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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 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, you create payments for an opportunity and then modify them.

Create Payments for an Opportunity

Sofia at the nonprofit NMH 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.

First, Sofia must create an opportunity. You can do this from the Opportunities tab. In this example, use a new opportunity record type, to learn another way to create a new opportunity.

  1. Click the Opportunities tab.
  2. Click New.
  3. 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.
  4. Enter details about the gift.
    The New Opportunity: Major Gift page with fields for Opportunity Name, Account Name, Primary Contact, Amount, Close Date, and Stage
    • Opportunity Name: This may be filled in automatically. If it isn’t, enter Jose Figueroa Major Gift Pledge and today’s date.
    • Account Name: Find and select Jose’s household account, Figueroa and Nguyen Household.
    • Primary Contact: Find and select Jose Figueroa. This field is optional, but it’s important to track the primary donor of a gift.
    • Amount: 300000.
    • Close Date: Enter today’s date, the day the contract was received.
    • Stage: Select Awarded, NMH’s stage for these situations. Each organization may have different policies about how to track pledges that are agreed to but not paid.
  5. Save your work.

You’re now on the new opportunity record. Create the payments.

  1. On the opportunity record, click the Related tab.
  2. Find the Payments related list and click Schedule Payments.
  3. 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.
    The warning message on the payment schedule page, and the Remove Paid and Written Off Payments button
  4. In the Create a Payment Schedule section, set the number of payments, the date of the first payment, and the time between each payment.
    Fields in the Create a Payment Schedule section on the opportunity record, including # of Payments, Date of First Payment, Interval Number and Period, and Payment Method
    • # of Payments: 6. 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.
    • Date of First Payment: Today’s date
    • Interval Number: 6
    • Interval Period: Month
    • Payment Method: Check. This list can be customized to your needs.
  5. Click Calculate Payments.
  6. Review the list of payments to be created. The schedule evenly divides 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 set the payment date to today and selects the Paid box for payment 1.
    The list of payments to be created, including columns and fields for Payment Number, Payment Amount, Scheduled Date, Payment Date, and Paid status
  7. 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. 

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

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

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. If you don’t see the quick action on the page layout, speak with your Salesforce admin.

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.

Explore how you mark a payment as written off (and hope you never have to use it).

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

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

  1. Go to the Related tab of the opportunity with payments to write off and find the Payments related list.
  2. Click the Show Actions button (Show Actions dropdown icon) in the Payments related list header.
  3. Click Write Off Payments.
  4. On the Write Off Remaining Balance page, enter the date you would like to use as the write-off date.
    The Write Off Remaining Balance page with a date after which all payments will be written off
  5. 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.

The steps you learned in this unit 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.

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