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Accelerate your Salesforce Org with a Lockbox Payment Applicator

By Jason Cookman |April 23, 2020
Integrations

What is Lockbox?

For those associations that still recieve checks mailed to your organization’s physical address, you have had to recently address: who goes in to collect the mail, logs the checks, and what the next steps are to deposit the checks and apply payments against orders in your CRM. If your organization uses a lockbox functionality, which is really just a PO Box accessible by the bank, you have just seen your return on investment with a low risk to human capital. The bank opens the mail, logs and deposits the checks, then provides you with a detailed report tying the customer to the order and payment amount.

Rather than applying payments one by one, fusionSpan has developed an online payment applicator built on the Salesforce platform. The Lockbox feature allows organizations to streamline posting payments into your Salesforce CRM. In fact, if your check logs could replicate the data template received from Lockboxes, this could streamline the process for you as well.

Through our custom Salesforce object, Payment Request Header, one can upload, validate, and apply payment to multiple orders with just a few simple clicks! The product essentially provides ease of access for the user to apply and receive payments in mass to invoices, and has been designed into three simple stages: Import, Validate, and Apply.

Import

Built with the user in mind, Lockbox can be used with a variety of CSV and Excel formats. In essence, the product takes these files supplied by the bank to automatically pay orders related to that file. We have created our Lockbox to use a custom metadata type, allowing your Salesforce Admin to easily configure your file format by criteria such as column index. Therefore, if your organization updates your file structure over time, there is no issue.

Furthermore, the system uses packaged custom objects for uploading Lockbox files (meaning the user doesn’t have to create anything, we create the object structure for transferring file details into Salesforce). This allows us to upload all data and separate the good from the bad – misformatted rows, orders that have already been paid, etc. in the second stage: Validation.

Validate

fusionSpan has developed a very customizable platform to allow the user to choose which fields are brought in and how they are validated during this phase.Using batch apex, the system can process up to 50 million orders at once, supporting almost any file size.

Our standard verification process currently includes features such as identifying the order of the payment within the system, validating the payment amount, verifying that two payments do not apply to the same order, and more. Furthermore, while we do have our standard code, the system allows custom validation. This allows the user to write their own custom apex class for handling the validation of each payment from the lockbox file.

Checking each field off the customizable fields provided, the lockbox application will mark all bad data with error messages. The system even allows you to run reports on all rows from your Lockbox file that were improper. An end user can easily validate each row of payment received in the file with the click of a button. Once validated, payment request details with errors will be flagged for review and payment request details without errors will be ready for the last stage, applying payment.

Apply

The final step is applying payment! Once your payment request details are ready for application, you press the button and all payments are processed in the system. Staff will be able to click one button to satisfy all payments and create necessary data in the system for a whole file, as opposed to manually applying payment to each order for each payment. Our clients that have implemented lockbox said this has saved hours or even days of work.

Payment Application can take some time since the lockbox must interact with payment gateways and process any additional data necessary from the purchase. All integrations relying on orders in the system will be able to perform their standard functionality, and the system will create an automated generation of any receipts or transactions from the user paying their order.

Schedule a Demo Today!

As other organizations have begun to create similar products, we have developed our Lockbox with the user in mind, allowing for speed and ease of use. fusionSpan is cognizant of the fact that different customers have different needs, and our system gives leeway all the way from the standpoint of the imported fields to the validation checklist. We have provided extensibility in addition to standard functionality built into the system, and this has been a very popular application since it’s recent development. Schedule a demo with us today to see how Lockbox could be a fit for your organization!

Schedule Demo

Jason Cookman

Jason is a Senior Salesforce Architect and has been with fusionSpan since June 2014.He has multiple Salesforce Certifications and has led the solution architecture on dozens of Salesforce implementations. In addition he has created apps on a variety of platforms and frameworks including MuleSoft, Spring Boot, AngularJs and Drupal. He has been coding in Java, php and JavaScript for more than eight years and has over six years of experience developing on the Salesforce Platform in Apex, Visualforce and Lightning. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland with a double bachelor degree in Computer Science and Accounting. Jason's favorite foods are ramen, ramen and more ramen.

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