Creating a Recurrence
A recurrence is a regular pattern of occurrences. (The New Recurrence window is a lot easier to use than the New Occurrence window, so many times people will create a one time, one day recurrence in lieu of creating an occurrence...) REMEMBER: Recurrences happen at the same location at the same time of day, just on different days... You CAN edit the individual occurrences that this new recurrence creates, but in doing so, you lose the ability to edit them as a group.
Navigate to the Opportunity where you wish to add the Recurrence
You can use the Create New Reccurrence in the Volunteer Opportunity Overview... or you can click on New Recurrence from the related list of objects
Click New Recurrence
Both options take you to the New Recurrence screen.
The Opportunity Name should auto-populate, since you created this from the Opportunity page
If you created a New Recurrence from Recurrence Tab, make sure to use the LookUp button so it properly links to the correct Opportunity.
The Default Opportunity Coordinator will be brought over. You can update this if desired.
Update the Status
Active is ready for publishing on the Public Site.
Pending and Awaiting Approval mean they are not ready to be published and Inactive is the same as canceled and means that all occurrences associated should be removed from the site and won't be reactivated in future.
Use Pending for administratively created occurrences. Awaiting Approval is a status that indicates that it was created by the partner and awaiting you to 'publish' the recurrence and its related occurrences.
Enter the Start Date and End Date and Start Time and End Time for the series of occurrences you wish to create
NOTE: The end date cannot be later than the end date you have set up for the Opportunity. An error message will appear if you attempt this.
Set up the Type of Recurrence
How often does this event recur? Remember, when you build each instance of the recurrence, they have to happen at the same time once a day, once a week, or once a month. You want to have 2 different times? Once the recurrence creates the series of occurrences, you can go in and edit the individual occurrences. When you do that, however, the recurrence is broken and you cannot edit them as a group anymore.
The Recurrence type can be Monthly, Weekly or Daily.
When you chose the recurrence type, you'll have two more fields to update to specify which recurring day of the month, or which day of the week, etc.
i.e. for monhtly: Second Wednesday of the month.
When picking days of the week, be sure to move the days from the 'available' column to the 'chosen' column to select them!
Set up your Sign-Up information
NOTE: If you leave these fields blank, it populates with the default information from the Opportunity.
Registration Start Date: When would you like people to open the registration for this recurrence? In this case, registration starts on 12/1/2009
Registration Deadline: How many hours before the start of this occurrence is registration turned off? In this case, 2 hours.
Set up your Location
This field is auto-populated with the default location. You can lookup a different location if you choose.
If each recurrence is happening in a different location each time, you need separate recurrences (or to update individual occurrences)
You can choose to input a Description
This is an internal field where you can put notes on the nature of the occurrence.
Click Save
You have created a recurrence. You will be taken to the Recurrence page. Confirm all the information and look to see that it has the related field: Occurrences at the correct Start and End DateTime.
You will also see that a number of occurrences have been created.
NOTE: Best practice in creating recurrences is to NOT create occurrences too far into the future. Things change. And you'll want to update a lot of the occurrences you originally created. This gets harder to manage the more occurrences are involved.
There is a system limit that prevents you from creating more than 52 occurrences with one recurrence.
If the recurrence is created by a partner, it will be sent to you to approve, which you do clicking on the Publish Link in the saved recurrence record.
NOTE: You cannot have more than 58 upcoming, active occurrences at one time.
Do not have more than 58 occurrences that are on future dates and in active status. The limit for displaying active occurrences in the volunteer opportunity detail page is 58. Exceeding this number will cause an 'authorization required' error page to appear.
Lauren Dunford
Once an end date for a recurrence has been set, can it be changed?
Larry Deckel
Technically it could be, but we don't recommend it. By saving the recurrence again you might wind up with duplicates of the occurrences that were already created. If you changed the times for example, you'd wind up with multiple occurrences created (because it wouldn't delete the old occurrences that had already been recreated). Given the touchy nature of this - we do not recommend changing a recurrence after you've created it.
What's your goal in changing the end date? Are you trying to shorten the recurrence? if so - you'd be better off canceling the occurrences you don't want in the series (this will disassociate them from the recurrence).
If you are wanting to add additional occurrences, you'd be better off just creating a second recurrence that picks up where the first one left off.
Leanna
Hello, I am currently trying to set up a Recurrence for an Opportunity that has already started.
Someone started a volunteer op a while back without telling any of us office folks who keeps things updated in Salesforce.
Now that we have found out about it we need to log the volunteers for both past and future instances.
However while setting up the Recurrence it outright refuses to make any occurrences for days before the current date.
For example, I set the start date as July 1st, yet it resets it to todays date once I click Save.
Is there any way to fix this without having to make the past Occurrences one by one?
Larry Deckel
Recurrences can only be used to create occurrences taking place in the future. You cannot create a recurrence for past occurrences.
I’m afraid you’ll have to create the occurrences one by one for the past dates. (Hopefully there aren’t too many of them - but even so, a new occurrence only requires 4 fields to be filled out - so it shouldn’t take too long!)
Best practice of course is to always put occurrences in before they take place, rather than populating data into salesforce after the occurrences have taken place :-)
Alternatively, if you're experienced with the data loader - you could bulk create new occurrences for past dates, and upload them into the system using the data loader.