May 24, 2019

Dime Tsunami is the codename that we've given to our new accounting platform. We are still in the design stages but we've roughed out the database design and several user interface areas. There's not much to show yet but we'll be releasing a very early "alpha" version for you to preview in the coming weeks.

Here's what's new with Dime Giving:

Text to Give

  • You can now give via SMS!
  • Each organization must opt in to Text to Give. To do that, simply go to Settings/Text to Give, and enter the area code in which you want your telephone number. Click to select one of the available numbers, and it's yours!
  • To donate, a donor can send a text message such as "Give $20" to your Text to Give number. Dime will reply with a URL which they can tap to complete the donation in their mobile browser.
  • Subsequent times a donor donates, they can simply text an amount, and it will automatically be paid using their credit card on file.

CCB Integration

  • Donors and donations can now be synchronized with Church Community Builder.
  • When you first enable the CCB integration, Dime Giving will download all the individuals from CCB into your Dime Giving database. Then it will upload any donors from Dime that don't yet exist in CCB. Then it will do the same with donations.
  • After the initial sync, donors and donations will automatically be kept up to date.

Dime Payments

  • An email notification is now sent to support@dime.is whenever a new merchant account is submitted.
  • Donor credit card details are now saved separately from the recurring donation, so that they can be used for text to give.
  • Admins can now browse recurring donations by clicking on Donations/Recurring. Click on the recurring donation to review its details.

Invite Codes

  • You can now use custom invitation codes when signing up a new organization. This lets you set up customized rate plans for onboarding customers onto Dime Payments.
  • To use an invitation code, simply pass it through the URL, like this: http://giving.simpledime.com/sign_up?invite_code=ABC123

Other Improvements & New Features

  • Updated navigation header on public pages to match the new website.
  • The New Donation form button now says "Save and New". If you click "Save and New" it will save the donation and then open up a new blank donation form. We also added a plain "Save" button, which will save the donation and then display it.
  • Undoing an import now no longer deletes the import record, only the donations. The import record is kept, which can help with debugging if something goes wrong with your import.

Bugs Fixed

  • Fixed a problem when importing donations that had a comma in the amount field, that would result in the amount being wrong.
  • Fixed a problem where the recurring button on the public donation page would sometimes be the wrong color.
  • Fixed an issue where the "new donation" button would sometimes wrap to the next line.

Version 19.7

What the heck - version 19.7 - where'd that come from? What happened to version 1.0?

We're using a calendar-based versioning system to keep track of releases. Even though this is really "version 1", we're calling it "19.7". The first number "19" refers to the year, and the second number refers to the number of releases in that year. This is the 7th release that we've done in 2019, so it's version 19.7.

I like this a lot better than the conventional way of numbering things. It turns out version 1.0, 2.0, etc. is pretty arbitrary. How much has to change before you switch to version 2.0? With calendar-based versioning, it's a lot easier to know when to increment the version, and that makes it easy to see what has changed between versions. So, welcome to 19.7!