Track Gift Transactions
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how gift transactions work in Fundraising.
- Create a gift batch.
- Add gift entries.
- Explain how gift batches are processed.
Understand Gift Transactions
A gift transaction record tracks a payment to your nonprofit, either as a one-time gift or as part of a gift commitment. Like gift commitments, gift transactions can relate to designations and campaigns.
A gift transaction not only tracks completed payments but also expected payments. Gift transactions automatically created by a gift commitment, for example, exist with a Status value of Unpaid until you receive the payment.
Gift transactions relate to a few additional objects to help you manage the details of a gift. Those objects are:
- Gift Soft Credit, which tracks people—other than the donor—who receive credit for the donation, such as a volunteer fundraiser or influencer.
- Gift Tribute, which tracks gifts made in honor of or in memorial of an individual other than the donor. Gift tributes can also relate to gift commitments.
- Refund, which tracks money given back to the donor, due to either an overpayment or because the donor requested a refund.
Create a Gift Transaction
You don’t always create a gift transaction manually.
For example, gift commitments create gift transactions in anticipation of a payment. When a donor makes their payment on the gift commitment, update the gift transaction record.
Your Salesforce admin may also have worked with a Salesforce Independent Software Vendor (ISV) to handle payment processing and online donations. When a donor gives online through a donation form, the payment processing ISV can send payment information to Fundraising as a gift transaction record.
You can also create gift transactions manually. If you’re entering details about a gift transaction yourself, we recommend that you use Gift Entry, a powerful way to create and manage gift transactions. Let’s explore that tool now.
Understand Gift Entry
Gift Entry is a helpful tool to efficiently enter details about one or more donations, and create gift transactions, gift commitments, and other records. There are two key objects to understand in Gift Entry: The Gift Entry object represents one gift, and the Gift Batch object groups gift entries together for processing.
When you create a gift entry record, you aren’t creating a gift transaction and other records until the gift entry is processed. Gift entries that aren't part of a gift batch are processed when you save them. You can also test gift entries in a gift batch before you process them and create gift transactions and other records.
This test—called a dry run—is important for gift batches because every gift entry in a batch must process without errors for the batch to process successfully and create the corresponding records. See Considerations for Gift Processing in Salesforce Help for details.
To make data entry easier, your Salesforce admin can also configure gift entry so that you can find donors by name or by defined external identifiers, such as an ID value from another system. This is helpful if you have multiple donors who have the same name. With an external ID, you can select the correct donor for the gift.
Let’s try a gift batch now.
Create and Process a Batch of Gifts
Eddie at HNMI receives two gifts totaling $125 in the mail and decides to create a gift batch to process them both at once.
He first creates a gift batch record.
- From the App Launcher (
), find and select Gift Batches.
- Click New.
- Specify these details:
- Screen Template Name: Default
- Description:
Donations received via mail onand today’s date.
- Estimated Gift Count:
2.
- Estimated Batch Value:
125.00.
- Select Total Gift Value Match.
- Screen Template Name: Default
- Save your work.
The Estimated Gift Count, Estimated Batch Value, and Total Gift Value Match fields are optional. But Eddie wants to use them to make sure his gift entry is validated to his expected amount. Is this check necessary for just two gifts? Maybe not, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. And it’s good practice for Eddie’s next batch, which could be as many as the maximum 50,000 gifts that can be processed in a single batch.
Eddie now creates his gift entries. The first is Brandy’s first payment on the gift commitment you created earlier. Eddie can update the automatically created gift transaction directly in Gift Entry. The second is a $100 gift from another donor. He creates both gift entries in the same window.
- On the new batch record, click New Gift Entry.
- Specify these details:
- Gift Type: Individual
- Donor: Brandy Lozano
- Gift Received Date: First day of next month
- Matching Gift Commitments: Brandy Lozano - Recurring Donation
- Gift Amount:
25.00 - Payment Method: Check
- Gift Type: Individual
- Save your work.
- Specify these details for the second gift.
- Gift Type: Individual
- Donor: Alex Brown
- Gift Received Date: Today’s date
- Payment Method: Check
- Gift Amount:
100.00
- Gift Type: Individual
- Save your work.
- Click
on the Gift Entry window.
In this example, you skipped the Outreach Source Code field, but that’s an important feature in Fundraising. Outreach source codes track your appeals and measure the effectiveness of a fundraising message. See Outreach Source Codes in Salesforce Help for details.
On the gift batch record, refresh your browser window or click 
on the Gift Entries related list to see both gift entries.
Let’s test the batch by clicking Batch Dry Run. Give the dry run a few minutes to complete. If you receive no error message, your gift entries are ready to process and create or update gift transaction records in Salesforce.
Click Process Batch. Give the batch a few minutes to process, then click 
on the Gift Entries related list to check the gift entries’ status. The Gift Processing Status value for both gift entries is now Success. This means that your gift entries were successfully processed and the related records were created or updated.
Click in to Brandy’s gift entry record and then the gift transaction link. The gift transaction includes the due date on the first of next month and a Transaction Completion Date value of today. The gift transaction is related to Brandy’s gift commitment and gift commitment schedule, as well.
Now find the gift entry record for Alex Brown and click through to the completed gift transaction. Notice that there are no related gift commitments or campaigns. Click the Related tab and find the Gift Transaction Designations related list. Notice that the General fund designation was applied because it’s the org-wide default.
On both gift transaction records, you can view other fields that you don’t use in this module but are helpful in other situations. For example, there are fields to track when a donor chooses to cover transaction fees for a payment processor and if the donor’s employer offers a matching gift.
While the examples we shared here are single transactions, remember that you can also create gift commitments using gift entry.
After transactions are tracked in Fundraising, you can also quickly create PDF files for individual transactions and end-of-the-year gift acknowledgments, individually or in a batch. See Gift Acknowledgments and Tax Receipts in Salesforce Help for details.
Delight Donors and Improve Your Work
Eddie is ready to move on to his next task—there are always new gift commitments to track, gift transactions to enter, and donors to help. Fortunately, he has the tools to do those tasks quickly and efficiently.
In this module, you followed Eddie and learned how the Fundraising Operations app in Fundraising can help improve your work, too. You reviewed how to define gift designations, manage gift commitments, and track gift transactions using Gift Entry. But this module was only a high-level overview.
As any fundraising operations professional knows, there are many moving pieces to manage to keep donors happy and your fundraising team working at its best. Explore the Nonprofit Cloud trial to further discover how you can use Fundraising to nurture authentic relationships, practice data-driven fundraising, and boost efficiency and productivity.