Hi,
After some advice/opinions on how non profits are dealing with Failed, recalled or refunded Direct Debit payments.
We use the Recurring Donation functionality within NPSP to handle our Direct Debits (both BACS in UK and SEPA in europe).
Each month, we run a claim and change all "Pledged" opportunties to "Posted". If any fail, or are recalled (which seems to be quite common in europe for SEPA dds), we mark the opportunity as Failed, amount set to 0.
Whilst this works ok from a supporter record perspective, our finance team dont like it. They want to see the +ve entry for the claim, then a corresponding -ve one for the failure/recall - so SF matches exactly what happens in our bank account.
So they want to see 2 opportunties like this:
05/04/2020: €10 Posted.
12/04/2020: -€10 Refunded/Failed
Before thinking about the technicalities of how this might work, is this even possible under a recurring donation? can we just insert opportunities like this and link them to the RD record? will that work and not affect roll ups, or the way it creates future opps?
And in general, how do people deal with refunds on single donations? Do you create -ve opportunities for this?
I know each Opp has a payment object that could possibly help with this, but it wont work for us. We have a separate "Transaction Allocation" object underneath opportunity, which codes the donation against the correct GL code for finance. (So 1 £10 donation can be split £5 against GL Code A and the other £5 against GL Code B). its this level we report on income - so having an +ve and -ve payment wouldnt work for us.
Interested to know how other people handle this, so i can come up with a feasible solution for our Finance Director.
Thanks in advance for any help.
James
Adding in @Fundraising and #Recurring Donations for greater reach on your question.
I'll defer to others, however it's not common from my experience to create two Opportunities in the manner you've described when using Recurring Donations. Also, it's not common to mark the stage as Closed/Lost and then change the Amount to 0. I can see why your finance team isn't pleased :). More often, the Payment object is used for this purpose. You can mark the Opty as Closed/Lost, and then mark the related Payment record as "Written Off" rather than paid which will accomplish half of what your team is looking for. You may consider looking into using the @Accounting Subledger product.
Also, just note that we've released an update to Recurring Donations (called Enhanced Recurring Donations) which does't create extra Opty's or negative Payments, but does have some other really great functionality. Take a look and consider upgrading.
