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I'm implementing Salesforce for an organization that interacts in both monetary and non-monetary ways with individuals, individuals as part of community groups, and formal organizations. We need to keep track of everyone in Salesforce, so I enabled Person Accounts.

We're not a nonprofit pack customer, we're using the standard version of Sales Cloud.

My problem now is: how do I handle individuals who make monetary transactions with the organization? Perhaps someone donates money, or pays to attend an event, or otherwise gives us money. Where do I record this?

If I'm reading the documentation and various salesforce blogs correctly this is really straightforward for organizations that give money (just create an opportunity) and theoretically we could go the standard nonprofit route and create "households" as Accounts and opportunities, but I don't know if that is the correct route here. We theoretically have people who are members of local community groups and want to treat them primarily in their role as a member of that group, who then give money on the side.

I just started this Salesforce installation. So I'm not attached to any one schema or workflow.

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  • If you enabled person accounts you are now attached to it unless you get SF to dump the org and start you fresh
    – Eric
    Jun 22, 2017 at 2:30
  • I'm aware. I need person accounts for the vast majority of what I'm going to be using Salesforce for (individual people.) I just don't want an entirely different copy of Salesforce for financial transactions.
    – Nick
    Jun 22, 2017 at 3:03
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    Hey Nick, In my opinion you create bunch of objects in your org which you think will be more appropriate in your case. Like you can have Payments__c, Payees__c, Donors__c, Donations__c in your above explanation you can treat them separately but their will be a link between each of them. Because just in case there could be a person who pay you for an event and also on and off donating some money. In this case you should not duplicate that contact but there will be a link between all the above four objects but the parent will be the one contact.
    – LetMeCodeYou
    Jun 25, 2017 at 11:26
  • @LetMeCodeYou Is going the "Custom Object" route for payments going to burn me in the future if I want to use apps and integrations? I was also thinking of adding a Lookup Relationship to Opportunities that links to Contacts, then creating a catch-all "Account". Then that would let me use future integrations that rely on Opportunities. Right?
    – Nick
    Jun 28, 2017 at 2:52
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    Person account can be very inflexible. My past experiences would lead me more towards contacts with household accounts, or a single non-business entity associated holding account. If you go with the former you can use Account Contact Relationships (multiple accounts per contact) and assign them to their house and a business if they ever show up in both aspects. I imagine that happens quite a bit. If you're wanting to use sales standard features like any kind of forecasting or pipeline planning (not sure how that works for donations/non-profit) you'll burn yourself using the custom objects.
    – drakored
    Jul 1, 2017 at 11:42

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In my opinion you create bunch of objects in your org which you think will be more appropriate in your case to match your requirements. 

Payments__c
Payees__c 
Donations__c
Donors__c

In your above explanation you can treat them separately but there will be a link between each of them. Because just in case there could be a person who pay you for an event and also on and off donating some money. In this case you should not duplicate that contact but there will be a link between all the above four objects but the parent will be the one contact.

To answer your integration related question above in the comments. So there are no issues if you want to integrate with default objects or custom objects underlying force.com platform facilitate enough to make a robust, secure and scalable application.

A mix of both default and custom objects will give you best solution.

Tip: Don't try to accommodate your requirements with custom or default object if it is not fulfilling your needs.

Otherwise this will be the key reason to burn your system in future about which you are worried now and asked above in comments.

From here the next steps will be to design your system layout all the objects and define and describe the complete usage of each of them. There shouldn't be any compromise at any level that this is not fitting for all the needs but we can use it for now. No way.

Now is the best time to think and rethink, build and mold and not of the compromises.

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  • Great! I really like Salesforce Inbox in Google Apps (and other integrations with the Contact functionality.) In this case what would I set the Account to be for donors and other individuals who are not part of a community group or employer (but could be in the future)? Just a catch-all?
    – Nick
    Jul 1, 2017 at 19:33
  • Well, Those individuals can be treated as the leads because we're not sure if they are going to be a part of our community group or employer. They are just a prospect at this stage and we can set a whole criteria which will definitely according to your process to convert them into a donor or payee. You can also have some simple flags in your contacts for each individual just to mark them as isDonor, isPayee or both. If few individuals who belongs to a company or institution and they collectively supporting your cause and donating you then you can put them in a single Account.
    – LetMeCodeYou
    Jul 2, 2017 at 3:26
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The best solution i would suggest for your requirement is that you may turn on the business accounts, person accounts in your salesforce instance. You can records individuals, individuals of community group, and formal organization in the following manner. Individuals can be created as person Accounts If individual belonging to community group, then you can use business account and relating all individuals of a specific community group as each contacts in an business account. Formal organization can be created as each business account. You can records all the money transaction as an opportunity in Salesforce.

Note: If person account is enabled, you will not able to turn off the feature again.

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