The Recurring Donations feature allows you to automatically process recurring credit card donations on a predetermined schedule. You’ll be able to input a patron’s credit card number once, and automatically charge her card a specific amount on a specified monthly or quarterly schedule. Patrons can also initiate their own recurring credit card donations online.

Credit card numbers are still not stored with PatronManager, for data security reasons. This feature works by using a process called "tokenization" where the card information is exchanged with a token and stored in an encrypted form called "vaulting" with the credit card processing service, and can be charged without re-entering it each time.

As we mentioned in the release notes a few months ago, during the next few months, we’re transitioning the way credit cards are processed in PatronManager for all clients. Only the new and improved processing gateway supports recurring donations. If you’ve already been moved over, everything's already in place and you can start entering recurring donations immediately. If you haven’t been transitioned over, you’ll need to wait until this happens before you’ll be able to use this feature -- so if you're eager to get started with Recurring Donations, let us know.

The easiest way to find out is to navigate to the Recurring Donations tab in your PatronManager account. (You may need to use the “+” sign at the end of the navigation bar to get there.) If you’re not able to use this feature yet, you’ll see an error message that says “Your payment processor doesn't support this option.”

Contact the PatronManager Client Administration team by clicking the red "Submit a Support Request" button in the PatronManager Help tab. We’ll do our best to get you transitioned over to the new payment processing method as quickly as possible.

We know many recurring donations are made by check and cash. In fact, many of our clients are using the Salesforce Non-Profit Starter Pack’s Recurring Donations module to manage them right now. We plan to incorporate these types of recurring donations into our own product in the future, but for now, you should continue to use Salesforce’s Recurring Donations package for those donations.

There’s very little overlap between these two features right now, as Recurring Donations for PatronManager is only for automatic credit card donations. That means you might need to use the two features alongside each other. You can tell the two tabs apart by remembering that Recurring Donations for PatronManager is indicated by the bank safe icon. As we continue to introduce more functionality to the Recurring Donations feature, you’ll eventually be able to turn off the NPSP Recurring Donations package. (Of course, we realize this might be a bit confusing at first, so we encourage you to contact us for help at any time.)

The easiest way to submit a recurring donation is to use the “New Recurring Donation” button located on the Recurring Donations related list of the contact making the donation.

1. The name of the donor. This will populate automatically if you start from the contact record.
2. Uncheck this box if you want to change the Donation Name to anything other than the default.
3. Enter the amount of each recurrence. For example, if the patron is donating $25 every month, I would enter 25 here.
4. Choose the frequency.
5. Optional End Date: If no end date is chosen, this donation will be considered open-ended, and one year of recurrences will be created. At the end of the year, PatronManager will “renew” the recurring donation and add another year.
6. Enter credit card information.
7. Choose acknowledgement options.
8. Process Transaction. The first payment will be charged to the patron’s credit card immediately.

1. Status of the recurring donation.
2. Amount due for each recurrence.
3. Total of all recurrences that have been paid.
4. Amount due. This is $0.00 for open-ended recurring donations, since we don't know when they're going to stop.
5. Gross Amount. The total amount of this recurring donation once it is complete. If an end date is specified, this will automatically populate.
6. The credit card for this recurring donation.
7. All donations that have already been processed.
8. All upcoming recurrences for this recurring donation. The Close Date indicates when they will be processed.
9. You can suspend all future payments with this button.
10. To cancel the remaining payments, use this button.

We’ve included a new donation form that allows patrons to submit their own recurring donations. These will be qualified the same as all donations made through your donation form. Contact the PatronManager Client Administration team by clicking the red "Submit a Support Request" button in the PatronManager Help tab to have us create your customized Recurring Donation form, branded to match your website.

There's a lot more to learn about how all this works! Click on the "recurring donations" tag here in the Help tab to read the rest. For now: onward to more features of this release.