Ah, the holidays! From the many gatherings between friends and family, delicious treats and the spirit of giving that’s in the air, this time of the year is complete with cheer. But for Blackbaud CRM™ gift processors, that same spirit of giving can cause anxiety as they face one of the busiest and high volume times of the year. This can of course be stressful, and successfully managing the influx of gifts that comes with the end of the tax year requires preparation and planning.

Today we want to highlight a custom process we’ve developed to complement your import processes and increase efficiency. This is useful for every day, but especially in high volume times like end of year. The process is called the “File Watcher Utility”

This lightweight solution was developed to continuously poll a designated FTP or SFTP site for the presence of a file, and if found, trigger a business process or queue. This is useful for situations where a vendors’ delivery schedule of a particular file is unpredictable. Rather than continuously check FTP sites, or wait for file delivery notification emails (which may come at a time when you are busy), you can schedule this process to run on an interval you find appropriate (such as hourly), and then rely on this process to kick off your import immediately following detection of a new or updated file. When every minute counts, this ensures there is no downtime wasted, and also reduces burden on end users.

Many Blackbaud CRM™ customers are also choosing to leverage our BrightVine Data Loader (BVDL) and Agility Integration Platform to eliminate the need for manually transforming files or to create direct integrations to external systems through APIs. One such organization is UNICEF USA, who are using both the BVDL and file watcher process.

With these tools, they’ve eliminated the need to manually QC and adjust their daily lockbox files, instead relying on built in BVDL logic to check validity of items like finder number, appeal and source code combinations for them. They also now get a jumpstart on the import process as soon as the file is delivered (the timing of which varies from day to day).You can learn more about the BVDL here.

Regardless of which import tool you use, the File Watcher Process can be used in a variety of ways, including kicking off standard import processes and queues, since it is built to work with any Blackbaud CRM™ business process.

To request your free copy of this customization (that’s right, we said free...no strings attached!), simply send us an email and we'll provide you with the code. Happy Holidays from BrightVine.