Native to Salesforce, Chargent allows you to create custom automated payment processes using Flow that meet a variety of business needs. If you want to use the best tool to automate repetitive tasks and streamline your processes, Salesforce Flow is the way to go.
Before You Begin #
What is a Flow?
Flow is a declarative tool in Salesforce that allows you to automate various processes. Whether you are a pro at Flow or learning about Flow for the first time, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the following resources to help you best understand how you can use Flow with Chargent:
- Review Chargent’s When and How To Use Salesforce Flows page for the basics, examples, and frequently asked questions.
- To become an expert at building Salesforce Flows, we recommend flexing your Trailhead muscles by completing Automate Your Business Processes with Salesforce Flow.
- We’ve compiled a list of Salesforce Flow Ideas for Salesforce Admins, including common use cases, best practices, and considerations.
- If your expertise is in finance, see Salesforce Flows for Finance Professionals, curated just for you.
Is Flow the Answer?
Chargent listens intently to customer needs, constantly developing new functionalities to facilitate your payment processing goals. Before you turn to building a flow to handle your unique business processes, we recommend reviewing Chargent’s built-in capabilities. To avoid recreating the wheel, check out the following links to learn about what comes out of the box with Chargent:
- See Chargent Features to learn about what Chargent can do without the need for custom Flows.
- Chargent Automation provides an overview of baked-in automation in Chargent.
Flow Examples and Use Cases #
Adding an Invoice Number
You can add an Invoice Number from an Opportunity (or any object from which you are processing payments) to a Chargent Order using a Before Save Flow. To learn more, see How do I add an Invoice Number from an Opportunity to a Chargent Order?
Auto-Populating Recurring Billing
Flow allows you to auto-populate the recurring billing fields on your Chargent Orders. For instructions, visit Using Flow to Automatically Populate Recurring Billing.
Calculate Tax
If your business collects taxes or other fees when collecting payments in Salesforce, you can create a Flow that automates tax calculation. For more information, see How do I calculate sales tax or other taxes?
Community Payments Using Flow
Chargent’s Flow-Enabled Take Payment component allows you to develop a custom payment process for your Salesforce Community. Additionally, you can also enable guest users to make payments. To learn more, review Community Payments Using Flow.
Customizing Recurring Billing Frequency
Chargent provides you with the most common Recurring Billing Frequencies out of the box (daily, monthly, annually, etc.). However, you may need a custom payment schedule based on your business model. See Customize Recurring or Scheduled Payments using Flow to learn more.
Discounting Orders
Many customers inquire about automatically applying discounts to their Chargent orders. Follow the steps in this knowledge article to build this automation in your instance: How do I apply a discount to a Chargent order?
Sending a Payment Request
If you want to automatically send a Payment Request to your customers when a Chargent Order is created, see How do I automatically send a Payment Request email when a Chargent Order is created?
Using the Flow API
Want to get really creative? Chargent developed a comprehensive API for developers, but we didn’t stop there. Admins can take advantage of Chargent’s API declaratively using Flow. For more information, see our Developer Documentation.
Troubleshooting Flows #
Adding a Delay
You’ve read above that there are many different types of flows and how to build them, but often, the order of execution in Salesforce is complex. We recommend adding a delay to your record-triggered flows to ensure your processes are completed in the correct order.
To troubleshoot or avoid errors before they happen, follow these steps: Add a Delay to a Salesforce Record Triggered Flow
Dealing with Unhandled Faults
A common error when creating flows is “An unhandled fault has occurred while processing the flow. Please contact your system administrator for more information.” To learn about common reasons why this error might occur while using Chargent, see Flow Error – An unhandled fault has occurred in this Flow.
Troubleshooting Tools
Chargent includes tools to help you troubleshoot your custom automation in Salesforce. For more information, see Troubleshooting Automation and Validation Rules.
