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Manage Donations in Salesforce
Learn fundamentals of gift entry and donor management in the Nonprofit Success Pack.
- About Donation Management
Chances are you've managed donations in another database, accounting system, or with spreadsheets. The same concepts you're familiar with apply to Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). You just need to know what things are called and where to click. - How to Get Donations Into Salesforce
NPSP is designed to handle all the different kinds of donations you receive, such as single donations, matching gifts, recurring donations, tributes, and more. Learn the most efficient way to enter different kinds of donations. - Credit Where Credit is Due
Soft credits let you track people who contributed to getting a donation in the door. For example, you might attribute a soft credit to a board member who influenced their friend to donate to your organization. - Nonprofit Financial Accounting
Use General Accounting Units to designate a donation to specific funds, and Accounting Subledger to bridge the gap between accounting and other departments.
About Donation Management
Chances are you've managed donations in another database, accounting system, or with spreadsheets. The same concepts you're familiar with apply to Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). You just need to know what things are called and where to click.
Donations are called Opportunities in Salesforce. An Opportunity is a specially-designed Salesforce record for recording revenue by the amount, date, and person or organization that revenue is from. Businesses use Opportunities to track sales deals–nonprofits use Opportunities to track donations. We use the terms Donation and Opportunity interchangeably throughout the product documentation.
For help with Salesforce terms you aren't familiar with, check out the Donations Glossary.
How to Get Donations Into Salesforce
NPSP is designed to handle all the different kinds of donations you receive, such as single donations, matching gifts, recurring donations, tributes, and more. Learn the most efficient way to enter different kinds of donations.
Enter Single Donations or a Collection of Donations
Use the NPSP Gift Entry tool to enter one-off single donations, or a collection of donations in a batch. To learn about Gift Entry, see Enter Gifts in Gift Entry.
Enter Pledges
NPSP uses Opportunity and Payment records to manage pledges–a donor’s agreement to donate a set amount of money in installments. For example, to track a pledge of $400 paid in $100 installments every quarter for one year, NPSP creates one Opportunity of $400 and four related Payment records of $100 each.
To learn more about Pledges, check out Manage Pledges.
Issue Refunds
Refund donations on an Opportunity’s Payment record. To learn more about refunds, see Refund Donation Payments.
Enter Recurring Donations
NPSP handles recurring donations by creating Opportunity records based on the installment schedule. You can specify a monthly, quarterly, yearly, or custom installment schedule.
To learn how to enter recurring donations in NPSP, see Create a Recurring Donation.
Collect Donations Online
Salesforce.org Elevate is a powerful app that accepts and processes donations online, and automatically sends the donation data to NPSP.
To learn more about Elevate, see the Elevate Product Documentation.
Import Your Data
Import your contacts, accounts, and donations into Salesforce with the Salesforce Data Import Wizard or another import tool of your choice.
For more information about importing your data, see How the Import Process Works.
Credit Where Credit is Due
Soft credits let you track people who contributed to getting a donation in the door. For example, you might attribute a soft credit to a board member who influenced their friend to donate to your organization.
Soft credits let you track people who contributed to getting a donation in the door. For example, you might attribute a soft credit to a board member who influenced their friend to donate to your organization.
You can assign soft credits manually, or configure NPSP to assign soft credits automatically based on criteria you choose.
To learn more about soft credits, see the Soft Credits Overview.
Nonprofit Financial Accounting
Use General Accounting Units to designate a donation to specific funds, and Accounting Subledger to bridge the gap between accounting and other departments.
Designate Specific Funds for a Donation
To designate a donation (or portions of a donation) to specific funds or programs, NPSP uses General Accounting Units (GAUs). GAUs often map to an organization's chart of accounts or accounting classes.
To learn more about GAUs, see Allocations Overview.
Bridge the Accounting Gap
Accounting Subledger is a Salesforce app that helps bridge the gap between accounting and other departments. Accounting Subledger generates debits and credits from Salesforce records—automatically formatted for export to your accounting systems.
To learn more, see the Accounting Subledger Documentation.
