It is possible to import gifts that come in from a constituent's bank or where the money is taken from their bank via a direct debit or direct deposit scheme (EFT).


In RE there is some confusion over terminology used for banks and financial relationships. In Importacular we refer to a bank as a financial institution such as you would see on a high street and a financial relationship as the bank account that an individual may have at that bank.


Firstly go to the Banks tab and create a new bank mapping (please note that this requires the paid data destination for Banks and Financial Relationships). The same field in the US version is "Transit/Routing" no and in the Canadian version it is "Institution Id" and Australia it is "BSB" number. The example here uses the UK version showing sort code but please use this in the same way as you would wherever you are in the world!


Before you are able to create a financial relationship you need to ensure that you have a bank that the constituent can use. Like everything else, if the bank already exists in RE then mapping to it will only update the existing one and not create a new record. We map our bank using the bank name which is require and the sort code. While the sort code is not required in RE it is, at least in the UK, essential. A bank may have a name but it will also have very many branches each one with their own sort code. We map this at the bank level.



Once we have the financial institution mapped, we can map the financial relationship. This mapping is specific to the constituent so in this we put things like the account number and the name of the account. We also need to specify which financial institution this relationship is related to. i.e. we tell Importacular the the bank that this account belongs to. In the dropdown we should see the name of the mapping we have just created i.e. "Bank"



Before we add the financial relationship to the gift, it is worth while taking a look at the area settings. Firstly for the bank:



Here we are saying that we should only add a new bank when no existing bank is found. We are matching on sort code which in the UK is a unique identifier for the bank. If we didn't do this then we would always match and always overwrite the bank that we find first.


For the financial relationship, we want to match on bank and account number. It is possible that the constituent has two accounts at the same bank so we don't want to overwrite the existing one.



Now in our gift mapping we can add the financial relationship in the same way that we did with the bank on the financial relationship mapping.




Note that in the current version there is a slight in consistency with the naming convention. The term "Bank" here should in fact be "Financial Relationship".