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Rollups Overview
Rollup fields are custom fields that display information from other related records, including aggregate totals. To think of this another way, rollup fields allow information from Opportunities or Payments to automatically "roll up" and appear on a related Account, Contact, General Accounting Unit, or Recurring Donation records.
For example, the Total Gifts field on an Organization Account displays the total value of all the donations from that organization—it's the total value from across all the associated Opportunity records “rolled up” into one.
There are multiple types of rollups available to Nonprofit Success Pack users. This can be confusing if you're trying to figure out what you're already using, what you can (or should) use, and how they all compare. But, before we get into what each one does, let's look at the history.
Original Salesforce standard roll-up summary fields were created to work with master-detail relationships, and therefore when rolling up Opportunity records, only work with Accounts. But that doesn't make sense for nonprofits, who need to track donors and donations, and need their rollups to be based on Contact information.
Seeking to solve this problem for NPSP users, the NPSP team created a collection of out-of-box rollups. There are approximately 87 out-of-box rollups that appear on the Account, Contact, Recurring Donation, and General Accounting Units objects and roll up data related to Opportunity Amount and Close Date. NPSP users loved these rollups, but also wanted to be able to see more rollup information.
So, the NPSP team thought “Why not let users define their own rollups?” Enter User Defined Rollups (UDR), a feature that allowed users to create rollups that work with custom fields. That solved everything, right? Well, as many of you know, the story doesn't end there! User Defined Rollups, which filled some of the users' needs that out-of-box rollups could not, left users wanting more. Users didn't want to be so limited in choosing what to roll up and what rollup types were available, and while many clever admins found ways to use UDR in combination with formula fields to cover more use cases than we had ever envisioned, they found the process time consuming and complicated.
The NPSP team went back to the drawing board once more. After many long months of reviewing Community feature requests, strategizing, prototyping, revising, and coding... Customizable Rollups was born. Customizable Rollups provides the flexibility and functionality that users have long been asking for (and you can roll up Payments!). Read on to find out more.
Customizable Rollups
With Customizable Rollups, you have complete control and flexibility over the donor statistics your organization needs. You can create highly customized rollups that roll up either data from Opportunities, Payments, or Soft Credits (including Partial Soft Credits). (Yes, you read that right!) You can create custom donation rollup fields on Accounts, Contacts, General Allocation Units, or Recurring Donations and you can also edit the definition of legacy out-of-box rollups. We also provide the ability to edit which records are filtered out, just like in reports! You can even create your own filters and apply them to individual rollups. And with Customizable Rollups enabled, NPSP is compatible with Advanced Currency Management, which means your donor statistics can reflect changes in currency value over time.
With legacy User Defined Rollups, you could take the largest gift and only copy that amount to your Target field. But, with Customizable Rollups, you can select the largest gift, and copy any field from that gift to your Target field. So for example, let's say you want to know what Campaign brought in the largest gift for an Account or Contact. You can create a rollup that finds the largest gift, and copies the Campaign from that Opportunity to your Target field. You can even create a lookup field directly to that gift or that Campaign!
Customizable Rollups are available as part of NPSP when using the Household Account Model. They are enabled by default for all new NPSP Trials starting with version 3.155 (May 2019); all other orgs have to turn the feature on. And when you do, all existing out-of-box and User Defined Rollups are converted into Customizable Rollups so that you can edit and enhance them as needed. Note that if you have User Defined Rollups for the Household object in your organization, and you enable Customizable Rollups, those Household UDRs won't be be converted. For more information on Customizable Rollups, see the Customizable Rollups Overview.
NPSP Legacy Rollups
NPSP includes approximately 87 out-of-box rollups. With these "donor statistic" rollups you can get a big picture view of a donor's history just by looking at their Contact record (instead of having to peruse actual donation history that is spread out over many related objects). For more information on legacy out-of-box rollups, see NPSP Out-of-Box Donation Rollups (Legacy).
NPSP Legacy User Defined Rollups
With User Defined Rollups, you can create new rollups on Accounts, Contacts, or Households (for those still using the One-to-One or Individual Bucket model). For more information, see User Defined Rollups.
