Create and Edit Payments

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain how payments work with opportunities in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).
Create and edit payment schedules.

Understand Payments

In fundraising, a pledge is a promise to pay a specific gift amount over time. Unlike a one-time donation where a donor pays right away, pledges can be conditional on a goal being met or unconditional with no strings attached.

Pledges can be a critical component of an organization's fundraising strategy, and they are managed in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) using opportunity records and an object called a Payment.

While a gift or grant may be tracked with a single opportunity record, you can relate that opportunity to many payments that add up to the total opportunity amount. Payments are particularly helpful when major donors or grant funders define a payment schedule over months or years.

In this unit, we’ll create payments for an opportunity and then modify them.

Create Payments for an Opportunity

At our fictional nonprofit, No More Homelessness (NMH), Development Associate Sofia just received a $300,000 pledge agreement from supporter Jose Figueroa. Jose will pay off the pledge over 3 years in $50,000 installments made every 6 months.

Let's follow along as Sofia creates a new donation with six payments to track Jose's generous pledge.

First, let’s create an opportunity. We’ll do this from the Opportunities tab and use a new opportunity record type, to learn another way to create a new opportunity.

Click the Opportunities tab.
Click New.
Select the Major Gift opportunity record type and click Next. (You can also use payments to track installments that are part of a grant agreement. The process is very similar but begins with your team selecting the Grant opportunity record type.)
Enter details about the gift.

Opportunity Name (required): This may be filled in automatically. Sofia enters Jose Figueroa Major Gift Pledge and today’s date.
Account Name (required): Sofia finds and selects Jose’s household account, Figueroa and Nguyen Household.
Primary Contact (optional): This field is optional, but it’s important to track the primary donor of a gift. Sofia finds and selects Jose Figueroa.
Amount (optional): Sofia enters $300,000.
Close Date (required): Enter today’s date, the day the contract was received.
Stage (required): Each organization may have different policies about how to track pledges that are agreed to but not paid. NMH uses Awarded as the stage for these situations and changes to Posted once the pledge has been paid in full. (Your Salesforce instance may instead use a Closed Won status instead of Posted.)

Click Save.

You’ll be sent to the new opportunity record. Let’s create the payments.

On the opportunity record, click the Related tab.
Find the Payments related list and click Schedule Payments.
The opportunity was created with a new payment record with a Paid status. Review the warning on the page, then click Remove Paid and Written Off Payments to create a new payment schedule.
In the Create a Payment Schedule section, you can now set the number of payments, the date of the first payment, and the time between each payment. Here’s what Sofia enters for Jose’s pledge:

# of Payments: By default, you can schedule up to 12 payments for a single donation, but your admin can change the maximum number of payments available based on your organization's needs. Sofia chooses 6.
Date of First Payment: Today’s date
Interval Number: 6
Interval Period: Month
Payment Method: Sofia selects Check. This list can be customized to your needs.

Click Calculate Payments.
Review the list of payments to be created. The schedule will evenly divide the opportunity amount over the number of payments, but you can make changes as needed now to adjust amounts, dates, and mark any payments as Paid. In our example, Sofia has Jose’s first check already, so she sets the payment date to today and selects the Paid box for payment 1.
Click Create Payments.

Back on the opportunity’s Related tab, check out the Payments related list. It now shows all six payments, with the first showing a Payment Status of Paid.

The Payments related list with columns for Payment Number, Payment Amount, Payment Status, and Payment Date for all six payments

Track Completed Payments

When a donor makes a payment, return to the opportunity record and the Payments related list.

Click the Show Actions button () and then Edit in the row of the payment you would like to mark as paid.
Select Paid, enter the payment date, and fill in any additional details that are helpful to track the payment.
Click Save.

You’ll repeat this process for each payment as it comes in—and use your list of payments as a schedule to send friendly reminders to the donor that a payment is coming due.

When the last payment is made and that record is marked as paid, NPSP will automatically set the status of the opportunity to Closed Won by default, but your admin can choose any stage in NPSP settings.

Refund a Payment

NMH is a fictional organization, so we can imagine everything there goes exactly according to plan, every donor can meet every commitment, and everyone on staff gets free pie every Tuesday.

That isn’t the world we live in, though.

Sometimes things go wrong and you may need to return money to a donor.

If a donor makes a payment and you need to issue a refund, you can track that change by clicking the Refund quick action on a payment record.

The action will create a new payment record with a negative value equal to the original payment, associate the new payment to the opportunity record, and decrease the value of the opportunity by the corresponding amount.

For example, if a donor gave NMH $1,000, the staff there would create an opportunity for $1,000 and NPSP would automatically create a related payment record for $1,000. If the NMH team needed to refund that gift, they would use the Refund quick action on the payment record. The quick action would create a new payment with a -$1,000 value and set the opportunity value to $0.

Write Off Scheduled Payments

Sometimes donors can’t make a payment as planned, organizations don’t meet pledge or grant conditions, or something else goes wrong. In those cases, you may need to write off—or cancel—a scheduled payment.

You want to keep track of these missed or canceled payments, of course, so you don’t want to delete the payment record—you just mark it as written off.

Let’s explore how you mark a payment as written off (and hope you never have to use it).

Find and select the opportunity record that contains the payment you want to write off. We’ll use Jose’s record as our example.
Click the Related tab and find the Payments related list.
Click the Show Actions button () and then Edit in the row of the payment you would like to mark as written off.
Select Written Off.
Click Save.

If a donor discontinues their payments entirely, you can write off all scheduled payments at once.

Go to the Related tab of the opportunity with payments to write off and find the Payments related list.
Click the Show Actions button () in the related list header.
Click Write Off Payments.
On the Write Off Remaining Balance page, enter the date you would like to use as the write-off date. By default, Salesforce shows you the current date and will write off all remaining payments after that date. If you want to choose a later date after which you want to write off payments, you can do that, too.
Click Write Off Payments.

Back on the opportunity record, check the Payments related list. Salesforce automatically sums up the remaining unpaid payments and displays them as a single unpaid write-off. You can click the payment number to review the written-off payments.

While you can set NPSP to automatically change the status of an opportunity where all the payments are marked as Paid, that doesn’t happen when a payment has been written off. You’ll have to update the opportunity stage manually.

These steps make it easier to track a pledged gift with a fixed number of payments, but what about ongoing donations that don't have an end date, such as those given by a monthly donor?

In the next unit, we'll explore how you can set up open-ended and fixed-length recurring donations.