New Salesforce.com version and Households
Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 January 2006 01:37 Written by Steve Tuesday, 10 January 2006 01:35
Householding is something that Salesforce.com hasn’t been good at. If you want to take donations from multiple people, and then thank them with one letter at the end of the year that aggregates all their donations, you had to go through some gyrations. The most comon gymnastic was to co-opt the Account object (usually meant to represent a company) and use it to represent a Household. This allows the report identified above, but has other consequences that have been a deal-breaker for me.
With the new Salesforce.com release, which came out this weekend, another workaround became possible. You can now relate a Household to an Opportunity. This allows you to record a $100 donation with Bob Horton as the donor and also relate it to his Household. Do the same thing with donations from Sue Horton, his wife, and then run the report that shows all Opportunites for a Household and you’ve got it.
To make this easy to use, there probably needs to be some custom code for creating Opportunities and automatically relating them to the right donor and Household. I’ve written part of this, and I’ll augment it to support the Household portion as soon as I can. Then I’ll tackle the non-trivial concept of thanking individuals vs. thanking Households, and the best way to do that.
Thanks to Salesforce.com for giving us more options!
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[...] Indeed, this is very powerful. It has allowed me to greatly simplify the method I use to handle Households. I suggested that things might be better earlier, but they are much better than I thought. [...]