Salvation Army improves Direct Debit efficiency with BANK WIZARD

Last year The Salvation Army raised £25m in donations from approximately 700,000 individuals and organisations. Historically however, with many on traditional bankers orders, only a relatively small number of donor payments - 45,000 - have been made by Direct Debit, despite it being one of the most cost effective payment methods available to charities. BANK WIZARD was recommended to The Salvation Army by Westwood Forster, the supplier of the charitys donor management software, Visual Alms. BANK WIZARD, embedded within Visual Alms, validates the bank account numbers and sort codes of donor accounts before the donations are submitted to BACS for processing. Weekly updates from Eiger Systems ensure that the system’s databases are maintained with the latest available bank and account data. Achieving a substantial reduction in bank validation errors has encouraged the Salvation Army to migrate to AUDDIS, the Automated Direct Debit Instruction Service. AUDDIS allows Direct Debit Instructions (DDIs) to be electronically transferred between Originators and paying banks, thereby supporting the imminent introduction of Paperless Direct Debit via the telephone and the charitys web site. The charity is now encouraging all regular donors to use Direct Debit thereby reducing the charitys overhead in payment processing.