What a difference a week makes – in Birmingham at least!

With the worst of the snow now little but a fading memory and a rash of potholes, the all-important donorflex 8 Service Pack 1 is now back on course.

In short, it's ready to be downloaded from the website.

As usual, it's available via the Client menu's Your files and Profiles / Downloads area, which is accessible through your donorflex Liaison Manager's login. Look in the General downloads section and you'll find it in a zip file that also includes a set of installation instructions. Simply save the zip file and proceed.

Why is Service Pack 1 particularly important? It's because the clock's ticking down to the day when the window available to make Gift Aid claims drops from six to four years

SP1 includes new functionality that will be vital to you managing your Gift Aid claims in relation to the big change, which happens on April 1, 2010.

In short, the development allows donorflex to recognise the new four-year period rather than the outgoing six-year period.

Changes made in donorflex 8.0 Service Pack 1 (8.0.1.13) include:
  • Donor Management – Category drop-down: The list of categories offered in Donor Management is now filtered to only offer those categories that have been identified as being appropriate for the particular donor type. These links are defined via the Data Policy Tables
  • donorflex colour scheme: donorflex 8 introduced a new visual 'theme' and the ability to change your background colour was removed. This has now been reinstated

  • Gift Aid Target Enquiry: This enquiry has been enhanced to allow a date range to be specified. Also the enquiry now automatically excludes records that are of a type that is flagged as 'InActive'
  • Organised Events – Invitations Enquiry: This enquiry has been enhanced to include the ability to search on Participant Type and / or a range of Participant Sequence Numbers
  • donorflex RDE – Keyword Lookups: We've now added a keywords lookup to the Tributes, Journal Memo, IRO text and Comments columns

Please note that it's available only to organisations with a current Annual Software Support Agreement.