uploaded file is held only long enough to review; its raw rows are cleared once you commit. Real giving exports are never kept in Vianney's working files.