Name: The Modern Finance/SIS Advantage: How to Simplify Operations, Data Access, and Program Reporting
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T18:31:17.128Z
Duration: 56 min 44 s
Description: The Modern Finance/SIS Advantage: How to Simplify Operations, Data Access, and Program Reporting

Transcript for "The Modern Finance/SIS Advantage: How to Simplify Operations, Data Access, and Program Reporting": Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Susan Smith, and I am a member of our higher ed team here at Blackbaud. We're going to begin here in just a few moments, but I want to go over a few house housekeeping items while everyone is getting a chance to to get logged in. This is an interactive platform, so please feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation via the q and a function. Submit your questions as they come up, but note that we're going to hold until the end of the presentation to start answering those questions. If there are any questions that we don't have time for at the end, we'll make sure to follow-up with you and get you a response. The platform we're using today is called Goldcast, and just a few things about this platform. Audio for the webinar is being broadcast through your computer speakers, and if you have any technical issues, try refreshing your browser. You'll receive a link to this webinar webinar recording by email later and use the q and a to submit your questions. There's a cogwheel below to adjust any of your settings. I also want to let everyone know that one of our reps, Kenneth Abel, is on the line today and ready to chat with you if you have any sales specific questions during our time together. You'll be getting a high level overview of the Blackbaud Student First partnership today. But if you'd like a more in-depth or personalized demo, pricing, anything like that, then, Kenneth will be able to get you connected in real time. Just drop a note in the q and a at any point during the presentation, and he'll get back to you. So for those of you that I haven't met, my name is Susan Smith. I'm a CPA here in the state of South Carolina. And before joining Blackbaud, I spent my career in higher education as the chief operating officer at the University of South Carolina Foundation. Today, in my role at Blackbaud, I work exclusively with higher education institutions and foundations, partnering with the finance, IT, and institutional leaders to evaluate their financial processes and technology and just thinking more strategically about how those systems can better support their mission. And that mission driven focus is exactly why this topic comes up in so many of my conversations. Across higher education, institutions are being asked to do more faster, and with greater accountability while still advancing their mission and serving students effectively. At the same time, many schools are relying on legacy ERP and student information systems that simply weren't designed for today's pace or complexity. These systems often create silos between finance, student data, and operations. They introduce unnecessary risk, slow down reporting, and make it harder to get a clear, real time picture of the institution's financial health or program performance. What I hear again and again is frustration. Teams are spending too much time reconciling data across systems, manually pulling reports, or answering basic questions that should be easy to access. Leaders want better visibility. Finance teams want confidence in the data, and everyone wants technology that supports smarter decisions, not more work. And that's what today's session is all about. We're gonna talk about what a modern, connected approach to finance and student information can look like and how institutions can move beyond those silos to simplify operations, improve data access, and strengthen program reporting. And a big part of that conversation centers on Student First and our partnership. Blackbaud and Student First are bringing finance and student systems together in a more integrated, purpose built way for higher education, designed to reduce complexity and better support both operational and strategic goals across the institution. To walk you through this in more detail, I'm excited to introduce today's speakers, and then we'll get going. So speakers, will you please join me? Thank you so much, Susan. My name is Jen Taylor. I am with Student First. I'm a director of solutions here with Student First. So I'll be going through the student life cycle components relative to admissions, the academic affairs, academic areas, student, and student accounts. I'll let my colleague, Serena, introduce herself. Thank you, Susan and Jennifer. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Serena Heights, and I'm one of the directors of solutions focusing on financial aid here at Student First. Alrighty. Thanks, Serena. Thanks, Jen. Great to have you all today, and we're looking forward to our time together. My name is Marty Singleton. I'm a senior solutions consultant here at Blackbaud, and I support many of our software solutions, including Financial Edge. And prior to working for Blackbaud, I was actually a director of finance and accounting in a small college, and I used Financial Edge NXT that we're gonna be looking at today. So excited to share some information with you, just kinda give you some insights on what our capabilities and functionality is going to bring with that solution and how we can partner with Student First. So the first slide that I'm gonna share, we're jumping a little bit here. Let me go back one. This is an overall view of financial edge. You can see on the right, we're mobile responsive, which is really powerful if you're away from your desk. You don't have to be tethered there. You can always pull up these reports that we're gonna be looking at today. So we do deliver fund accounting solutions through Financial Edge NXT. It is one of our flagship solutions here at Blackbaud. As you probably are aware, many cloud accounting vendors, they claim a long list of features, but only Financial Edge NXT delivers a rich cloud based solution designed solely for real nonprofit accounting staffs. We have modern secure technology and industry leading reporting. I personally experienced this as very robust. Tailored design, it means your daily experience is efficient and simplified. And since Blackbaud does not serve the needs for non for for profit accounting, you don't need to worry about clunky design or navigating through features you won't use. This creates material efficiencies in search, data entry, and other common task for our users. This next slide gives you kind of a visual of how you can actually leverage our software. Some vendors talk about dimensions. We actually talk about GL segments, projects, transaction codes. What's really powerful about our software, and I wanna emphasize for you, everything you're seeing on your screen here holds equity, and our software will roll that equity forward into next fiscal periods, next fiscal years, and so forth. Specifically, Specifically, we can manage your challenging reporting requirements with this flexibility in how you structure and set up your chart of accounts. For profit systems, they talk about tags that can track data such as funds and projects. But ultimately, as you've found, these tags aren't a substitute for more powerful capabilities that can manage business logic or complex combinations of data resulting in a frustrating and inefficient experience for nonprofits. In contract in contrast to this financial edge, NXT's general ledger architecture utilizes a combination of powerful tools. As you can see there on your screen, it includes a multi segment account code for long term business drivers. So we have a segmented GL structure. You can have up to 10 segments. Those segments can be alphanumeric, and they can be up to 30 alphanumeric characters each. There's also a dedicated program and grant record to offer additional capabilities, not just a generic tag. And when we say a program record, that's also synonymous with a project record, which we're gonna be looking at today when we get into my demonstration portion of the webinar. And you also have an unlimited dimensionality through custom fields that allow you to report on any measures without cluttering your chart of accounts. And, of course, we've also got the transaction codes. So as you look at this design and think about it, it's a little bit of a change in the way you might be doing it now, but it allows Blackbaud and Financial Edge to deliver an experience that's tailored to your unique business processes while still providing control and simplicity that commercial systems simply cannot offer. And many of you are struggling with that today, particularly if you have an ERP accounting system. It's a square peg in a round hole. It is not built for restricted fund accounting. That's not its purpose. Financial Edge, on the other hand, is purpose built for restricted fund accounting. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jen for getting into the student first solution demonstration. So there you go, Jen. Thanks, Marty, very much for that. I appreciate it. So part of part of what Marty has has talked about, of course, is, what we're doing together. And, Susan, of course, introduced this conversation here at the beginning of of the hour. So what we've done together with our partnership is we realized about a year and a half ago that there was quite a lot of synergy between what we were doing at Student First and what we're doing here at Blackbaud. So we put together this total campus solution, if you will, that really looks at bringing what we do with student first, so the student central life cycle, feeding that data over to Ranger's Edge NXT in order to continue the process related to alumni engagement and fundraising. And then, of course, what is needed, as Marty mentioned, related to true fund accounting for institutions of higher education. And we saw there was no one together meeting those needs, which was the impetus of the partnership here between Blackbaud and Student First. So Student first is part, in this journey, if you will, is to connect your campus, really making sure that you've got a system of record then that connects all of the components that you have at your institution. And the average institution really, really has over, several dozen, if you will, software solutions. And so you've got to have the ability to integrate seamlessly with those as you go throughout your work. So with Student First, what we offer to you, as part of as part of our ecosystem is truly a cloud native software as a solution software deployed in Microsoft's Azure cloud here. We employ an agile implementation methodology to ensure you can get up and running at quick time, give you comprehensive reporting that you can put into the hands of your users, reducing some dependencies there with IT, and a commitment really to being very robust in supporting your complex processes without you having to increase your reliance on IT. So we have an open, what's called API structure, which simply means you can preserve your connectivity to all of the solutions that you have there on campus. And we employ AI driven development, and we also have some AI driven embedded functionality that we'd be happy to share with you. So from that student life cycle, it starts at the admissions stage, if you will. So when we can go out and take care of your lead management, your application management, you have an option to use third parties if you'd like to do so. Again, we support your student academics, your financial aid, and also your student accounts. So I am going to stop sharing the slides here, and we are gonna get directly into the solution here, related to student first. So let me make sure I get us into the right area here. Give me just a moment. I think I need Mary Beth to move my browser over from here to here, and this will enable me to share my entire screen here. There we go. Alright. So let me maximize this, and we will be in business. So when you first come into student first, you're gonna see here on the left hand side of the navigation menu, all of the areas, all of the, functional components that we support within Student First itself. And the summary screen is what you're gonna see some key data relative to your role there at your institution. For example, it's always a big thing where I work to be able to see things like the number of students that you have enrolled. So if that is important to you in your function or if you were like me and you got that question asked to you on a regular basis, you can come in, filter the information that you see here. If you select see wanna start just for a certain period, and then you wanna come in, for instance, and segment that out by program, you can do so here just by interacting with the data that you see. So the goal is to provide you, just as Susan mentioned, with better visibility and more data into what it is that you want to see. Part of what you need to have visibility into is supporting those students who are coming through your institution. So for example, I can see Carla Arnold here. She's been accepted here to Global University, and she has reached out because she has a question for me as her admissions adviser. By the same token, you're gonna be able to see student records as well. And in the case of Macy Burnett, again, she's reached out to me because she has a question about her upcoming schedule. So part of what's available to you within Student First is ability to communicate with students. If they come in, ask you a question via the student portal, you're able to get to that directly by clicking on a link, see an overview of their information here, and reach out to her to talk to Macy about her actual schedule itself. If she then wants to talk about the upcoming term, you'll see this menu here on the left hand side. These are all of the components of the student record to which you have access based on your security. So if Macy, for instance, has a question relative to her actual degree audit and how those courses are fitting into her secondary education degree, you can simply click on that area of the degree audit and find out what you need to know. She has a question about transfer credit. Again, very simple to come in and just do a quick search and get to that area within student first. So when you think about what your role is at your institution, it's about being able to quickly access the data and information that you need to serve your students in a timely manner based on what they are requesting from you and then to holistically see everything that you need to see together in one place from a supported environment, a total campus solution that is integrating for you every component of that student's educational record. Kind of the next phase in the life cycle is, of course, how it is that students are going to finance their education and how we are gonna help them in that regard. So I'm going to pass the ball over to my colleague, Serena here so she can tell us how you accomplish that within Student First. Okay. Thank you, Jennifer. Let me start sharing. K. You have to stop sharing for me to share. There we go. Are you seeing my screen now? Can I get a thumbs up for somebody? Yes. Okay. So Jennifer just showed you how Macy got into the system and had classes registered. Let's look at how her financial aid would be processed. Notice here that we have Macy listed in our list of the previous students that we've reviewed. We're gonna look at her financial aid record, and we'll see under her aid area that she does not have an ICER record. It's incomplete at this moment. So let's pull in an ICER record. I'm going to do it right now. I'm going through the process to pull it in, but you would have this on a scheduler that will allow you to pull in the ISO records when you want to pull it in. So Mesa does not have an ISO record at this point. We're going to quickly pull in a group of students, and it'll take just a moment for those records to come in. And we have within our system the ability for you to see all of the past records that have come in. You can look at it by the past day, the past week, the past month, or anytime that you want to review the data of the records that have come in. Also notice when the records come in, you can actually see if they are selected for verification or not. So we can see the verification flag. We can also see what verification group they were attached to. So we are looking for Macy, and here is Macy's record. She is not selected for verification. Once we select Macy, this will actually take us into the ISA record for her record so that you'll be able to see all of the information about that record. We can see her SAI. We can see the comment code, so it automatically shows that she has some comment codes, but it also shows if there's any actions needed. So if Macy was selected for verification or if she had any comment codes, it would automatically add documents to her record that is built in within the system. It automatically happens for the student. Now what also happens is when we look at that aid tracker we were just looking at, now it noticed it updates that that ISA record was received, and there's no documents required because her documents are completed. Now what we also have within our solution is the ability for you to see under the financial aid terms here. This shows you the Pell eligibility for the student. So we can see that she's registered for twelve hours. We can see here her financial aid classes credits. If you needed to adjust those, that pencil was here so you can adjust those hours if there for some reason, the financial aid hours needs to be adjusted for the course that she's taking. And we're looking at the financial aid term summary here because Macy is in a term based program. Now if Macy was in a nonterm program because student first handles term based and nonterm based programs, then this area would be called payment period summary because it would not be based on the term. It will be based on the payment period. So it'll be the exact same page, but based on the program that the student is registered for. And you can see the program at the top here. So she's in the secondary education. This is a term based program, so you would see the term. Under academic, this is where you will actually see the budget for the student. So what also happens is you can automatically attach the budget to the student, and you can put that on the scheduler as well to assign the budget to the student based on that ICER record coming in. So it's showing that she was the first year student, never attended, that she's dependent. At the bottom here, we can see what the living situation is and residency information. That is coming in from if you're collecting that from your admissions application, then it will automatically come in from the admissions area to help populate which budget, and you will be able to create as many budget groups as you would want. And then these are the budget components for that student based on that. Here under student aid, this is where you can actually come in. And if you wanted to manually award a fund to the student, then you can click this button to manually award the student. If you wanted to just auto package this one student, you would come here to click the button to say auto package. But we want to do it as a group. We pulled in some records. We pulled in about six ITER records when we pulled in Macy's ITER there. Back under processes here, we wanna go into the awarding engine. This is under the budget area. This is where you can assign those cost items to as a group to the student, and you can also set up the scheduler for that to happen. But what we want to do here is actually award all of our students that are ready to be packaged that's a part of the secondary education group. So you're able to create student groups that would put students together based on whatever criteria you're interested in. And then you can actually have this scheduled to happen so that it can literally, win a student's ICER record comes in, if they're not selected for verification and there's no c flags, it can go from ICER coming in to awarding the student. So for demo purposes here, I'm going to run this process so that you can see it happen. But this is where you can actually schedule this for daily, weekly, monthly, multiple times a day if you would like, and then you say what time you want that to happen. You can do that for budgeting. You can do that for awarding. So you can have the system as automated as you would like it to be. You can decide how often you want this to happen and for how long you want it to happen. And then if it's on a schedule, it will also show you every time it runs. You will see the last time it ran, and we have a history of that. So for now, we're going to go in, and we're gonna run all the students that are ready to be packaged based on those ISO records coming in. This should take just a moment, and it's running all of the students that's in that secondary education major based on the group that we selected. As soon as that runs, when you come into the job run history, this will actually show you how many students. So we had 10 students I'm sorry. 23 students that were part of that group, and there were 10 errors there. You select the plus sign here, and then this will show you the students that were awarded. So it shows you that they these students were auto packaged. And then it's also gonna tell you why a student was not packaged. So for Mitchell, Mitchell has an error because he was selected for verification, but verification is not completed. So even though he's in that group, he is not going to be packaged until you are ready for him to be packaged based on your rules. So now when we look at Macy's information, we can come here, look at that auto package for her. And if we extend this, this will actually show us based on your awarding methods, which you will create within the system, It will show you what funds were awarded to her. It will also show you what funds that were not awarded to her based on why it give you a reason why it was not awarded. So it skipped work study because based on the rule that we have in the system for work study, she does not meet the grade level for that. As we scroll down, we can see that it skipped this scholarship because she does not have the minimum GPA for that particular scholarship. So it tells you why. And if we select Macy's name here, when we go to her record, we can now see all of those funds that's awarded to her. We can also see a built in award letter that will show you what the award would look like for the student. And so this is an award letter that the student could print. This is completely customizable by you when I should say configurable instead of customized. So you will configure this for your institution and what information you want on that. Now we're gonna fast forward, and let's say we want the student to be able to accept this award online. So now that we have processed Macy and we've awarded her, now we're gonna go out and we're going to run this process to allow her to accept her award online. So we're just gonna run it for that secondary education major. It'll take just a moment here for that to process all the students that are ready for their awards to be published to them on the web. So we're gonna look up Macy, and here we can see that Macy is ready for that award to be sent to her. We're going to send that offer. So now is the time that the student can actually see that interaction that you had on their file. They can see that award. So when we go back to Macy's record here, couple of things happened. It would automatically update the aid tracker for Macy's record so that you can see what batch that was in that was pushed out to her. You can also see that it's in a offer status, so she has not interacted with that award online yet. So we can see that information. We're gonna go out and impersonate, Macy. One of the things that is available within student first is the ability for you as an administrator to impersonate the student so you can see exactly what they see on the portal. So we're gonna come out so you can see what Macy would see as a student. So this takes just a moment. And now here in the portal, you can see that she can see any financial aid related information. So there's resources here. If she needed to update the upload documents, she can see that. She can also see what her account balance is, and Jen is gonna run the billing process so that you can attach that and see that for the students in just a moment. Here is her offer letter that we created within the system by running that awarding engine that awarded the funds to her So the she's seeing this information. She can also download this apprinted, and she can also accept her award online. Here, she can go in. And if it's set it up for the student to be able to reduce the award, then she can come here and she can say, I only want a thousand dollars of that instead of 2,000, and it automatically does the update. There is an audit trail that keeps that on file so you'll be able to see that. For any of the funds that you want to auto accept, notice it will auto accept for the student so they don't have to make a decision on that. And then when we come down, the student is able to do what we considered an esignature here for Macy. So she's going to accept this online. And once she saves that, there's an audit trail that will show that she accepted that, and it updates the administrative system so you would see that. So back on the administrative side, we'll come here, and it automatically updated that she did a web acceptance. And then for the funds that were already auto accepted, it's here. So we're gonna fast forward now that she has accepted her award. We're gonna run disbursement so that we can look at this information on the accounts receivable side. So this is where you would come back into processes, go into disbursement approval. We're gonna create a batch. We're gonna run it for this aid year, and we're gonna do it for the secondary education major instead of all of our majors here. And then we're gonna select the term. So we're gonna do it for fall. We can do it by student group as well. And just a couple of seconds here, this is showing us all the students that's ready to be dispersed and all of the funds that are ready to be dispersed for those students. So for the sake of time, we're just going to disperse the SEOG here. We're gonna rerun that, and we're gonna pull that out. And we can see that Macy's in that group. We're gonna create this batch. And when we create this batch, this is getting ready for the accounts receivable to pick this up. So now we can see this is the batch of students that we have for the SELG. Notice here if there was any exception. So if she's not meeting the rule or any of the students are not meeting the rule for your disbursement for this fund, then it will not allow it to be dispersed. You can also even if the student is meeting the rule, you can come here. You can say, I don't want this student to be dispersed in this batch. You can update that, and it would not disperse for that student when you run that disbursement process. You can also make adjustments to the amount of disbursement if you wanted to, so you could do that. So we're taking those two students out, and we're gonna post this disbursement. Now that is ready for the accounts receivable area to pick up to disperse that onto the student's account. I'm gonna turn it back over to Jennifer to disperse that, and I will stop sharing. Excellent. Thanks very much for that, Serena. And I will go ahead and reshare my screen, and we're gonna pick up that process from the financial aid perspective onto Macy's record from a student accounts or accounts receivable perspective. So if we come in and we look at our menus that we have here from the student's accounts area, there are a few different ways that you can assess students from a billing perspective. And in the interest of time, I've gone ahead and queued up a batch here that includes the charges and credits that are related to Macy. So right now, she's enrolled full time for the 2026. You can see here there is an amount that is available to her, to be billed here. So if I come in and I post this batch, I'm just gonna quickly put in a reference number for this, indicate the transaction period start date, and save this information. And this is going to post that batch, which means the charges and the credits are posted to Macy's, what we call, ledger card. So if I wanna come in and quickly access her record, I can come back, see that amount. And because I haven't actually pulled down her aid yet, within her account balance is ability to see those charges that are here, and I can also see any pending aid that the financial aid office has put out. Now at whatever point in time you are ready to apply the financial aid that's available to you, you're gonna be able to pull down that financial aid batch that Serena here just queued up for us that we have for 03/12. I'd be able to indicate the bank account to which this information or deposits are going, put in a reference number as well for this. And I would be able to save this information, and Student First is gonna show me exactly what it is going to try to pull down for these students. And I can come in and, again, post that batch to these particular records that we have. So the goal, of course, is to have all of that in one place and the ability to come in and see that information in one area here within a connected campus. At any point in time, and going back to what Susan mentioned with regarding data access and information that is available to you, you'll see here a reporting tools menu within student first. So we support, of course, all regulatory reporting that you have to do at your institution. That includes things like your iPads report and your ten ninety eight t's. And at any point in time, you can see a real time reflection of the student's account balance, including payment plan details, anticipated aid, and get that information all in one fell swoop. Yet the the buck, proverbially speaking, does not stop here. If you'll see, there is an export to GL function when you integrate with Financial Edge, the ability for you to come in and see any open batches that you have, view and resolve any exceptions that you need to resolve before those transactions are actually reflected in Financial Edge where then you have access to the data that you need to begin to run analysis relative to your institution. So I'm gonna stop sharing now and let Marty come back on stage here and talk about what happens to that transactions once they're available to you there within Financial Edge. Marty? Alright. Thank you. Always love to look at the Student First software. And for me, I'm a left brain individual. As I stated before, I had an accounting role in my previous role before coming to Blackbaud, so I fit perfectly in that. But what I really like about student first is the granularity that you get with their solution. And once we partner with them and you set up your jail structure and then you map all of those accounts to the various specific areas that you wanna track from a tuition perspective, no longer are you looking at data coming into your general ledger in a ginormous tuition bucket. You can slice that up and get granularity. And I can break it down for you if you want fees for books, fees for labs, fees for technology, and then, of course, all the various different tuition types. So that's what we're gonna be looking at. I'm on the landing page right now. Rather than navigate here in our webinar, I'm just gonna jump to tabs just for brevity. This would be a sample batch that has come over from student first. So we're gonna be walking through this. You'll see the summary of the batch information up here at the top. As I get over here on the right hand side, you can see numbers about the batch, when it was posted, dates, amounts, things of that nature. Now as I scroll on down, I wanna bring your attention over here to the left hand side where you can see the GL accounts. So, again, perfect world. At the very least, you're working with Financial Edge NXT at the same time you're implementing student first. Ideally, a little bit ahead of that so we can establish your chart of accounts and the specific GL account structure. So on the left hand side, what you would then have is all of your revenue mapped coming over from the various different tuitions. And, again, it's not just going to be one bucket anymore. You're gonna be able to send over very granular and specific tuition GL mapping. As I scroll on across, of course, I've got my post date. I've got my journal reference that is going to be student first. Now we can also map from the student first side to specific projects. Now I've just got a generic one listed here, 9999 default, but I'm gonna show you a sample of an engineering program here in just a few moments. Of course, your debits and credits, you can book to class, restricted, unrestricted, things of that nature. And as I scroll on across here, you're gonna see at the top here, we've got some additional tables that you can code to when you're putting in your journal entries. We call these transaction codes. I talked about them earlier in the slide where when we were talking about the structure of Financial Edge. So these columns are labeled spendable, event, grant, appeal. We've got some additional custom fields here. You can have up to five tables, and you get to populate the pick list under these tables with whatever data that you want. So, for example, if I wanted one of my transaction codes to be program, in my drop down, I could have all the programs that we have listed in our curriculum for our college or anything else like location. So maybe I have different locations of campuses. I've got online learning. I've got physical locations. Some schools are gonna have multiple locations across the state. So maybe one of my drop downs is going to be location. So think about the flexibility that's going to give you when you're going to be running reports. Because what I've shown you here is you're able to get granular detail in your reports from the transaction codes, from the class, from the project. And then as I scroll on across, I wanna bring your attention again back to the GL account itself. I'm showing you three segments in the account structure. Again, you can have up to 10, but you can slice your reports at the segment level within Financial Edge. I also like to highlight up here at the upper left hand corner of the screen, for every single journal entry batch in Financial Edge, you can attach documents. This is great for an audit trail. So this could be any type of tuition document or program document that you wanna have. They can be any document type, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG, PDF. We don't care. And every attachment can be up to 100 meg in size, and you can have multiple attachments per journal entry. If you've already got that information scanned in and you don't want to attach it, just go right over here to the right hand side and just link that Google Docs, Dropbox, SharePoint, whatever. So get rid of the paper and get everything into the cloud. It's gonna be a lot more seamless. All of your stakeholders would then have access it to that. On the note of auditors, I wanna take a quick little sidetrack here. As I said before, I used Financial Edge in my previous role. During audit week, I actually gave my auditors direct access into Financial Edge. They could come in and look at journal entries, reports, any attachments in my AP for invoices. That allowed them to do a lot of the homework on their own. I didn't have to deal with auditor interruptions unless they needed something that they couldn't have access to that I could answer their questions. Then when audit week was over, I simply turned off their access. So that's something to think about that's really gonna help you streamline a lot of your workflows if you partner with Blackbaud and Student First. Now I'm gonna go next. I alluded to this. It's a project in financial edge. You can also call them programs. You navigate under the general ledger here right to projects. They are going to be unlimited. And if you already have something like this in your current accounting solution, we're gonna actually bring all of those in for you in bulk during implementation. But you're gonna get a lot more flexibility. So for every degree program that you have, engineering, business, nursing, whatever that happens to be, you can have an actual project for it. It's a project record in Financial Edge. What's really powerful about this is the ability to track everything associated with that in one record. And we're gonna see that in more detail here. The other thing I wanna highlight about projects is they're not just limited to programs. You can have projects for events. I had a golf tournament every year. So everything coming into that golf tournament tickets and things like that, I would book it in. All the expenses associated with it, I would spend it out in disbursements. But with a project, I can run an individual income statement and balance sheet. Yes. You heard that right. You can roll them all up into one report if you wish to show all program activity, all project activity by degree, things like that, or you can have it parsed out to where it's just in its own individual report. So in this example here, we are looking at an engineering program. You're going to be able to assign it a project ID or program ID up to 12 alphanumeric characters. It can be active or not. You can specify the type. So in this case, it's a engineering. It's part of our degree program. What department is it? It's gonna be engineering. Of course, you're gonna have your dates in here. One thing really powerful about our projects and our reporting is we only require a start date. You don't have to put an end date, so a project can live in perpetuity. The most important significant feature about the date is you can report across fiscal periods and fiscal years. So you don't have any limitations on date ranges. Notice too that we can also have an area where we capture the location. So, again, if you've got multiple locations where you have various different degrees, instructions, classes, professors, things like that, you can have that location. In this case, I've got this designated as main campus. It could also be online learning, whatever that happened to be. Within every single project, we are going to track activity. This is powerful because the tuition revenue coming over from student first is gonna be reflected here in an activity tile. Notice you're going to be able to sort by fiscal year. And then if it's populated with data, you would actually see bar graphs here. And then you would see activity in the respective fiscal period, which you can drill into all blue text in our software. In addition to the activity tile, I have unlimited notes. I can also put in all contacts. So I can put internal stakeholders to the college. I could also put any external stakeholders that might apply, professors, short term professors, online professors, things like that. You also have the ability to track actions within all of your project records. So maybe if I need to be updating things, maybe I need to be talking to people, professors, academic deans, things like that, I can set up meetings. I can have statuses, and then I can put a description of those and then save those. That, again, will always be something that your stakeholders will have access into this record. We have unlimited custom fields that we can track, and this is defined by you. So you can add infinitely anything that you wanna be tracking around programs. Like you saw in the journal entry, we also have unlimited storage at the project level. So anything that I wanna have in here. So specifics on the curriculum, any kind of documents associated with the degrees, with that specific program, grades, anything that I want, I can attach here. We also have a quick snapshot balance sheet for your stakeholders to jump in and see assets, liabilities, fund balance. You can also budget at the project level in our software in Financial Edge. Alright. That's just a quick overview of the project. Now how does that relate to reporting? We talked about the granularity that you're gonna get with mapping over on the student first side into the various different tuition types. So here's a couple of example reports. It's a basic statement here. I've got revenues and expenses on the left hand side. You can have up to 30 columns. I've just got a few examples here, operating, restricted, potentially endowed, things like that. Another example might be broken down by that degree program itself. And, again, I can have 30 of these in the same report. So I've got engineering business. If I had nursing, if I had arts and cultural, whatever it happened to be, I can have a column specific to that. On the left hand side, this is where I can actually break out that revenue. So I've just got one tuition here listed, but I can have very specific. And then I can have fees and things like that. Again, lab fees, tech fees, all of that can be associated by the programs. Very detailed, very granular. So that's the reporting that we're talking about. You've also got the ability in our software to create specific dashboards. All of this content is updated dynamically anytime we post a new journal entry batch to our general ledger in Financial Edge. So I can create these for all of our departments or department heads. So I can show them budgets and I can show them activity. This is a themed report specifically around budgets, budgets to actual, budgets remaining, things like that. This is really, really powerful, and I know a lot of business offices and finance teams struggle in this area showing the level of detail that they need to actually communicate to their departments where are you at. Where are you at with your budget? And specifically, where are you at with a program? You know, is this program profitable? If we take that up a level and we're talking to the president of the college or our board, hey. This program's profitable. This program's not profitable. We need to make a few tweaks and adjustments here to get things back into scope. This is a sample of another dashboard that you might create in our software. This steps back another level. Instead of just looking at budgets, we can bring in key performance indicators into a dashboard for many different areas that you might be wanting to track in your business office. So revenue, operating margin, of course, various different budgets. And notice the visualization options that you're going to have, line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, things like that. If you have a lot of data in a given tile, it's a window within a window. And, again, grants, expenses, I can get into vendors, accounts payable, everything that I want all in the same dashboard. Dashboard. And you get to configure this, and it's quite simple to do. I'd love to do a demonstration for you if you'd like to get back with Blackbaud and schedule a demonstration and take a look at Financial Edge. Before I turn this back over and leave the software, since I have all of your attention, I do wanna highlight what's coming in AI, and I'm only gonna spend a couple minutes on this. To that end, I need to give you a safe harbor statement. Everything I'm about to show you is forward looking and subject to change, so please don't hold me to that. This is what is here today in Financial Edge in the green tile. This is a little bit dated. We rolled it out in fourth quarter. Basically, it's like generative AI. Think about chat or Copilot, but this is inside of Financial Edge NXT. So it's only gonna be looking at data that you have in all of your records. So I could go into a project record, the one that I showed you, for example, in engineering. And I can just pull out a chat window and I can ask Blackbaud's AI to summarize this record for me. And then I can say, build me a report for this program. Build me an income statement. Build me a balance sheet. So again, it's generative. So that's available today. It's no additional cost. It comes out of the box with your subscription to Financial Edge. Coming soon is also Smart Insights for Financial Edge. This is like a virtual assistant. It's embedded right in financial edge. So if you look at the second paragraph down here, it's going to enable you to detect anomalies. Is really powerful when you're doing closing. Irregular entries, things that don't add up when we're talking about transactions, and it's gonna help you with closing. Again, this is coming. It's going to be included in your subscription. And the third item is a virtual accountant. So this would be a add on cost to your subscription, but, essentially, this is like adding a staff person in your business office. And it will actually do some of the more menial tasks allowing your staff to focus on more strategic tasks. So that's all I wanted to say about it. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up about where we're at and what's coming with our AI. So with that, I'm going to stop sharing, and I'm going to bring Great. Thanks, Marty, and our Student First group. We have a few minutes to go over some questions, so I'm going to invite our speakers to come back on stage with me, and we'll go through a couple of the questions that we've gotten in. The first one is, if a student doesn't accept the full award amount, do you have the ability to track that declined amount and or use it in a deferral situation? The answer is yes. They would be able to use that in a deferral situation. Great. Another one we have is how hard is it to integrate our LMS with student first? I'll take that one, Susan. So it's very straightforward. So we integrate out of the box with all the major LMS solutions on the market. So that includes solutions such as Canvas, Brightspace's desire to learn in Moodle, as well as a plethora of others for that two way data exchange. Awesome. And can we automate communications in student first? Absolutely. Great. Let's see. And can you calculate SAP and academic standing differently than student first? Yes. And this one's pretty specific, and I actually see this happening a lot right now. I think it's just due to our our current higher ed environment. We may be merging with another college. How would that work with student first? Yeah. Unfortunately, that's the reality of today's market, correct, within higher education. So with Student First, we architected the solution from its inception to be able to handle what we call a multi institution construct, which allows you to have separate business rules, academic calendars, accounts, financial aid funds, as well as chart of accounts, to be able to handle business differently, should you should you have that occur. Great. Here's one for you, Marty. Do we have to create a new chart of accounts and general ledger account structure, or can we map our current chart of account directly into Financial Edge? That's an excellent question. Hopefully, it came through when I was actually doing the demonstration. Because we have a segmented structure with 10 segments and up to 30 alphanumeric characters per segment, we can actually drop in your existing chart of accounts right into Financial Edge, your existing structure. However, best practice, and it's included in the scope of your implementation, is that you work with our implementation consultants to optimize your current GL structure to really get the most out of your partnership with Student First and Financial Edge NXT, specifically around getting that granular reporting. So you might have current limitations the way your GL structure is set up. But if you'll optimize that and work with us, we can maybe do a little tweaking and fine tuning as we go forward. So it's it's your option. It's your choice. We're gonna actually present to you what the options are, what the best practices are. Again, it's already included. You might as well at least explore it and consider it. Basically, what our consultants do is they take the approach of what do you wanna get out? What kind of reports are you looking for? And then they'll tell you based on your current structure you're gonna be able to do that or not or whether you're gonna be limited. Great question, though. I get that one all the time. I appreciate it. Great. Here's one more, I think, that I think the whole group could talk about. Who manages the integration with Student First and Financial Edge? Certainly. Excellent question there. So that's that integration is set up, during your implementation, and part of your support is that we together collectively manage that working together between Student First and Blackbaud to take that onus off of you both for setup and maintenance. And we have one more. Can we copy our current reports within Financial Edge NXT? So, Well, I think that. one's for you. in general, if you've got income statements, balance sheets, tuition reports that you're tracking, we can't bring those in exactly like you've built them, but we can actually build out the same report. And I would like to think that we're gonna be able to do it better. So, again, within the scope of your implementation going to be a few reports that we're gonna help build for you. So if you've got some favorites that you have, bring those to the consultant and say, I want a report that looks exactly like this. And I'll tell you from personal experience, there's not a report out there that we can't build in Financial Edge, not only the layout of the report, but the content of the report. And we're gonna challenge you to expand your thinking. We can actually do more than you're currently doing. And, Susan and I are speaking from experience. We both actually use Financial Edge NXT, and I could tell you that that is one of the most powerful features of our software is reporting. Usually, when I do a demonstration, one of the comments I make is the only limit we have to our reporting in Financial Edge NXT is your imagination. Absolutely. So one last thing before we wrap up is that we do have a poll that we have launched. If you look over on the side of your Goldcast, you'll see a poll. If you click on that and answer that question for us, we would appreciate it. And I just would like to thank all of you for joining us today. If there were any other questions that we didn't get to, you know, just feel free to reach out to us, and we'll we'll answer those questions. As a reminder, you're gonna get an email in the next twenty four hours with an on demand link for this presentation in case you wanna revisit it on your own time or share it with any of your colleagues, which we encourage you to do. And in that email, you'll also have the option to schedule a call with us if you want to take a deeper dive. And I wanna thank you again for joining us. We're excited to continue this conversation with you and hope that you all enjoy the rest of your day. Take care, everyone. K. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.