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Faster Grant Making by Utilizing Apex Triggers

If you’re anything like our friends at the Rogers Family Foundation then Foundation Connect is an essential part of your day to day operations.  So maybe, like Rogers Family, you’ve found that there are some tasks involved in the Grant Making process which you feel could be faster.  In this specific use case, this organization was interested in automating the creation of Payment records. FC has this great Payment Scheduler wizard but what if your payments always follow the exact same schedule then you could bypass the wizard all together. Who does not like to save time!


We created an Apex Trigger which automatically creates a Payment, a Contributing Program and Budget Contribution every time a Grant Request is created.  This is done by utilizing a picklist field on the Grant Request object which contains the names of all the Program Areas, allowing the Program Area to be chosen while creating the Grant Request.  We further customized the custom solution to update the affiliated records whenever the Grant Request is updated, but only under certain conditions; for example: once the Grant Request status is set to ‘Awarded’ the Grant Request is assumed to be finalized and no more changes will reflect through to the related records.  Additionally, Rogers Family Foundation only uses one Payment per Request the vast majority of the time but it has happened before where additional Payments have to be issued; in that case the logic of the trigger automatically stops updating the Payment record and switches over to manual mode so that the Grant can be split across multiple Payments.  


Step 1: Create a new Grant Request

 

 

Step 2: Appreciate the automatically created related records.

Note the Program Area was mapped directly from Priority Area picklist on the Grant Request

 

 

This isn’t limited to one single Payment record, if you regularly create 10 Payments per Request then the trigger can be easily modified to create 10 payments for each request.  If you use a different number of payments for each record type then that too can be easily configured.  Essentially any part of the Grant creation process which is consistent can be automated.  The Payment Wizard is an amazing and essential addition to Foundation Connect but it’s definitely not always as fast or as automated as we might like.  With this solution you don’t have to do a single thing, if you create a Grant Request then you get the related records immediately, no extra steps required.  


If you think that you might be able to benefit from this kind of custom solution then we here at Sputnik Moment will be more than happy to discuss creating your custom built Payment, Program Area and Contributing Program creation tool!


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About Faster Grant Making by Utilizing Apex Triggers
Contact Faster Grant Making by Utilizing Apex Triggers

If you’re anything like our friends at the Rogers Family Foundation then Foundation Connect is an essential part of your day to day operations.  So maybe, like Rogers Family, you’ve found that there are some tasks involved in the Grant Making process which you feel could be faster.  In this specific use case, this organization was interested in automating the creation of Payment records. FC has this great Payment Scheduler wizard but what if your payments always follow the exact same schedule then you could bypass the wizard all together. Who does not like to save time!


We created an Apex Trigger which automatically creates a Payment, a Contributing Program and Budget Contribution every time a Grant Request is created.  This is done by utilizing a picklist field on the Grant Request object which contains the names of all the Program Areas, allowing the Program Area to be chosen while creating the Grant Request.  We further customized the custom solution to update the affiliated records whenever the Grant Request is updated, but only under certain conditions; for example: once the Grant Request status is set to ‘Awarded’ the Grant Request is assumed to be finalized and no more changes will reflect through to the related records.  Additionally, Rogers Family Foundation only uses one Payment per Request the vast majority of the time but it has happened before where additional Payments have to be issued; in that case the logic of the trigger automatically stops updating the Payment record and switches over to manual mode so that the Grant can be split across multiple Payments.  


Step 1: Create a new Grant Request

 

 

Step 2: Appreciate the automatically created related records.

Note the Program Area was mapped directly from Priority Area picklist on the Grant Request

 

 

This isn’t limited to one single Payment record, if you regularly create 10 Payments per Request then the trigger can be easily modified to create 10 payments for each request.  If you use a different number of payments for each record type then that too can be easily configured.  Essentially any part of the Grant creation process which is consistent can be automated.  The Payment Wizard is an amazing and essential addition to Foundation Connect but it’s definitely not always as fast or as automated as we might like.  With this solution you don’t have to do a single thing, if you create a Grant Request then you get the related records immediately, no extra steps required.  


If you think that you might be able to benefit from this kind of custom solution then we here at Sputnik Moment will be more than happy to discuss creating your custom built Payment, Program Area and Contributing Program creation tool!