How to map recurring C&P transactions to their corresponding installments?

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

Excellent - I think I can give you a clear instructions there.

C&P Recurring Donations require a form of automated payment- they are not created until a form is filled out (which can be any or our forms- Virtual Terminal, Connect form, API custom form) with either a credit card number or echeck information. Recurring Donations have fields of Total Commitment, Installment Amount, Total Paid, and Remaining Balance. Indefinite Recurrings may throw a wrench into trying to forecast, since that value can be estimated pretty high. You may need to plan a custom formula field to hold the income you would receive from the next X number of payments, based on how you have set up NPSP to forecast Recurring Donations.

In the event that you want to record a pledge, but you don't have automatic payment method to schedule the pledge by- you can record it as a C&P Pledge - there is a tab for C&P Pledges in Donor Management (Payment as a Service) app. This has a field called Total Pledge and another field called Remaining Balance.

You're probably looking for a combination of both- so that you can accept some payments that are set up online as pledges, and some payments that are initially established manually, but payments may or may not be paid online.

Documentation

• Recurring Donations
• C&P Pledges

I'm guessing that you may be taking these in as part of the same "program", so you'd probably want to report on both in the same report. Both express their payments in Opportunities, but as they are different objects that may be a little tricky.

I'm glad this has come to my attention- because it will be excellent for me to look into this and come up with documentation on the best way of managing both together, and will inform our next release.

Tips on moving forward:

• Look into how you can make sure both Recurring Donations and C&P Pledges come in as the same Opportunity Record Type, and this is probably best done with SKUs.

I will look into creating documentation for this.

• Explore the options of how you can combine the information you will need into the same report. This may get tricky - I don't know if there would be a way to create a Custom Report type that could include the Recurring Donations, the Pledges, and their related Transactions and Opportunities on a single report. What might be simpler would be to create a custom formula field on the Opportunity that can hold the total expected value of the pledge- I would have to explore whether this would be cleaner in one formula field or two- but essentially you'd be creating a 'roll down' as a formula. (Both Recurring Donations and Pledges are related to their Opportunities and Transactions, but I will have to clarify for myself the exact nature of those relationships,.)

I will need to play with this in a test environment to determine what will work best, but this would also be nice documentation to add to our Knowledge Base

• Come up with a SKU naming schema that you can use both to allow automated payment of Pledges and Recurring Donations- so that the Opportunity is processed the same way for both. You would want a SKU schema that can automatically be nearly infallibly unique- so you can set the expectation for your Pledges.

This is a bit challenging, you may want to take the size of your organization into account. My first thought was PLG-(First Initial)(Last Name) and possibly an additional 2 digit or 3 digit number to be unique, but this might be hard if you need to worry about that pattern being the same for different people, e.g. PLG-JSmith01 made by Jeremy Smith, and PLG-JSmith01 made by Jessica Smith. Another option would be email, e.g. [email protected]- that would be more likely to stay unique, and have the added benefit that you can play with that string to make notifications and automations more easily.

I do think documenting a combined method of using Pledges and Recurring Donations together would be great to addition to our Knowledge Base, but I'm afraid I cannot give you a timeline on how quickly I can make that happen. There's quite a few- 'investigate capabilities of Salesforce to address this issue' involved. If looking into any of those suggestions sounds extra fun to you, I'd be glad to collaborate with you to divide the labor of outlining a complete solution- we can continue the discussion here, or using the message tool of the forum.

Once those topics have been researched to create a plan, you could move your data for your existing NPSP Recurring Donations into C&P Pledges and go from there.

Does that sound like a plan? Amanda

[Susanna]

Once those topics have been researched to create a plan, you could move your data for your existing NPSP Recurring Donations into C&P Pledges and go from there. Does that sound like a plan?

Amanda, thanks for the detailed response. I had no idea I was opening Pandora's box in asking for the best solution here. Yikes. I'd love to collaborate on a solution and learn more in depth about how C&P functions, but I am part time and already overextended. Also: this may be a bit over my head. As you can imagine, all we want on our end is to be able to run things smoothly and cleanly with minimal required workarounds. This means:

1. have online recurring payments reflect automatically against the corresponding Opportunity in Salesforce, however that is designed (sounds like it must be C&P Recurrings in order for this to happen);
2. run clean reports on our pledges, no matter how they're paid. It's not entirely clear that this is possible, and now I wonder if making any change at all to correct the manual work I must currently do (your Option 2 upthread) will be paving the way for even more work on the other end.

You're probably looking for a combination of both- so that you can accept some payments that are set up online as pledges, and some payments that are initially established manually, but payments may or may not be paid online.

This is exactly right. I'm holding off on any changes now as a result of the reporting concerns raised by switching everything over to C&P Recurrings (and, it seems, C&P Pledges). It's just not clear enough to me how to manage these in conjunction with straight Opportunities, and definitely not certain to save me effort in the end. But please let me know once you develop solutions, because I'm very interested! thanks.

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

I understand about being over-extended - tell you what? I'll look into starting documentation for Migrating Recurring Donations to C&P and have part one (the record types) available for you to set up by the weekend, so you can be making progress. I'll message you with the work in progress.

~ Amanda

[skari.IISD]

Hi Amanda & Susanna

I read this thread with great interest. We're finishing up our implementation of Click and Pledge.

Did you ever create a solution (or workaround) to this issue with NPSP & recurring gifts?

Best,
Siobhan