January - June 2026

By now you should be familiar with the FinanceHelp email address (FinanceHelp@worldventure.com).  However, you may have been hesitant to use it for any number of reasons.  Maybe you have a favorite person that has helped you in the past.  Maybe you only remember the name or email address of one person in Finance.  Or maybe you just don’t like the impersonal feel of emailing a non-person.  These are understandable reactions to a generic email address.  However, there are significant advantages to the FH email address.  We’d like to suggest that using the FH email address might just be to your advantage—actually, several advantages!

First, by using the FH email address, you don’t have to remember who to email for what issue or problem.  This email address is connected to our automated case system.  As soon as our Salesforce system receives an email to the FH email address, it sets up a case.  This case is then automatically assigned to the appropriate person based on any recognized key words in your email’s subject heading, as well as your world region.  So you never need to remember to whom you should address your question or concern—the system will do that for you, even if it’s a different person since the last time you emailed about a similar issue.  And even though you’re emailing an impersonal email address, your question or issue will receive personal attention from the appropriate individual.

Secondly, the case that the system automatically generates in response to your email will retain all the emails, related files, and any notes that we make about it, all in one place.  There are two advantages to this.  It makes it easier and faster for us to access any previous communication, related file, or note when working on your case.  We don’t have to search our email inbox, or hunt down the file you sent us two days ago that we now can’t remember what folder we saved it in.  It’s all right there in the case.

In a similar vein, if after conversing with you several times or doing some preliminary research, we realize that your question needs to be handled by someone else, we can easily pass the case—with all its history, emails, notes, and other information—to another member of the Finance team.  Say after some back and forth and several files sent to us, we decide that it’s really a Payroll issue rather than a budget issue. We don’t have to forward five emails and three files to Payroll.  We simply reassign the case to the appropriate person and they immediately have everything they need to resolve your problem, including any notes we’ve made on it.

As you can see, using the case system—i.e., the FinanceHelp email address—is a huge advantage to both you and us.  For us, it allows us to be more efficient by streamlining our workflow because it keeps everything in one place.  Imagine having 20 or 30 open cases and you receive a new email about one of them.  Instead of pawing through the many emails in your inbox to refresh your memory about the history of that person’s issue, you simply go to that case and immediately have everything you might need at your fingertips to help resolve the person’s problem.  That’s what the case system does for us.

And it’s more efficient for you because you don’t have to know who to send your question to, and you’ll likely get a response more quickly since having everything related to your question together in one place allows us to be more efficient.

There are two more things that are helpful to keep in mind when using the FinanceHelp case system:

1. As already mentioned above, the case system uses any key words that it recognizes in the subject heading of your email to auto-assign the case to the appropriate person or department. In other words, it is advantageous to use an appropriate key word in your subject heading.  For instance, the word “budget” will automatically assign your case to your Staff Accountant.  Using the words “giving” or “commitment” will automatically assign the case to someone in Financial Services.  The words “wire” or “transmittal” will assign it to the person in Accounts Payable who handles those processes.  If you want a list of recognized key words, there is a document that lists them in our Knowledge Base on WorldVenture’s intranet.  But don’t worry if you can’t figure out the correct keyword.  Your case will still get to the right person, but it’s just a little more efficient if you use the appropriate keyword to start with.
2. The following implication is also explained in the article on “Finance Response Time” elsewhere in this newsletter, but it bears repeating here. When you want to send an email that’s related to an existing case, make sure that you either reply to an email from the case, or else copy-and-paste the case reference number from that case into your email somewhere—it can be in the text of the email or in the subject heading.  (Note that a reference number is not the same as the case number.  Case numbers are 6-7 digits and only numerals; reference numbers look like this:  ref:!00DA00IiP5.!500VX0i1qjH:ref, and usually appear in the subject heading of any email from the case.)  The reference number is how the case system recognizes your email as belonging to a specific case.  Sending a new email about an existing case to FinanceHelp without the original case reference number somewhere in the email text or subject heading will simply generate a new case, adding to our workload and slowing down response time because we may not immediately realize that the new case is related to your original case.  So if you use a fresh—i.e., non-reply—email to send an inquiry to FinanceHelp about an existing case rather than replying to an email from that case, make sure to add this reference number from the original case to your new email so that our case system recognizes it as belonging to an existing case and knows to route your email to that case.  We are immediately alerted about a new email to an existing case, so we are likely to respond to those more quickly than we are to a brand new case.

Thank you for your help by keeping these suggestions in mind.