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Enable Customizable Rollups

Learning Objectives

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

  • Explain the two types of rollups.
  • Describe the benefits of customizable rollups.
  • Create a customizable rollup.

The Basics of Opportunity Rollups

Rollup summary fields allow information from one record to automatically roll up and appear on a related record. This can be helpful in adding, averaging, or counting data from other records or simply copying data from one field to another.

The rollup summary fields on the contact and account records in NPSP provide your users with a quick overview of the level of engagement that a donor has with your organization.

Donation rollup summary fields on the account record

If your organization is satisfied with the more than 80 rollup summary fields that come preconfigured in NPSP, you’re all set! But what happens if you want more rollups or different ones? You can enable customizable rollups in NPSP to create your own custom rollups, define the rollup field and filters to use, and get the right data summarized on the right records.

Before you jump into setting up custom rollups, let’s review the two types of rollups.

  • Aggregate rollups summarize data from multiple records into a target field. They’re used for summing, averaging, or counting. For example, NPSP comes with aggregate rollups for total gifts (summing), average gift amount (averaging), and total number of gifts (counting).
  • Single result operation rollups copy data from a field on a single record to the target field. These rollups are used for finding the smallest or largest number (currency, number, etc), pinpointing a particular date, and copying data from another record. In standard NPSP, you get single result operations like the largest gift amount, first gift date, and last gift date. With customizable rollups, you can select any field from an opportunity or payment record (including text and lookup fields) and copy it to another object.

Now let’s get customizing.

Enabling Customizable Rollups

If your Salesforce org began recently as part of a trial, customizable rollups may already be enabled. For older NPSP installations, you need to enable this feature. When you do, it will convert all out-of-the-box NPSP rollups into customizable rollups.

Let’s check if customizable rollups are enabled in your org.

  1. Find and select NPSP Settings through the App Launcher (The App Launcher icon).
  2. Click Donations.
  3. Click Customizable Rollups.
  4. If the Customizable Rollups toggle already reads Enabled, you’re all set. Otherwise, click it to enable customizable rollups and show the Configure Customizable Rollups and Reset to Defaults buttons.
    Customizable Rollups configuration settings page within NPSP Settings

Create a Customizable Rollup

Now let’s create new customizable rollups with our friend Gorav Patel, the Salesforce admin at the (fictional) nonprofit No More Homelessness (NMH).

NMH is launching a capital campaign to purchase a new building for transitional housing programs. They assembled a capital campaign committee of board members, community leaders, and corporate funders and they want to be able to easily see the total amount of capital campaign contributions that committee members have influenced.

The No More Homelessness team presents its capital campaign proposal to the local community.

Before he can create his new customizable rollup, Gorav must create a custom field on the Contact object to house the rollup data. He must also create a campaign record where NMH can associate the gifts for the capital campaign.

Lets follow along as he creates the field.

  1. Click Setup, then Setup.
  2. Click Object Manager.
  3. Find and select Contact.
  4. Click Fields & Relationships.
  5. Click New.
  6. Select Currency.
  7. Click Next.
  8. Specify these details:
    • Field Label: Capital Campaign Solicitation Totals
    • Length: 9
    • Decimal Places: 2
    • Field Name: Capital_Campaign_Solicitation_Totals (This should automatically appear)
  1. Click Next.
  2. Click Next.
  3. Save the new field.

Gorav also puts the Capital Campaign Solicitation Totals field in a new section on the page layout and sets the field to read-only to help prevent confusion. Rollups function properly even if the user who is creating the rollup or viewing the record with the rollup field doesn't have edit or view access to the field.

Note

For information about custom fields and updating page layouts, complete the Custom Fields: Quick Look and Lightning Experience Customization modules on Trailhead.

Create a Filter Group

Now Gorav creates a filter to include only capital campaign gifts. 

Customizable rollups come with a set of default filter groups. Filter groups work like reports to make sure you only roll up the data you really need. You set up criteria, called filter rules, within the filter group that determine what data to include in your rollup. 

You can create filter groups or modify the defaults as needed. You can also delete unused filter groups, but you won't be able to delete any filter group that has been applied to a rollup—and that’s for the best, honestly. 

You can include as many filter rules as you want, but keep in mind that filter rules only use ‘AND’ criteria (there’s no ‘OR’). So, if there’s more than one rule within a filter group, data will only be included if it matches criteria for all of the rules.

These can get complicated and there are a lot of rules that apply. For more details about these rules, reference Create Filter Groups in Salesforce Help.

For now, we’ll follow Gorav as he creates a filter group for capital campaign contributions.

  1. Find and select NPSP Settings through the App Launcher (The App Launcher icon).
  2. Click Donations and then click Customizable Rollups.
  3. Click Configure Customizable Rollups.
  4. Click View Filter Groups.
    The View Filter Groups button
  5. Click New Filter Group. (If you want to edit an existing filter group, click the filter group name and click Edit.)
    Customizable rollups, highlighting New Filter Group button
  6. Enter a name for the filter group. Gorav names the new filter Contact: Cap Cmpn Solicitation Total. (There’s a 40-character limit.)
  7. Enter a detailed description for this filter group. Gorav writes out exactly how the filter rules work within this group.
  8. Click Add to create the filter rules for the group. Then, for each rule, follow these steps.
    • Select the Object. The available values are Account Soft Credit, Contact Soft Credit, GAU Allocation, Opportunity, and Payment. Gorav selects the Opportunity object.
    • Select the specific Field on that object. Gorav selects the Campaign ID field in order to filter to a specific campaign.
    • Select the Operator. The available options are determined by the type of the selected field. Gorav chooses the Equals operator to limit to one campaign.
    • Enter the Value. What you can enter in this field is determined by the Operator you choose. Finally, Gorav enters the Campaign ID for the NMH Capital Campaign.
      Filter rules in the customizable rollups settings
  1. Click Save. Gorav can now select the filter group he needs to create his customizable rollup.
Note

If you are working on a more complex filter group, click Add again to add additional filter rules until you have exactly what you need.

Next, let’s follow along as Gorav creates a rollup summary field to track capital campaign donations on the contact record of the committee members who influenced the donation.

  1. Find and select NPSP Settings through the App Launcher (The App Launcher icon).
  2. Click Donations and then click Customizable Rollups.
  3. Click Configure Customizable Rollups. (Note: When you are on the Customizable Rollups page, you’ll need to click Back to NPSP Settings to go back. The browser buttons don’t work here.)
    Customizable rollups settings page
  4. On the Customizable Rollups page, click New Rollup. (If you want to edit an existing rollup, click its name in this list, and then edit its individual record.)
  5. Choose the Target Object and Target Field the data should roll up to. Gorav selects Contact as the Target Object and his new field, Capital Campaign Solicitation Totals, as the Target Field. One important note about your Target Field selection—always use a custom field that you create, because choosing an existing field could cause complications.
  6. Enter a detailed Description of the rollup to help you distinguish this rollup from the others.
  7. Select an Operation. Your choices are limited based on the type of the Target Field you selected and will determine whether your rollup will be an aggregate rollup (sum, average, or count) or a single result operation rollup (first, last, largest, smallest, etc.) Gorav selects Sum because he wants to add up all of the capital campaign solicitations.
  8. Choose the Time Frame. Gorav selects All Time. It’s also possible to select Days Back for a span of days ending with today or Years Ago to roll up data for a specific year.
  9. Choose the Rollup Type, or the combination of the object to roll up, and select whether it will be a hard or soft credit rollup. Gorav chooses Opportunity -> Contact (Soft Credit) so that his team can see the total gifts solicited by a contact.
  10. Choose the Filter Group. Gorav selects the filter group he just created: Contact: Cap Cmpn Solicitation Total. If you want to include all records, use the default No Filter Group (Include All Records).
  11. In the Advanced Customizations section, enter the required information. Gorav selects Soft Credit: Amount. The fields that appear are determined by the Operation selected, check out the documentation links in Resources for details.
    Customizable rollup settings
  12. Click Save. It may take a minute to create the rollup.

The data won't show up right away in your new rollup. You'll either have to wait for rollups to recalculate in the scheduled batch job or manually recalculate them on a contact record or using the batch job. See Manually Recalculate Rollups in Salesforce Help for details on how to do that.

After the rollups are recalculated, the NMH team can quickly see how each capital campaign committee member is doing with their fundraising. 

Contact detail page highlighting the Capital Campaign Solicitation Totals customizable rollup field

This is just one example of the power of customizable rollups. 

If you want a headstart on some other helpful rollup fields check out the Customizable Rollups Recipes in Salesforce Help for step-by-step instructions on common customizable rollups.

In the next unit, we’ll explore how to configure general accounting units and payments, two other tools for tracking donations.

Resources

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