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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS > Converting Data from Geminon |
Geminon church software is a program that is no longer available - the authors of it seem to have completely disappeared. DONATION can convert and import much of your data from the Geminon program, by reading it from an actual Geminon database file. Geminon stores some data that DONATION does not, so only data that is normally stored in the standard fields in DONATION is converted.
If you are using the Local Network Version of DONATION, the conversion can only be done from the Local Network Server Version - it cannot be done from the Local Network Client Version.
As of April 2015, this conversion feature is still fairly new, and we are not entirely sure which versions of Geminon it works with (if there were multiple versions) or whether there might be peculiarities of the data that cause problems for the conversion. If you try the conversion and have difficulties, please contact us at Software4Nonprofits for assistance. We may ask you to send us a copy of your Geminon database file for analysis, in order to have the program enhanced to convert that version's data as well.
The information that can be converted from your Geminon database is your organization's name and address, donation categories (what Geminon calls Offering Types), donors (what Geminon calls Members) and donations (what Geminon calls Offerings). All years of donations that are in the current data are imported, but data that has been archived in Geminon is not imported.
To start the conversion, use the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ From Geminon menu option. You will be prompted to select the Geminon database file to be converted. If the program cannot find a unique database file in the expected location, a file open dialog box comes up to select the file, initially in a folder where we think these files are generally found, but that may or may not be correct on your computer. The Geminon database file will be a filename ending in ".mdb". From there, just follow the prompts to have your Geminon data imported into DONATION.
On an initial startup of DONATION with an empty database, if it detects a Geminon database in the standard location for it, you will also be prompted about whether to convert the data. If you answer No then, you can convert it later with the menu option mentioned above.
The conversion of data from Geminon completely replaces any data that you already had in your DONATION database.
Note: Importing and converting your data from Geminon does not affect your existing Geminon data in any way - you will still be able to run Geminon after this (assuming you were able to run it before!).
Some specific notes on the conversion:
•DONATION keeps separate copies of donor records for each calendar year of data in the program. All donor/member records will be imported into the latest year (the one with the latest donation from Geminon). For prior years, only donor records that have donations will be imported. If for some reason you want the donors to be the same in all years, you can use the Copy Missing Donors function in DONATION.
•The same approach is taken with donation categories (called Offering Types in Geminon) - all of them are imported into the latest year, but only ones actually used in donations are imported into prior years.
•DONATION does not have a concept of families with family members. Any family members you specified in Geminon will have their basic details added to the Comments field for the donor record created in DONATION from the basic Member record for the family in Geminon.
•The Notes field for Members in Geminon is also copied into the Comments field in DONATION, preceding any family information, but only if no fonts, boldface etc. were used in Geminon, because that converts the Note to RTF (rich text format) which cannot easily be converted back to plain text for the Comments field.
•Some Geminon fields are longer than the corresponding fields in DONATION. If necessary, field contents will be truncated (cut down) to the maximum size in DONATION. If this happens, you will be shown a file of all such fixes after the conversion is completed, which you can print out and use to fix any problems caused by this truncation. For technical reasons, there may be some duplications in this list of fixes, for example donor names or donation categories that were cut down once for each year they were imported into. There is probably no good reason to do any fixes in anything other than the latest year.
•DONATION only has one phone number field, whereas Geminon has both Home Phone and Bus/Fax Phone fields. If there is a Home Phone, it will be used, and if not, if there is a Bus/Fax Phone, it will be used. If there is space after the phone number (which there usually will be, unless there's an extension), "(h)" will be added as an identifier after home phone numbers, and "(b/f)" as an identifier after business/fax numbers.
•Geminon has no special facility for business names, whereas DONATION has a Business Name field. Since there is no way to identify business names during the conversion, if you have any, you will want to move them from however they were split up in the First Name and Last Name fields into the Business Name field.
•It is possible for there to be unposted offerings (donations) in Geminon. If that is detected, you will be prompted with options as to what to do about that, including going back into Geminon to post them, or just importing them, or skipping them.
•Negative dollar amount corrections in Geminon seemed to be put into envelope number 9998, in a Member named "zz Account, Over Under". You shouldn't need a donor like that in DONATION (though if you want to get rid of it, you would first have to figure out what to do with any donations that were credited to it that were converted).