Are All of Your Receivables Coming From One Database?
If your organization uses a centralized enterprise-wide AMS, one of the primary processes it should manage is accounts receivables. That's geek-speak for invoices. If you are managing all of your processes (membership dues, events, publication sales, development, etc.) in one database, then all of the invoices should be coming from one place.
There are a lot of good reasons for doing this, but one very important reason: Centralizing your invoicing allows you to know exactly how much each of your members/customers owes you and lets you act accordingly.
I once worked with an organization that did not have a centralized system; they were sending invoices from Word, Excel, and their membership database. As a result, they had over $150,000 in outstanding invoices owed to them by their members. It wasn't because their members were deadbeats that they weren't getting paid; it was because no one was following up on invoices sent. And they weren't following up because it was too difficult to locate all the different invoices that had been created.
So if you're currently running invoices from more than one system, STOP, and get them all into one database.
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