Processing payments manually can be challenging, especially when dealing with subscription, installment, or recurring billing. Automate these processes in Salesforce quickly and easily with Chargent, right where your customer data already lives. Using scheduled or recurring payments in Salesforce will allow you to collect revenue for your products and services automatically. This makes your billing process happen in real-time without you having to do a thing.

This is especially helpful for a business model built on subscription management. But what if you don’t have the date the payment needs to be collected?

Create a Custom Payment Date

In this article, we will explain how to use Chargent to create a custom payment date that an event or action will trigger. Chargent provides you with frequency options that allow you to set up a standard Recurring Billing cycle, like for subscription-based business models or a one-time scheduled payment. Automating this process can help reduce billing errors by allowing you to set everything up at once. On occasion, however, you may need to process a payment based on a certain time or event that is specific to your Org.

For example, you may take a down-payment at the time of purchase, but you want to charge your customer the remaining balance once the order is fulfilled and shipped. Since you don’t know the exact date that the fulfillment will be, what can you do?

The solution is to set up a custom field on your Opportunity record, with a process that will create a Chargent Order and allow it to process in your Recurring Batch when the field is changed to Order Shipped.

Before You Begin

There are a few items to complete before building this process. First, make sure all mapping fields are on your Opportunity page layout. If not, the fields won’t be mapped to the Chargent Order when it’s created.

Next, make sure you are using tokenization for your payments (this is always recommended for PCI compliance).

If you don’t have a custom picklist on the Opportunity record, you need to create the following items in Salesforce:

  1. A custom picklist on the Opportunity record containing two or more values.
  2. A Process in Process Builder will create the Chargent Order when the picklist value changes.

Let’s Get Started

Navigate to a customer’s Opportunity record. To add the picklist to the Opportunity, click on the gear icon and select Setup. A menu will give you a few selections to choose from.

  1. Under Objects & Fields we will choose Object Manager and select the Opportunity object.
  2. Under Fields and Relationships click New.

You want to create a new picklist called Order Status with two options.

  1. Order Placed
  2. Order Shipped

Choose the option to enter values with each value separated by a new line. Follow the prompts to complete the new custom field.

Create a New Process

The next step gets you ready to create a Process. This Process will create a new Chargent Order once Order Status field is changed from Order Placed to Order Shipped. Chargent will automatically populate the necessary fields for a scheduled payment. This step will allow the Chargent Order to process in the Recurring batch along with your other Recurring payments.

To set up the Process you need to click the gear icon again and choose Setup. In the Quick Find Bar, search and select Process Builder. Now here is where the fun starts.

What to Fill in to Set Up the Process

The Process Name indicates the purpose of the Process. To be specific to its use, let’s call it “Process Payment When Order is Shipped.” The API Name will automatically populate based on the Process Name, so no need to type anything there.

The Description is optional to fill in but add details about what job the process will do.

The “Process Starts” field lets us know when the process should run. In this case, we want to choose from the drop-down menu “When a record changes.”

Next, add the object you want to begin the process with. In this case, you will begin with the Opportunity object, and you want the Process to start when a record is created or edited. Don’t forget to click save after each step!

The next thing to add is the immediate criteria. The criteria tell you what needs to happen for the trigger to work. We want to select “when conditions are met” and set the conditions to when the Order Status field equals Order Shipped.

The last step is to add an immediate action. This is where we tell the process to create the Chargent Order and populate all the necessary fields, including both the recurring and standard charge fields.

Make the following selections:

  • Action Type = Create a Record
  • Action Name = Create Chargent Order
  • Record Type = Chargent Order

Here is the breakdown of fields we need to map for the Chargent Order to process the payment.

Populate all fields necessary to process a payment, including:

  • Billing First Name, Billing Last Name, and Billing Address
  • Charge Amount
  • Manual Charge checkbox needs to be checked.
  • Token to send to the gateway. The token would be copied to the Opportunity from the initial Chargent Order using a separate process.

Map the following fields to set up the Recurring one-time payment.

  • Payment Status = Recurring
  • Payment Frequency = Once

The Payment Start Date will need to be a formula that indicates today’s date. The formula is the word “Today” followed by open and close Parentheses and no spaces. It will look like this: Today()

Click Save, and don’t forget to Activate the Process! And you’re done. You’ve just created a process that triggers a Payment Request based on a specific event. When the Order Status field is changed to Order Shipped, it will create a one-time scheduled payment with the Payment Start Date of today, which will process in the next Recurring Billing batch.

Recurring Billing Software that Saves You Time

The example we provided here is just one way to automate payments based on a business process event with Chargent on the Salesforce platform. You can also automate them to run monthly or quarterly if you offer subscription billing. As each business is unique, you and our customer support team can customize them to suit your needs.

Connect with us today to start automating payments and make your Salesforce recurring billing process more efficient. Your team will appreciate being able to save time by customizing and scheduling payments, and letting Chargent do the rest. Contact our payments experts to discuss your solution.