v1.34 – RaiseNow Digital Fundraising Kit with NPSP Integration Backend Upgrade V1.17

This release requires the RaiseNow Fundraising Kit for Salesforce version 1.34 in conjunction with version 1.17.x of our backend integration. 

This release focuses on extended support for NPSP Enhanced Recurring Donations, adding functionality to sync payment schedule updates from Salesforce. This included extensive improvements on how changes are propagated from Salesforce to RaiseNow. 

New Features and Improvements

Support for pausing recurring donations for a defined number of installments.

You can now use the "Pause" function in NPSP recurring donations to interrupt collection of the recurring donation for a defined number of installments. Please note that RaiseNow "listens" for pause and activations events in Salesforce rather than synchronizing the number of skipped installments. 

Support for synchronizing Enhanced Recurring Donation installment schedules from Salesforce to Hub-managed RaiseNow subscriptions

You can now update the installment schedule for recurring donations directly in Salesforce for subscriptions managed on our new Hub platform. This currently includes:

• direct debit subscriptions via pain.008 and camt.054 processing, as well as 
• subscriptions managed via Stripe for SEPA Direct Debit, Credit Cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay.

As not all possible installment schedule configurations are supported by RaiseNow, validation in Salesforce will check for valid configurations before persisting the change in Salesforce and propagating the updated schedule to RaiseNow. Validation messages will be shown accordingly. 

Note: We cannot offer this functionality for subscriptions in RaiseNow Manger as the underlying API does not provide the necessary requirements. We will add support for other payment service providers in Hub in the future. 

Support for Apple Pay and Google Pay

We have added support for Apple Pay and Google Pay via Stripe in Tamaro for one-off and recurring donations. Payments will be shown as Wallet payments in Salesforce. A new payment method was added to the RaiseNow__Payment_Method__c picklist fields in Salesforce:

RaiseNow__Transaction__c.RaiseNow__Payment_Method__c: "Wallet"

RaiseNow__Subscription__c.RaiseNow__Payment_Method__c: "Wallet"

Note: You will see these payments in RaiseNow only on the new Hub platform. RaiseNow Manager will not show these payments. 

Automatically cancel outstanding installments 

In the context of direct debit, RaiseNow will generate claims when a recurring donation installment becomes due. A claim in RaiseNow is represented by an invoice and a payment, reflecting opportunities and payment records in Salesforce. For example, when you have a recurring direct debit donation in Salesforce that is due on 2 November, RaiseNow will generate the corresponding invoices and payments on that day. Both will stay in a pending state until a collection is initiated by generating a pain.008 file. This caused issues for customers when a recurring donation was closed after an installment became due, but before the collection was initiated. 

With this release, pending payments and invoices for which no collection has yet been initiated will be automatically cancelled when closing the corresponding recurring donation. 

Add field for payment service provider PaymentId

A new field is now shipped with our managed package to contain the payment_id assigned by the payment service provider processing the payment:

Opportunity.RaiseNow__Payment_Provider_Payment_Id__c 

This field is directly set when receiving the payment success notification from the payment service provider. This is primarily intended for PayPal but will be set for other payment service providers as well if such a field is provided by the payment service provider when confirming the payment.  

PayPal Donations will be created with fees as reported by PayPal

Fees reported by Paypal will now be added to the Opportunity record automatically. Ensure you have these fields in your page layout for the opportunity to view this information:

RaiseNow__Net_Amount__c
RaiseNow__Gross_Amount__c
RaiseNow__Value_Date__c

The same fields will be available on the RaiseNow__Transaction__c object in Salesforce.

Set debtor bank account on the RaiseNow transaction record

When a debtor bank account is provided in a processed camt file, this will now be linked on the RaiseNow transaction record 

RaiseNow__Transaction__c.RaiseNow__Bank_Account__c

Support generating payment references for Opportunities with Accounts only

It is now possible to generate payment references based on opportunities that do not reference a contact via the opportunity. This functionality was added to facilitate payment reference generation for company donations.

In this context, a bug was addressed when processing multiple, subsequent payments referencing the same original opportunity due to the reuse of the original payment reference. Subsequent payments with the same payment reference will now result in a new opportunity, based on the values of the original opportunity.  

Provide reversal and payment failure events in dedicated steps

We have broken down the composite request when providing payment failure and reversal events to Salesforce into individual steps. We observed customers with custom accounting processes that locked records (usually opportunities) for editing. Now, the payment failure and reversal events are propagated to Salesforce in dedicated steps to ensure the relevant information is passed to Salesforce, regardless of whether the object manipulation in Salesforce is successful. This should allow customers to implement custom workflows compatible with their accounting requirements. Please note that the business process will still show up as failed in the RaiseNow monitor application if the actual record manipulation fails due to custom validation constraints. 

Other bugs and improvements 

• A bug has been resolved that resulted in an error when trying to update direct debit bank account information for a company recurring donation. 
• Contact currency is now set according to donation currency when RaiseNow creates a new contact.
• The RaiseNow permission set shipped with our managed package now adds create and read permissions for RaiseNow__Payment_Failed__e and RaiseNow__Reversal_Succeeded__e events in Salesforce.
• When closing a recurring donation, the end date will now be set to one day in the future to avoid validation issues with NPSP when opportunities have been paid on the same day. 

Upgrading Instructions

When upgrading you will need to add the following picklist values in the Salesforce object manager:

• • RaiseNow__Transaction__c.RaiseNow__Payment_Method__c: Wallet
  • RaiseNow__Subscription__c.RaiseNow__Payment_Method__c: Wallet

New articles in the knowledge base

• Required permissions for the integration user
• Upgrade to Enhanced Recurring Donations
• Reversed and Failed Payment Events

Deprecation notice

With this release, we drop support for NPSP legacy recurring donations. Though the legacy code is still in place, we have not yet verified that previous functionality for legacy recurring donations is not negatively impacted. We are currently verifying the usage of legacy recurring donations with our customers. If you are still using legacy recurring donations we highly recommend that you upgrade to Enhanced recurring donations.

If you are still using legacy recurring donation in Salesforce, you cannot upgrade at this point. 

Please get in touch with us if you absolutely cannot upgrade to Enhanced Recurring Donations.