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Karani Docs

A tour of Karani

Five minutes here will save you a lot of clicking around later.

The navigation

Section titled “The navigation”

Every page in Karani has the same dark rail down the left side.

The Karani left-hand navigation listing Dashboard, What's Next, Contacts, Tasks, Expenses, Finances, Campaigns, Events, Groups, Reports, Integrations, Import, Migrations, Blog, and User Guide
The primary navigation. Items with a + let you jump straight to the “add new” form.
Item What it’s for
Dashboard Your home screen. Rearrangeable — see customizing it.
What’s Next Karani’s suggestion engine. When you don’t know who to contact, start here.
Contacts Everyone you’re in relationship with. The + adds a new one.
Tasks Everything you’ve told yourself to do, ordered by due date.
Expenses Fundraising costs, tracked against categories. Only appears when accounting is enabled.
Finances Pledges, gifts, goals, and your online giving link.
Campaigns Time-boxed appeals with their own goal and results.
Events Banquets and galas — ticketing, registration, check-in, volunteers.
Groups Reusable lists of contacts. The + creates one.
Reports Fifteen built-in reports plus your own saved searches.
Integrations Stripe, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, and everything else Karani connects to.
Import CSV importers for contacts, gifts, pledges, interactions, and expenses.
Migrations Direct transfers from another CRM.
Blog Product news and fundraising articles from the Karani team.
User Guide These docs.

The top bar

Section titled “The top bar”
Karani's settings navigation, split into an Account Settings column with Preferences, Notifications, Integrations, Data, Gift Receipt, Donor Portal, Accounting, and Share Account, and a User Settings column with Profile, Accounts and Sharing, Plan, and Payment
Settings is split in two: things that belong to an account, and things that belong to you.

Along the top of every page:

  • Search — type any name and Karani finds the contact. Press Ctrl K to jump straight into it.
  • Adv. Search — the advanced search builder, for anything more complicated than a name.
  • Log out.

The dashboard

Section titled “The dashboard”

The dashboard is built from widgets, and you can rearrange them — see Customizing your dashboard. What follows is the standard set.

The Karani dashboard with a Tasks list, a Notepad, a Reports shortcut list, Gifts progress bars, an income and expense chart, Pledges progress, and Groups
The dashboard, top to bottom.

The dashboard is two columns.

On the left:

  • Tasks — the next few things due, with the contact each one relates to. Click the check to complete a task; it moves into that contact’s interaction history automatically.
  • Notepad — a scratch pad that saves as you type. Nothing clever, just somewhere to put a thought.
  • Reports — your saved searches, plus shortcuts to the most-used built-in reports.

On the right:

  • Gifts — given vs. goal this month and this year, plus any active campaign.
  • Expenses — income and expense over the last three months.
  • Pledges — pledged and potential income for this fiscal year and next.
  • Groups — your groups with a count of members.

The shape of the data

Section titled “The shape of the data”

Three ideas explain most of Karani:

  1. A contact is a person or organisation. Everything else hangs off a contact — gifts, pledges, tasks, interactions, tags, group memberships.
  2. A pledge is a promise; a gift is money that arrived. Karani tracks them separately and compares them, which is how it knows who’s behind.
  3. A task is future; an interaction is past. They’re the same kind of record. Completing a task turns it into an interaction.

Everything else — reports, campaigns, the donor portal — is a particular view over those three.