Pause a Recurring Donation

Learn how to temporarily suspend donations, and restart them, when your donor wants to stop giving for a period of time.

Note Watch the Nonprofit Salesforce How-To Series video about Managing Recurring Donations.

With their recurring giving, your loyal donors provide your organization with a consistent source of funding. But life happens and a donor sometimes asks to temporarily suspend their giving due to travel, job loss, or unexpected expenses. To fulfill this kind of request, NPSP provides you with the ability to pause up to 12 consecutive installments in a Recurring Donation. If you need to pause a Recurring Donation for more than 12 installments, it's probably best to Change, Close, or Delete a Recurring Donation.

Note If you're asked to pause a Recurring Donation for more than 12 installments, it's probably best to close the Recurring Donation.

Here's an example scenario: Alex is a college student who donates $75 monthly to your organization. During an accident, Alex twists his knee and tears a ligament. He doesn't have insurance so treatment is likely to be expensive, and he still needs to buy books for school. Alex realizes that he has to reduce his spending and asks you to pause his monthly donations until the beginning of the new year.

To pause a Recurring Donation:

1. Locate the Recurring Donation record.

2. Click Pause.

3. Select a Paused Reason. In our example, choose Financial Difficulty.

4. Select up to 12 consecutive installments from the list of future installments. In our example, select the September through December installments.

5. Save your changes.

Note Your administrator can adjust the Paused Reason values by editing the values in the Status Reason picklist field. Paused Reason uses the same values that are defined in Status Reason. Your administrator can also enable field history tracking for Status and Status Reason, so you can track how these fields change over time.

Now look at the Upcoming Installments for the Recurring Donation. Notice that each installment you selected is marked Paused.

Paused installments appear in the Upcoming Installments component, but NPSP won't create Opportunities for those installments marked paused. In our example, when you close the 8/22/2020 Opportunity, the next Opportunity NPSP creates is for the 1/22/2021 installment.

Note NPSP reactivates paused installments if you change the Recurring Donation schedule details such as Amount, Day of Month, or Installment Frequency. Essentially, the new schedule you've defined replaces the old one.

Pause a Fixed-Length Recurring Donation

When you pause a fixed-length Recurring Donation (Recurring Type = Fixed), your donor suspends their giving but still intends to fulfill the original amount for the Recurring Donation after the pause is over.

For example, let's say you have a fixed-length Recurring Donation where a donor signs up to give $100 per month for six months. The total expected amount is $600. Your donor pays the first installment, then asks to pause their giving for three months.

In this example, the original installment schedule would look like this, with six consecutive installments:

When you pause the Recurring Donation, the adjusted installment schedule would look like this:

In both cases, your donor fulfills the entire $600. When a donor asks to pause their Recurring Donation, it takes them longer to fulfill the original planned amount.

Note If the intention is to skip a certain number of installments entirely, adjust the Number of Installments instead of pausing the Recurring Donation. Using the previous example, change Number of Planned Installments from 6 to 3. The result is that the donor would give a total of $300, instead of the original $600.