Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud General Accounting Units and Allocations is a fantastic feature that allows nonprofits to designate their donations to one or more funds. This gives donors the ability to choose where their donation dollars are being spent and gives them a greater sense of the impact they’re making to your organization.
Out of the box, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud allows you to create GAU Allocation records to connect one opportunity to one or more GAUs (General Accounting Units). Here’s an example. Marvin gives a $100 donation and wants to allocate $75 to the General Fund and $25 to the New Building Fund. In Salesforce, we would create a $100 opportunity and 2 GAU allocation records ($75 and $25 to their respective funds). This is a multi-step approach that requires additional work after the opportunity is created. For many organizations, this is a rare or unnecessary scenario since their donations only map to a single fund. If this is the case for your org, doing the extra step of creating a GAU allocation will be a tedious exercise especially if you plan on using the Batch Gift Entry Tool.
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud gives us a couple of ways to automate this by setting a default GAU which will automatically create an allocation for every opportunity -or- Setting up a mapping from Campaign to GAU so that if a donation is linked to a campaign, a GAU allocation will be automatically created to that GAU.
However, these solutions are very inflexible and option 2 would require additional setup for each mapping… so what if we could simply choose the GAU on the fly while creating the opportunity and have the system automatically create the GAU allocation for us?
That’s exactly how we do it here at Plative!
Solution overview:
– Create a new field on the opportunity called “GAU Override”
– Then create an automation that checks if this field is filled in or changed. If so, it will:
– Find any existing GAU allocations on this opportunity and delete them
– Create a new GAU allocation that connects this opportunity to the GAU specified in the GAU Override field.
– We’ve also set up NPSP so that if nothing is specified, a default allocation will be automatically created to the GAU called “General Fund”
Step 1: Create the GAU Override field on the opportunity. This is a lookup to the General Accounting Unit Object
Step 2: Create an auto launched flow with the following details. This flow will delete any existing GAU allocations on the specified opportunity.
Block 1: Get Records: Find GAU Allocations. This searches all GAU allocations for ones that map to the opportunity
Block 2: Decision: If any allocations are found…
Block 3: Delete the found allocations
Step 3: Create a process builder that checks to see if the “GAU Override” field is not blank. If so, it will
– Call the flow created in Step 2 to delete any related GAUs
– Create a new GAU allocation
– Clear out the GAU Override field so it can be set if someone wants to change the GAU in the future.
Some things to note:
– The automation will run anytime the GAU Override field is filled in. This implies that you can run the automation multiple times on the same opportunity.
– The GAU Override field will always be cleared out after the automation is run.
– If you set up NPSP GAU Allocation Mapping, these will get set first as an opportunity is created. If you populate a value into the GAU Override field, this will override the NPSP mappings.
To learn more about how we can help your nonprofit organization manage common requirements like GAU Allocations and more in Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud or NPSP, give us a call!
