Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at the NCS Beneficiary Intake SOP.

NCS stands for NZRT Charitable Services, and this procedure covers how enquiries from charities and community organisations make their way into the system — automatically, with very little manual handling. Let’s walk through it.

It all starts with a web form. A visitor lands on the NCS intake page at nzrtnetwork dot com slash ncs-intake and fills in their details. One thing worth knowing: that page isn’t a WordPress page or a plugin. It’s a standalone PHP file, which keeps it simple and self-contained.

When the form is submitted, the PHP does several things in sequence. First, it sends the details straight to Dolibarr, our ERP, creating a new third-party record — that’s the organisation — tagged as an NCS entity, with a client code built from the organisation name and a timestamp.

Next, it creates a ticket for cas, the customer and sales agent, directly through the Dolibarr API. The ticket is marked as charitable services, assigned to cas, and linked to the organisation’s record and to the NCS project. It’s worth noting that an earlier approach using a Dolibarr trigger was abandoned — the team found it more reliable to create the ticket directly in PHP instead.

Once the record and ticket exist, the PHP sends an email to Nathan with a summary of the application and the delivery instructions. And this is where the human step comes in.

Nathan reviews the application. The email subject makes it easy to spot — it reads NCS Application, followed by the organisation name. If the organisation is a good fit, Nathan simply replies with the word approved, followed by the services. That reply is the trigger. A background process called mail handler watches for it, and when it sees the approval, cas runs the delivery script and sends the applicant their resources automatically. If the organisation isn’t suitable, Nathan just doesn’t reply, and handles it manually instead.

A quick word on how the form fields map across. The organisation name becomes both the record name and the prefix of the client code. Email and phone carry straight over. And the free-text message is stored as a private note on the organisation’s record, so the context is never lost.

Finally, escalation. If an applicant goes quiet after three attempts over seven days, the organisation is marked as cold and the ticket is closed. And if the applicant turns out to be a school or a large institution, that’s deferred — it sits outside the near-term scope of NCS for now.

So that’s the whole journey: a single web form, an automatic path into Dolibarr, one clear approval step from Nathan, and an automated delivery at the end. It’s a good example of how a small charitable operation can run lean — letting the agents handle the plumbing, and keeping the human in the loop only where judgement is genuinely needed.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.