Post-Auction Processes

After your auction has finished, the night has ended, and you’ve had a good night of sleep to recover from all the fun and excitement, there are still some tasks to wrap up.

1. Pending Checkouts – Remind the people that haven’t paid to check out.
2. Abandoned Items – How are you going to handle situations where winning bidders have backed out?
3. Import to DonorSnap – Transfer your contacts and donations from AuctionSnap to DonorSnap (or export to another Donor Management / CRM)
4. Bill Me / Invoice Payments – How will you collect the money from people that checked out and asked for an invoice to pay later?

1. Pending Checkouts

All winning bidders will be sent an email to alert them that they have won and their items have been added to their cart for checkout. The email will also include a link to go directly to checkout. If they forget to pay, they will need a reminder. If at all possible, make sure people pay the night of the event. Make announcements, send in-app notifications, and stop people at the door to give them as many reminders as possible.

Where to Find Pending Checkouts

At the top of the auction dashboard screen, you’ll see the Pending Checkout item along with any amounts that you are still waiting to collect. The ideal way for a participant to check out is through their mobile device because it will save time and minimize mistakes. If that isn’t an option for some reason, you can check a person out through the admin interface as they give you their payment information.

From the auction dashboard screen, select Checkout under the Auction Activity section. This will take you to the admin checkout screen where you can see all pending carts and create new carts.

Click the Participants dropdown field to browse all the participants. The ones with items still in their cart will have [Open $$$] after their name. Select one of those participants with and Open designation and you will see the cart contents in the box on the right side of the screen. When you have payment information, enter it at the bottom to complete the checkout.

Email Reminders – Unpaid Items in Carts

When someone slips through the cracks, use the email tool in AuctionSnap to send additional reminders with the link to go to checkout. Go to the auction dashboard page and click the Communication Tools button under the Auction Activity section.

Next click the Unpaid Items in Carts button:

The subject line will always begin with your auction name and be followed with the editable subject line on this page. Customize it as needed and click send to alert everyone that still has items in their cart that need to be checked out.

Call People

When all else fails, don’t hesitate to call people that have won an item and have not checked out. Then use the admin checkout or direct them to the mobile checkout. If you are unable to contact them then you have an abandoned item and should move forward with your plan.

2. Abandoned Items

It is important to have a plan in place for abandoned items – winning bids that have not been paid for. AuctionSnap does not store payment information, so you are not able to charge someone that abandons an item. One option is to have a deadline for winning bidders to pay. If the deadline has passed, then the next highest bidder will receive the opportunity to buy the item at their last bid price.

Deleting a Winning Bid

When moving on to the next highest bidder, the easiest way to handle that would be to be to delete the bid that has been abandoned.

This action is permanent and cannot be undone, so make sure you are certain this is how you want to proceed.

Go to the Bid Maintenance page under the Auction Activity section. Find the item that has not been paid for and click the delete icon on the left side of it.

Deleting the bid will revert the winning bid back to the previous bidder. You will need to notify them directly that this item has been added to their cart and they can check out through the mobile checkout.

3. Import to DonorSnap

There are two sets of data that need to be handled separately: Contacts and Donations. First you will need to link up your Participant records in AuctionSnap with the Contacts in DonorSnap.

Participant Linking

Go to the Participant Linking page under the DonorSnap Integration section of the auction dashboard. Here you will see a list of all of your auction participants and buttons to link/unlink them with their DonorSnap counterpart.

Click the Auto Link button at the top of the screen to quickly search your DonorSnap account for exact matches on the email addresses of your participants. If that email address is found in DonorSnap and is not duplicated, it will automatically link to that contact. If it is not found or it is duplicated, you will still see the blue Link button. Click that button to open up the manual linking page.

The lookup page is smart and will narrow your search automatically to contacts with some matching contact information. Find the appropriate contact and click the Link button. If you do not see one, use the search boxes above to find them. If no corresponding Contact exists in DonorSnap, then go back and leave them unlinked to create them as a new contact in DonorSnap during the integration push.

Transfer to DonorSnap

From the auction dashboard screen, click the Transfer/Export button under the DonorSnap Integration section. First push the new contacts over to DonorSnap if needed.

This page gives you a few options:

1. Export ## Participants to Excel: This is a complete export of all the participants to an Excel spreadsheet
2. Upload ## Participants Not Linked: This will create new contact records in DonorSnap for all of the participants in your auction that are not linked with an existing contact in DonorSnap.
3. Upload ## Participants Not Linked That Checked Out: This option is limited to only the people that made a payment/donation during the auction. If they did not have a transaction, they will not be created in DonorSnap.

At a minimum you will need to click the third button so that you can transfer your new donors over to DonorSnap so their transaction can also be created. If you do not want everyone that registered for the auction to be created in DonorSnap, do not click the second button.

Next click the Donation tab to set up how those will be pushed over to DonorSnap.

Fill out the settings on this page as you would like them to show up in DonorSnap. If you have donors that made additional donations or opted to cover the processing fees, those are both considered additional donations and more fields will show up for those.

If the value you want to use in DonorSnap hasn’t been created yet, you can create a new dropdown choice right from this screen using the New box on the right. All fields are optional.

Calculating Tax Deductible Amount

If you would like to calculate the tax deductible amounts in DonorSnap, check the box “Set value received to be the Fair Market Value.” This means that the FMV will be transfered to DonorSnap into the Value Received field. The total bid amount will be placed in the Donation Amount field. The tax deductible amount will be calculated as Donation Amount – Value Received = Tax Deductible Amount.

How to Handle Acknowledgement Letters

By default each checkout will be sent an email receipt. If you would like to also send more traditional acknowledgement letters from within DonorSnap, you should leave the “Mark all donation records as Acknowledged” box unchecked. This will add them to the queue to create your letters in DonorSnap. If the emailed receipt is all you want to send, then check this box and they will not be added to the queue in DonorSnap.

4. Bill Me / Invoice Payments

When you check someone out in the admin interface, you have the option to select “Bill Me Later.” Collecting on these payments later will need to be managed outside of AuctionSnap. It will be up to you to follow through and collect a check or mail invoice reminders as needed.

If you need to print a receipt/invoice, it can be done from the Checkout History section. Go to the Auction Activity section of the the auction dashboard and click the Checkout button. Click the Checkout History tab and find the one you would like to print in the listing at the top and click on it. Scroll down and click the PDF button to generate the receipt document. At the bottom it will say “Total Paid (Bill Me)” with the amount due.