Since continuing political committees “close out” at the end of every calendar year, there is some extra work to be done in January to prepare for another year of reporting.
You will need to know the “cash on hand” balance from Line 18 of your December C-4 report. Please DO NOT use a beginning balance that does not match your bank balance. Doing this recreates any aggregation problems from previous years. Please contact PDC staff for guidance on correcting earlier reports.
First, make a backup of your campaign data from the current year and update your version of ORCA. To update your ORCA, go here.
To create a backup:
You can import your lists(s) of contacts from the previous year ORCA data into your newly created coming year ORCA campaign so you don’t have to re-type them. Your contacts are found by going to ACCOUNTS>CONTACTS>INDIVIDUALS. The import process will go smoothly if you don’t have any errors in your current list. In the current year campaign, use the “browse” button found in the bottom right corner of ACCOUNTS>CONTACTS>INDIVIDUALS (or the appropriate choice) to review your old year's list. Delete any empty lines you find in your list. Repeat this process for your couple contacts (ACCOUNTS>CONTACTS>COUPLES) making sure all your “couple” contacts have both an appropriate “couple name” and separate unique contact entries. Please review to ensure your "other" contacts, (ACCOUNTS>CONTACTS>OTHERS) are correct as well.
If you import contacts from the current year to the coming year and errors exist in the current year campaign, ORCA will halt the import process. If you import a second time it will import the entire list again, subsequently duplicating the names from the first attempt. You can delete the duplicates after the import process is successful or choose to start over by deleting the new year campaign and repeating steps 1-4 in the section above.