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

[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

[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

[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]

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]

I'm sure I come across as a complete newbie trying to address this particular issue, but I'm really not so much a newbie in the greater land of Salesforce. The first half of your message I understand completely, but the overview is nice. The confusion lies, it seems, in that absence of a tight integration with NPSP Recurring Donations. I made the mistake during integration in assuming syncing them would be super straightforward when we were finally ready to implement C&P in Salesforce, and I was so wrong about that.

I was seeking those options, and I appreciate you laying those out so succinctly. Option 1 is exactly what I do now (not at all efficient of course; I want those recurring charges to just change stage automatically!). My need all along is how to seamlessly transition to Option 2. What do you recommend?

And thanks again; it's great to be communicating with someone who actively wants to help!

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

Payments is a different thing too, and they are exclusively NPSP. Payments let you set up an opportunity and multiple payments are tied to a single opportunity.

Each tab (as a general rule) in Salesforce represents an 'object'. Think of an object as a worksheet in Excel. Each row represents a record in the object.
Then there's a hierarchy to your worksheets - you could track your pledge as an opportunity, and then have multiple payments tied to that opportunity. Your spreadsheet has 2 Worksheets - one for Opportunities, one for Payments. The Opportunity worksheet has a column for ID. Each pledge you record on the Opportunity worksheet has a unique ID. Your Payments worksheet has it's own column for ID, and then it has another column for which Opportunity it is tied to. So each payment is related to an opportunity by the value in it's Opportunity ID column.

This is how relational databases work. Each object has its record, and each parent object (Opportunity) can have a 'child' object (Payment) that is related to it based on the Opportunity ID that the Payment record is assigned.This way multiple Payment records (or rows on your Payments worksheet) can apply to a single Opportunity 'Pledge
(a single row on your Opportunity worksheet).

NPSP is an app that takes traditional Salesforce, and adds to it so that nonprofits can track their data- but NPSP is primarily a structure for storing information, with some extra fields that help make the calculations easier- your organization does all the manual data entry into that structure.

Click & Pledge is bank account and the software that nonprofits need to accept payments. Some of our clients do not use Salesforce at all- they have Click and Pledge to accept and store records of their transactions. Click & Pledge has an additional app that can be added to Salesforce that can take the data that is in your nonprofit Click & Pledge account, and bring it into Salesforce- so that you can store the data in Salesforce and use it with other features/aspects of Salesforce. It's not a sync- when Click&Pledge adds information to Salesforce it's not looking at what's already there. It brings the information in, and then the Click & Pledge Donor Management app (aka Payments as a Service) looks at that data, then looks at the C&P settings, and then writes the data into Salesforce Contacts, a C&P Transaction record, and Opportunities - with some minimal impact on Accounts and Campaigns. In the case of recurring donations that have been set up automatically with Click&Pledge - the C&P Donor Management app can update the C&P Recurring Donation record.

There is no currently no way to automatically relate the Click and Pledge Recurring Donation to one you created in someone else's product. If you had some way to pass the NPSP Recurring Donation ID so that it was tied to the transaction when your Donor fills out the form, then we could create an opportunity that was related to the NPSP Recurring Donation, but it still wouldn't erase the 'predicted' donation that NPSP creates as an Opportunity with an open stage like 'Pledged'.

Option 1: If you want to use both methods - then as each C&P donation gets recorded, you would need to manually open the Opportunity created by C&P, assign it to the NPSP Recurring Donation, and then delete the open Opportunity that NPSP created for that expected payment. Manually. That also introduces a lot of room for human error- because you have to make sure every one is manually updated.

Option 2: Or you could just use C&P, and do nothing with NPSP Recurring Donations to show when you are expecting a payment. You would have a C&P Recurring record that will tell you how many installments have been made and how many more are expected.

Option 3: Or you can just use NPSP to record pledges as Recurring Donations, accept money from your donors by whatever method you like, and manually record each payment as it comes in.

Option 4: You can create pledges as Opportunities with an open Stage, and then apply payments to that Opportunity

We are hoping to add a tighter integration with NPSP Recurring Donations in the future, but currently it is not available, and you have to decide which option works best for you.

Salesforce is beautiful because it is customizable, but it is also a beast because it is customizable, and you have to create a plan for how to record your information.

Hope that helps. ~ Amanda

[Susanna]

Thank you Amanda, what a helpful response; we very much appreciate your offer to help fix this problem. I concur with your assessment and I feel like I mostly understand what is currently happening, though I don't know how to remedy the disconnect. Yes, we do use NPSP's Recurring Donations, and we appreciate the ability to report on that object in various ways, particularly to show what has been paid to date on a pledge, and what remains on the pledge. We set up Salesforce this way before implementing the C&P app and did not know there would be an issue with our choice (of Recurring Donations vs Payments). Are you saying we should have chosen the Payments option to handle pledges because that is the only way that will integrate with C&P?

Yes all of our recurring charges are run through C&P so I'm relieved to hear that we shouldn't have to contact donors as part of this process.

I've granted you a week of access to our instance, Org ID 00D61000000aVFr
I have historically been unable to use Live Support because it starts an hour before I start at my job.

What do you suggest as a way to correct this issue?

thanks so much for your attention!
Susanna

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

Hi Susanna,

I suspect you are using NPSP's Recurring Donations - This is the recurring donations you create in the middle section of your screenshot. NPSP will create new open opportunities for your recurring donations for a given period of time, set in NPSP Settings. It is Salesforce.org's way of managing Recurring Donations, not specifically a Salesforce way.

C&P Recurrings are a separate object that work in a similar way in the sense that each Opportunity is related to another Object (C&P Recurrings). NPSP does the same thing with their way of tracking Recurring Donations- they just create open opportunities, and then when you receive the payment, you manually go change the Opportunity Stage to reflect that the payment has come in.

If this is the case, then your problem is that you are using two ways to track recurring donations. The benefit of using NPSP to track recurring donations is that you can report on how much money you are expecting to come in, because you already have the open Opportunities created.

Updating your existing NPSP Recurring Donations Opportunities is a totally different thing - because C&P is blind to what is already there that we didn't create.

C&P Recurrings are created when your Patron sets up an automatic payment - either you setting it up for them in Virtual Terminal, or by when they create it using in your online Donation form. There has to be a credit card number or an echeck connection involved, and then the charge is automatically run. C&P Donor Management does not create open Opportunities to 'forecast' what is coming for the future.

We hope to add a way in a future release that will integrate with the NPSP method of tracking Recurring Donations. But the way that C&P works is that all the transaction processing is handled in Connect, and then we send a copy of that data to Salesforce, and it populates into 'Salesforce locations' based on the settings that you set in the C&P Donor Management App (aka C&P Payment as a Service). We don't look at what Salesforce already has, we just create the records as specified. We can tie recurring payments to C&P Recurrings, because we were the ones that originally created the relation.

This is the first time I've personally been asked to look into your case, and we don't have login access- so I'm going on the information here. if a transaction has been run through Click & Pledge on your account in the past, we can use that same credit card or echeck to run another transaction - you shouldn't have to contact your donors again unless their card is no longer valid.

If you'd like to work more directly to discuss this, you can join our Live Support calls available M-Th afternoons, which I host, and then you can show me directly what is going on and talk with me in an online screen share meeting. Visit http://help.clickandpledge.com/custo...upport-options to see what other support options you have. You can also speak to someone at your convenience at any time over the phone with the fee-based Premier Support, but our Live Support is free to you as a C&P Customer.

I hope we can move forward to alleviate any frustration you've had with Support.

Sincerely, Amanda

Amanda Byrne | Customer Advocate | Click & Pledge^®

[Susanna]

Hello, I am still waiting for an answer to my question from November and I think you need a more detailed understanding of the problem we are having. Let me try another way: We run all of our recurring donations through Click & Pledge (all credit card info is already stored in C&P). Some of our donors set up their own recurring donations online, and the rest we set up using the (old) C&P Virtual Terminal. There does not appear to be a problem with this.

The problem:
We added the C&P app to Salesforce six months after we implemented Salesforce, and I think this is the problem. In the beginning, we set up all of our pledges as Recurring Donations with installments in Salesforce. For six months, we manually matched the C&P transactions to the installments in Salesforce.

And then we implemented the C&P app. This caused the creation of a new Opportunity in Salesforce. We still have to manually match the C&P transactions, and now we also have to delete the second Opportunity. When an automatic payment occurs, it never maps to the installment in Salesforce. This is confusing and time consuming and I know the app is not working the way it's supposed to. It has been like this for 1-1/2 years. I'd really like your help to fix the problem. Is there a setting I need to change or a box I need to check? Please help.

thank you,
Susanna

ps: I am attaching a screenshot of a standard Account page, in case it helps.

[Susanna]

OK so are you saying I have to contact every one of our donors to get their card information and then I need to manually re-enter everything in the C&P Virtual Terminal within Salesforce?

Does this also mean that I will no longer be able to accurately run pledge reports in Salesforce because all of Opportunities with installments are now under the Recurring Donations object, and all of the new ones will be under the C&P Recurrings object? Is this something I can use DemandTools to fix? How does a new C&P customer do this cleanly?

[CnP.Support.AM]

Good day @Susanna

We are sorry for your frustration and delayed in the response, not sure how this post get missed.

However, the answer to your question is YES, you will need to set up all of your recurring donations manually through Virtual Terminal and this is how all of our clients do. There is no way to map the matching installments which has been set up outside of the C&P. Once you set up the new recurring in C&P, the subsequent recurring opportunities will be attached to the same recurring chain.

Those opportunities will be under contact as opportunity settlement, pay through VT and it will resolve your issue.

Hope that helps.

[Susanna]

I never got my answer and I gave up on C&P customer support because it was unhelpful and taking too much time during a crazy time of year for us. But now I'm back and still need to solve this problem, and I think you have new staff, so I am hopeful. My question is the same. When we switched to Salesforce, we entered all of our Recurring Donations manually. Then, much later, we added the C&P app to Salesforce. Do I have to move everything I have from Recurring Donations to C&P Recurrings, and if so, how do I do this?

How do you help people who add C&P after all of their Recurring Donations are already set up?

[Susanna]

Hello. I'm not sure I made myself clear. Yes, all of the pledges were entered manually into Salesforce last year. What we need to do is connect the incoming C&P payment to the existing Salesforce installment. My original question was "How do I map the C&P Recurring transaction to its matching installment?" That is still my question. I need to map them.

If we have future pledges, I do not have any instructions about how to set them up from within C&P in order to have it create those installments. The only thing I can find is your Developer's Manual, which is a little bit helpful. I do not have a recurring option in my Virtual Terminal. How do I set up new recurring donations from C&P so it will create all of the installments and automatically map future payments to them?

[CnP.Support.AM]

Good day @Susanna

Sorry for the late reply.

Those are not the duplicate, you have created one opportunity manually and the other one is created by C&P.

Please refer to the following: http://help.clickandpledge.com/custo...ticles/2084233

You may assign the Contact and Stage to the Opportunity which you have created manually, this way the opportunity comes under that contact and from there you may settle the Opportunity.

Hope that helps.

[Susanna]

Still waiting for a response since I posted the information you needed last week.

In case you need it, our Org ID is 00D61000000aVFr and i have granted you another week of access.

thank you
Susanna