We’re pleased to announce our newest business partner, Profit Stars, a subsidiary of Jack Henry and Associates. Profit Stars will be providing a batch scanning and remote deposit capture solution for churches using Fellowship One.
Current Process
Many of our clients, especially larger ones, get hundreds and sometimes thousands of checks, into their offering plate each week. Before they can drive those checks to the bank for deposit they must first scan them into Fellowship One. As the checks are scanned into Fellowship One the data entry person enters the amount and visually verifies that the auto-matching process using the MICR code is correct. They also verify the activity, fund, pledge drive, etc.
Today, we only capture and store the front-side image of the check. A bit of trivia -- we have now captured and stored over 19 million check images! After scanning into Fellowship One is complete, they must then drive the checks to the bank for deposit. The church then waits for the checks to clear before they get access to those monies. Roughly 60 – 80% of the checks clear the next day, but checks drawn from smaller, more remote, banks may take several more days to clear. The diagram below illustrates the two step process of 1) Scanning into Fellowship One and 2) Driving the checks to the bank for deposit.
Our Interim Solution
After a long evaluation period we have chosen to partner with Profit Stars. With Profit Stars a church can use a batch scanner which can scan 30 – 100 checks every minute or so. The process is similar to the current one but with some big advantages. They open up Profit Stars, create a new batch, enter the total number of checks and total amount of money in that batch. They press go and the batch scanner quickly scans each check into the system. The church then presses save and moves onto the next batch.
But wait, didn’t I skip a step? What about entering the amounts, balancing the batch, etc.? The beauty is you don’t have to! Profit Stars leverages Courtesy Amount (CAR) and Legal Amount (LAR) Recognition technology to automatically read the written amounts on the checks. And for those it cannot read successfully they have a team of people on the back-end that will manually correct and balance the batch for the church. Next they convert those checks into either ACH transactions or Check 21 files for clearing. If all of the batches are scanned prior to about 6:00pm CT then Profit Stars will then make a deposit into the church’s bank the following morning for 100% of the total deposit -- even if all of the checks have not yet cleared (for qualifying churches).
Will you still need to scan the checks into Fellowship One? The software integration is still in progress. So if a church wanted to use Profit Stars now then they would have to scan the checks twice – once into Profit Stars and once into Fellowship One. Why start there? Well many churches are being pushed to use this technology by their local bank. So if the church is intent on using a Remote Deposit Capture solution, why not use Profit Stars instead? This will place you into a great position when integration is completed.
There are many churches that really want the security, convenience, and 100% next-day funds availability offered in this solution. They can complete the scanning into Profit Stars in just an hour or two and then can take as much time as they want to scan them into Fellowship One (since the deposit is already on its way electronically). The diagram below illustrates the three step process of 1) Scanning into Profit Stars, 2) Profit Stars deposits the monies into the church’s bank, and 3) Scanning into Fellowship One.
Final Solution
The integration into Fellowship One will be completed in an upcoming quarter. In this solution, a church that is using Remote Deposit Capture would only scan their checks once. The diagram below illustrates the four step process of 1) The church would scan into Profit Stars, 2) Profit Stars deposits the monies into the church’s bank, 3) Profit Stars will pass back to Fellowship One a file containing all of the check images, account/routing numbers, and amount, 4) We would then import the images and data into an interface similar to Fellowship One Contributions where the church could visually verify the activity, fund, pledge drive, and Household/Individual.
Who does a church contact for more information?
For questions or more information, please email us at remotedeposit (at) fellowshiptech.com