Name: Connected Systems: How to Eliminate the Divide between Fundraising and Finance
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T18:31:15.423Z
Duration: 55 min 8 s
Description: Connected Systems: How to Eliminate the Divide between Fundraising and Finance

Transcript for "Connected Systems: How to Eliminate the Divide between Fundraising and Finance": Hi, everyone, and welcome to the live tour for Blackbaud's Razor's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT. My name is Caroline, and I'm gonna be your host. Whether you are part of your organization's finance or development staff, this presentation will discuss how using these systems together can help you eliminate the divide between finance and development and overcome organizational challenges. We'll begin here in a few moments, but I wanted to go over a few housekeeping items while everyone's getting logged in. This is an interactive platform, so please feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation via the q and a function. Most questions will be answered with the chat feature, but if there are any that we don't have time for during the webinar, we'll email you after with a response. So we are using a webinar platform today called Coldcast. A few things about the platform. The webinar audio will be broadcasted through your computer speakers, so, hopefully, you can all hear me. If you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn captions on and off. If you encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of the browser is the best way to get it working again. Worst case scenario, feel free to leave and log in again. Wanted to let everyone know that one of our reps, Sophie, 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 seeing an overview of the NXT solution today, but if you'd like a more in-depth or personalized demo pricing, anything like that, Sophie will be able to assist. You can drop her a note in the q and a at any point during the presentation. So, again, my name is Caroline, and I am part of financial solutions marketing team here at Blackbaud. I'm joined today by my colleagues, Heather and Elaine. Heather and Elaine are both Blackbaud pros. Heather spent sixteen years working in nonprofit utilizing Blackbaud solutions before coming to Blackbaud seven years ago. And before joining the Blackbaud team, Elaine spent fifteen years working in education in both advancement and teaching roles. So just a quick introduction to Blackbaud. For those of you who aren't as familiar with us, Blackbaud is the world's leading cloud software company powering social impact for over forty years. Development and finance. Today, we're gonna be talking about how pull these two critical functions together and unify them under one provider. Before I hand it over to Heather and Elaine, I've got a quick poll to help us better understand who we have in the audience today. So I'm about to push that out now. You should see that pop up in the polls tab. So right now, the question is our organization currently utilizes, and you can select multiple answers for this. I'll give you some time here for that. Awesome. Thanks everyone for the responses. Regardless of which solutions you're using, you'll get an introduction to both today and learn more about the opportunities for a stronger connection between development and finance. So with that, I'm gonna hand things over to Elaine, and we'll dive in. Alright. Whether you're joining us today from the fundraising side or from the finance side, you're likely here because the you recognize this process. You know this screen. You know the spreadsheets, and you definitely know the challenges that come with having donor management and accounting systems that don't talk to each other. Disconnected systems aren't just a technical issue. They create real day to day friction for teams that are trying to do good work. One of the most immediate impacts is doubled effort when it comes to data entry. Guests are entered once by the fundraising team, then reentered or adjusted by the finance team. Not only is this inefficient, but it increases the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Furthermore, because the systems aren't connected, neither team has full visibility. That leads to time consuming back and forth back and forth around checks, restrictions, allocations, and adjustments. Fundraisers are asking finance for answers, finance is asking fundraisers for clarification, and both teams are spending time chasing information instead of acting on it. What total is correct here? Why doesn't this report match? Where did that adjustment come from? These conversations are rarely productive, and they pull teams away from what really matter. Instead of focusing on fundraising strategy or fiscal stewardship, teams are stuck reconciling spreadsheets and defending reports, and that distracts everyone. It takes fundraisers away from the building relationships with donors, and it takes finance teams away from ensuring accuracy, compliance, and accountability. Ultimately, it takes the entire organization away from focusing on its mission. These challenges are not caused by people or process failures. They're caused by systems that don't speak. This is what is possible with the connected systems of Blackbaud's fundraising CRM, Razor's Edge NXT, and Blackbaud's true fund accounting tool, Financial Edge NXT. With connected systems, revenue flows into your donor management system and pushes directly into the general ledger. That means no more duplicate data entry. Gifts don't have to be entered, reentered, adjusted, or explained multiple times across teams. Because your teams start in sync and stay in sync, you dramatically reduce reconciliation time. Finance isn't trying to figure out where a number came from, and fundraising isn't waiting on finance to confirm whether something posted correctly. Everyone is working from the same source of truth. Connected systems also mean better reporting back to your supporters and to your key stakeholders. You can confidently report on how funds were received, how they were allocated, and how they were spent. That level of transparency builds trust with donors, boards, auditors, and leadership. So as you're looking at this slide, I want you to pause for a minute. Close your eyes. Are you starting to imagine what a strong connection between development and finance could look like for your organization? Getting everyone on the same page empowered with the right data with full visibility from funding all the way through disbursement with Razors Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT. In just a moment, you're gonna see all of this goodness in action. During the demonstration portion of today's call, we're going to follow a gift from a foundation for a specific project. You'll see the pre award management on the fundraising side. You'll see the revenue post directly into finance, and you'll see how those funds are managed and spent down over time. Before we jump into the live demo, I do wanna briefly frame what Fraser's Edge NXT does for an organization from a relationship management standpoint. For those of you on the call who are not familiar with Blackbaud's Razor's Edge NXT, at its core, it is a solution built to help fundraising teams operate more efficiently, reach and engage new donors, and retain and expand existing supporters so that you can grow with confidence. What it is not, it is not a database being a static repository of donor information. Razor's Edge NXT is an actionable hub where your team can collaborate, stay aligned on relationship activity, and turn insight into consistent follow through for increased revenue. It includes tools like online donation forms, email marketing, event management, and wealth and prospect insights so your team can segment, engage, and understand supporters all in one single source of truth. So less energy spent on manual work and tracking things down and more energy spent on donor relationships, stewardships, and revenue driving activity. And while Raiser's Edge NXT delivers a lot on its own, closing gaps for teams, today, we're focusing on one especially important outcome, bridging the gap between fundraising and finance so teams aren't operating from different systems and different versions of the truth. With that foundation of Raiser's Edge NXT, I'll hand it over to Heather who will now highlight and give an overview of Blackbaud's true fund accounting tool, Financial Edge NXT, and how it helps organizations achieve goals. Thanks, Elaine. So yeah, a couple thoughts on Financial Edge NXT. So obviously this is predominantly for the finance side of the house. It is a total cloud accounting solution designed to meet the unique needs of nonprofits and government entities, and this is going to be the solution to manage your financial reporting, monitor and track program success, and ensure overall financial integrity for your organization. Everything from native project, grant, and endowment accounting to built in tools for expense management and automated vendor payments, and keep in mind that this was built for you first and foremost. It is not an afterthought from commercial accounting. It is that true fund accounting solution. And the points on the screen now equally apply whether you're on the development side or the finance side. So we definitely are going to be talking about how we can just better identify funding, and this involves deeper stewardship, which is created when there is collaboration around the various opportunities your organization is pursuing. We're going to be able to capture, utilize, and reconcile better and have confidence in the data, and this happens on both sides of the house, in the fundraising and the finance system, which then leads to better decisions for your organization. I love this next one, being able to create cross department knowledge that gifts and grants were used for intended purposes. And that is likely enough said, but are your departments being able to equally track this information today? It's a good question to ask. One of the best first steps towards eliminating the divide is being able to do this really well. And then lastly, being able to build trust, and this is both internally and externally important, but from a traditional perspective, trust in your community will continue to grow your revenue, which feeds your mission. So as you're thinking about your own organization, keep these points front of mind and ask yourself, can both departments say their needs are met to accomplish these things? And lastly, before we go into the live product, which you're all here for, I like this slide just because this is recognizing that these are two critical departments within your organization. Certainly there's others beyond fundraising and finance. We're just focused on these ones today, but they are critical. And when they come together, it can be a little bit of a paradigm shift depending on where you're at with this today in your organization. So a couple things, just visibility. The importance of greater visibility between these two departments cannot be overlooked. Collaboration. Fundraisers, they can't fundraise without financial figures, and donors want information, and we all need to be able to be transparent as an organization so that our community trusts us. And information doesn't solely come from fundraising or finance, it's a partnership. And lastly, foundational tools. Both sides need the basic tools to do their jobs, and each side needs to support each other in this requirement because if everyone can do their jobs easier, then everyone can be more strategic. So as Elaine mentioned, we're gonna follow a gift today, and it's really just telling the story of how money flows through your organization. I do like to think that this should come together and be fun and come together easily, and when it can come together naturally within your solution, it is a proud moment to be able to share the amazing work that you are all doing, and it's a true team effort. So this is just showing, you know, connected systems. When this comes together, you've got connected staff, and when that's working really well, that's where mission and community impact are created. So I'm gonna hand it back to Elaine so we can start to see firsthand how these departments can come together. Elaine? Alright. So we are going to start in Raiser's Edge NXT. As Heather said, in a bit, we'll follow a specific gift example that we'll post to finance, but I want to orient everyone to the fundraising side and show how this becomes an actionable hub for relationship management. Right away, you can see one of the biggest benefits of having fundraising and finance on the same platform. One login, one consistent experience. Manage users can easily toggle between the two sides of the house, fundraising and finance, without feeling like you're jumping between totally two different systems. If finance needs to toggle over to the fundraising side to check on some details about a gift pledge or agreement, or if fundraising needs to take a quick look at their budget, it is very easy to do. Now this type of visibility is not a free for all. There are it's very robust security, so you can control who can see and do what. The goal is to empower the right people with the right information and keep the experience seamless with appropriate permissions throughout. Blackbaud's responsible AI is embedded throughout Raiser's Edge NXT. Purpose built to enhance fundraisers and finance team superpowers, with the sparkle icon here, I can access Blackbaud AI chat. This is an in product conversational assistant in Razer's Edge NXT that lets users ask questions in plain language to quickly surface constituent insights, draft donor communications, get best practice ideas for stewardship, and really save time on everyday tasks. One more foundational point around visibility sorry. Is the fact that all of Blackbaud's products are designed to work wherever you are. They are mobile responsive. No separate app is required. Finance friends, you probably don't want to be keying journal entries in on your phone, but fundraisers, if it would be it might be helpful for a quick check on a spouse's name or giving history right before you walk into a donor meeting or an event. You're going to do this very easily with any device in front of you. I am here on the constituent record. I like to call this the relationship record of truth. Heather and I are actually talking about this recently. How painful it is to be a newer fundraiser, call a donor, and learn from the donor that they served on the board or they've been giving for thirty years. If the information isn't captured or easy to access, how are you supposed to know? We're gonna talk about how easy it is to get information into Razor's Edge NXT. These records are intentionally built to be robust but easy to navigate. There is a place for everything, and it is easy to find the information that you need. So this record of truth has tiles to track basic contact information, relationship information, of course, giving history from a high level and also individual gifts. Event participation track is tracked here, email history, actions that solicitors have set up or plan to accomplish. Opportunities are tracked here. So as you can see here, Robert has been a great donor over the years. We have reached out to him for support toward one of our new community gardens, and you can see here it has been approved. As a user, you are able to configure your records however what however they make sense for you best. Razer's Edge NXT comes with unlimited user licenses. Anyone can have access with a secure login. Finance friends can pop in to see what they might need to see. Your volunteers can be set up with special permissions for information to help them support your mission. The right people can access the appropriate information with, of course, the appropriate permissions. So scrolling back up doctor Robert Hernandez's record here in my demonstration environment, you can get a full picture of his relationship with my organization. These constituency codes are the magic, really, behind targeted segmentation available throughout the platform. The code fields are defined by you and what makes sense for your relationship groupings for your organization. Robert here is a board member, a volunteer, and a major donor. And it's just it's not just what we can see. It's how we can get here. With actionable data available to you right within the system, Razor's Edge NXT can help you to identify prospects like doctor Hernandez, ask the right amount for the appropriate initiatives, like this community garden example, at the right time for maximum support to your mission. And you can confidently know who to prioritize and what to ask for. This is where prospect insights comes into play. It leverages AI driven insights to help identify individuals with the capacity and propensity to give so you're less likely to leave money on the table. And because this is a native tool inside of Raiser's Edge NXT, you don't have to buy a separate research tool. For example, if we see someone with the potential to give it a higher level, like Sheila here, we can immediately turn that information into next steps. And if it's even if it's early, we can create an opportunity. And later, you'll see how these opportunities surface in dashboards as pipeline for major gift initiative. So fundraisers on the call, this is your pipeline and your moves management capabilities. And for my finance friends, the pipeline view can be helpful context for anticipating revenue timing and forecasting. Once you've identified prospects and opportunities, the next question is how do you make sure nothing falls through the cracks? This is what we call our work center. This is a personalized fundraising hub where users can manage portfolios, opportunities, grants, and actions all in one place. So for my grant managers on the call, this is a way for you to be sure that you meet all those deadlines outside of using Excel. You can get an at a glance view of who you manage. These opportunities we discussed, this is that pipeline, and next steps are actions. Actions is like your to do list. It's a place for cross team collaboration also. It looks like Jane here has a past due item for doc to call doctor Hernandez for his gift to the community garden. And even if you're not the primary relationship manager, you may still have tasks tied to stewardship, reporting, or grant retirements. This is where collaboration across team members and departments gets operationalized. So team members from finance and fundraising might be interested in information like actions regarding grant reporting, follow ups, or major donor impact reports where the tool will allow each office to get the nudges that they might need to keep that revenue flowing. In fact, you can see here there's an action for a finance team member to send a grant follow-up with spend down information and budgeting forecast for future funding opportunities. You can even assign a task to somebody's calendar right from the system. This really gets to that heart of the collaboration that is possible when your systems are on a single platform. And razor's edge NXT can also prompt action with smart queues and flags so overdue items don't quietly age in the background. So all of these prospects here have overdue pledges. Finance team might be interested to know what's going on here and to help communicate the need to give these supporters a call to fulfill their pledges or ask questions around when this money might be coming in for budgeting or cash flow purposes. Now let's zoom out. Sometimes we're working with one donor at a time or a handful at a time in a portfolio, and sometimes you need the big picture. Both Razer's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT include dashboards that give you out of the box insights into key metrics. You can customize and drill in without needing to export and manipulate data. This overview dashboard is giving trends at a glance. You've got your opportunity dashboard for pipeline visibility, keeping tabs on what else can we be expecting. I like this dashboard. The reengagement opportunities are shown here, surface step for you. And all of these blue numbers or blue type, all of it is drillable. So I can get an instant summary of my live lent donors if it will let me click in. It's not wanting to today. There we go. Here comes my list. All actionable data right at your fingertips. The experience is consistent across platforms. So whether we whether finance folks come into the Razor's Edge NXT for pipeline context or development folks come into finance tool Edge NXT to check budget, the navigation, drillability, and filtering all feel the same. Both systems allow for scheduled reporting and dashboards to key stakeholders. Let's talk about now how Razor's Edge NXT helps you to not only track relationships and opportunities, but actively engage donors with targeted segment and engagement messages. Remember the constituency codes I referred to from the constituent record? Those are super valuable when it comes to allowing users to target the right group with the right message. There are also other robust segmentation tools. These lists can be used for communication messages, maybe to encourage monthly giving from your usual one time donors or to invite community members to a special event or donor recognition ceremony or to come volunteer to help support your mission. You can have collaborative in system list building, lets you get out of Excel with both static and dynamic list creation that can be saved and shared when necessary. You can take any of these lists right over to our email marketing tool, native built in with best practice templates and easy to configure messaging. There's also integration capabilities, like with Constant Contact. And you can automate outreach, like a workflow welcome series for first time donors so stewardship is consistent even when staff is stretched. Online donation forms are designed to be optimized for conversion, helping reduce friction and drive more completed gifts. Now let's connect the dots to finance because this is where teams feel immediate relief. Online gifts flow automatically into Raiser's Edge NXT, reducing manual entry on the fundraising side. Oops. Sorry. Then they can post to get to finance, reducing manual entry on the finance finance side too, creating a cleaner audit trail end to end. If you've ever gone through GivingTuesday or year end giving and had to rekey high volume gifts into multiple systems, you know how meaningful this automation can be. You've got tools for receiving and documentation so you can stay responsive and audit ready. You can also access the help of AI to help you thank donors because we all know that sometimes it's hard to think of a different way to say thank you every day, multiple times a day. And, alright, the moment that we have all been waiting for. As we transition from Razor's Edge NXT to Financial Edge NXT, I want to follow a restricted gift example because it ties together what we've seen. Relationship context, actions, documentation, and then the flow over to the financial side of managing and spending those funds. This is an endowed organization working with orgs to form and sustain community gardens. You can see here on this opportunity tile the steps that we took to cultivate and solicit and post award tasks, like the steps we took to visit and see the school garden. We submitted the application, and this takes us all the way through the reporting needs and deadlines. All documented here, right where you'd expect it, not hidden in someone's OneDrive or buried in an email. You can drop as much documentation here in the system. You can drop in links if you'd like for reference. No file cabinets needed. All of this will surface back in work center across lists and reports so stewardship steps aren't missed, whether they belong to development, finance, or program staff. From here, you can also connect the spend down information over in Financial Edge NXT. Let's follow this 10,000 gift over to Financial Edge with the post tool. No reentry. And with that, I'm going to hand it off to Heather where she is going to take this restricted gift in Financial Edge NXT and show how fund accounting supports transparency and stewardship end to end. Alright. Thank you, Elaine. Let me grab the screen now. And, yes, as Elaine was saying, I'm just going to pick right up where the handoff happens from Raiser's Edge NXT to Financial Edge NXT. And here we go. So we are in a journal entry. Best part about this journal entry, even though it's only one gift because we usually work with much larger batches, but the best thing about this journal entry is I didn't have to create it. So think about that for your own organization and maybe a different volume of gifts. But for today, we are following a single gift, but the journal entry was created for me. Important to note, when it is initially created, that handoff between Racial Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT, this journal entry is originally unposted. So from the business office side of the house, we absolutely have full view of this information. We control it when it comes into Financial Edge NXT. We can review it, make sure all is good, and then we control what it actually posts to the general ledger. So it's important to be able to have that flexibility, be able to make any adjustments, but then also make sure that Financial Edge NXT and Regis Edge NXT stay in sync. So that opportunity is built into that handoff between the two systems. What's nice as well is if anyone noted the gift batch that Elaine was showing, it was batch twenty twenty five dash zero five. Well, I'm also retaining that information here in Financial Edge NXT. I preferred to do it that way as a former customer because it was a really tight reconciliation thread between the two systems. I do like to make a note as well. So we are starting this example of the school garden program, so we're going to follow that thread, and you can see that this gift does indeed get posted to that. But I do like to make mention of just the the this overall structure of Financial Edge NXT, and that does start with the account structure. So we do offer a chart of account that is purpose built for nonprofit accounting. And what do I mean by that? Financial Edge NXT utilizes a segmented chart of accounts, which means that restrictions can be built directly into your chart of accounts. And in addition to that, we do offer those additional unique records, such as the school garden program. This can also be used for grants or scholarships or endowments, and this allows you to track funding across multiple parameters. Also, maintain both quantitative and qualitative data and access your net asset balance at any time, all without expanding your chart of accounts. So we can always dig deeper into that structure with you, but high level, it's definitely important to note. And right alongside that, I do want to dig into that project record that in this case is that school garden program, because this is where really restriction fund management happens, and it's what we were built for here within Financial Edge NXT. So even though we are looking at this one example that happens to be a grant example, definitely for your own organizations, think about the different funding sources that are coming into your organization. All the different moving pieces and parts and the restrictions, sometimes the unrestricted funds, we do need to be able to keep track of that and be accountable to how those funds were used. So we do that really very tightly with Financial Edge NXT. So taking a look here at the school garden program, there is a place for a lot of information, just like what you saw on Mr. Hernandez's record, a lot of details to his giving history. We've captured details just as much here on the financial side. They just look a little bit different far as how funds were used and did we make sure that we are staying compliant and that sort of thing. So as we scroll down on this record, there is a lot of details. I can even look back very easily at prior fiscal years if I want to. What's nice about that is the system just refreshes itself, and as I continue to scroll, you'll see I also have all the fiscal period information. And in this case, because I did just scroll back to fiscal twenty five, this is all just reflecting that particular fiscal year. And just like Elaine mentioned, the blue text in Racious Edge NXT and how that's a continuous functionality piece, you got a lot of blue text here within Financial Edge NXT as well. So if I want to look back on activity, maybe dig a little bit deeper, I can do that. So you can see I've got some program service activity here. I can click once more and see, oh, this is actually accounts payable activity. And if I wanna go into that, I can do that too. So I'm actually transitioning us from the general ledger all the way into accounts payable, and in this case, all the way to the invoice record. So at this point, if I want to see how that particular transaction was distributed, I can do that. If I want to see the actual invoice copy, I can do that too because I can attach to my heart's content across both systems. And I just have a lot of detail just right at my fingertips. And if I wanna just go back to the school garden record, that's just a couple of clicks, and I'm right back to where we just started. Couple other things to note here on the actual project record. Those attachments are important. They are throughout the system. So in this case, I have attached, you know, the original grant application, the budget, the award letter. I even have a quick opportunity link back to Raise's Edge NXT right from within that school garden project. So if I wanna look into those details that Elaine covered, I have that as well just right here from the system. I also have the actions here. So those follow-up reports, especially in the grant space are important. We don't wanna overlook those, so I can build those actions and assign those to different users. And I also like to point out the contacts and the custom fields. So you can keep all of those here in the system as well. And custom fields are great because they're unlimited and they become the filters that you can use with reporting. So if there's additional information that you're needing to track and report on, custom fields are right there with you. So let's take a look into reports as I'm thinking about that. There are a lot of reports that just come with the system of Financial Edge MXT. So what's nice about this is all the reports that you would expect to have in a full accounting solution, they're here from day one. And what's nice with all of them is that you can add different filters and parameters to all of these, from your reports to your financial statements, to really dial into the level of detail and the data that you need to represent. Additionally, with that is you can schedule the reports. I love this feature. You really can put the system to work for you. So if there is a particular user that needs to receive a report, maybe the last Thursday of every month at 7AM, set it and forget it. Maybe it's that director of development that is on a deadline, they need certain information, or they have a cadence to some of their donor impact information. If you set these up, they're gonna receive that just in their inbox without even having to come to the business office to ask for it. A couple of examples I always like to show, this one's a great one because we have just been talking about that school garden program. This is a go to one for me even as a customer. This is a project activity report. It's very clean and simple, and I can filter it very quickly just by a particular project or even a grouping of projects depending on who this report needs to go to. This report for me was something that I was confident in that I would often share directly with my donors or funding agencies. Additionally, with that, I also pulled up another report, and I did, in this case, send it on into Excel just to show you you can send those reports as PDF or Excel documents. So this one's very straightforward. It's an activity comparison with some good budget, actual, and variance information. This is, again, one of the out of the box reports. I didn't have to do really anything terribly special with this. I just added additional columns for my months because I wanted to see more than one or two side by side. And what's nice with the reports is once you share them, if you've sent them to users so Elaine mentioned security a couple times, which I love. That is also equally important on the finance side. But if you've sent this report to a user that has certain rights within the system, they can actually drill into Financial. Xt. Maybe they have a question. Maybe there's something on this that catches their eye. They want additional details. If you look right now, I'm hovering over my top account, which in this case is contributions default, and my cursor changed to a hand, a little hyperlink box pops up. That's just the system letting me know I can drill directly into Financial GenXT from that report. So if I did have a question on that contributions account, I'm now directly on that account record, and I have a lot of details right at my disposal. So just a nice feature as far as how we might use that drill down capability as we're looking at the different areas of data. And right alongside reports, we also have the dashboards here within Financial Edge MXT, and you've got options here. So what's important is you do receive dashboards with the system from day one. So I always like to say explore what just comes with the system, and then if you need to take it further, we got you covered there as well. So this is actually one that just comes with the system. This was a go to one for me. A lot of my view only users use this particular dashboard because they were folks within my organization that oversaw the projects. Maybe they were responsible for certain projects from a budget standpoint, that sort of thing. So they could actually come in here. They could filter. These gray boxes are giving me options depending on what data is represented here. They could also just come in here and pair the system down because maybe they are only overseeing just a small handful of projects. I'm just randomly clicking here, and I can quickly filter and apply that. And now I'm just seeing a small grouping of projects. And even from here, I have drill down capability. So if I want those additional details, I can go into that project record directly from the dashboard. So right now, I could just scroll through the side panel, which is the actual record, or I could dive in and have it expanded across my screen. And what's nice is right alongside the dashboards that come with the system, you also can build your own. So we can grab different insights of information. The insights in this case will be these little boxes, this invoice request list or invoice request by requester. So those are prebuilt as well with Financial Edge NXT. You can drag and drop and really dial into the the details, as I've mentioned. That's called dashboard builder. So that's just also part of what comes with Financial Edge NXT. But for those on the line that want to start from scratch, maybe you are a query lover, I know I am, and I really like to dig into the data, we have what's called Insight Designer, which allows you to build your own insights from scratch and then add those to the dashboard, however you want them displayed. So this is an example of that. It's a lot of detail, maybe something I send to my controller, but you can see I can really be very specific on what information is showing on any given dashboard. Insight Designer is an add on to Financial Gen XT, but what's nice about it is if you purchase it, you also get it automatically for Raiser's Edge NXT. So it is a buy one, get one when you have both Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge. So that's that combination of reporting and dashboards, really just understanding your information, getting your hands on your data. I'm gonna switch gears just a little bit and talk about how you're getting the data into the system as well. So to do that, I'm pulling up another journal entry. So this one may not be terribly exciting on the front end, but I do find it very interesting as far as how this was created. It is similar to the Raise's Edge integration where I can automate journal entry creation. So in this particular example, I've built just one that's payroll focused because everyone does payroll, but this is would be an example of maybe I'm using an external payroll provider, but I do need to get that information into my accounting system. So let's actually go to where this all started, because like I said, I did not have to create this journal entry. So I'm back in Excel for this example just to show you, like I said, where it all began. So if you look in the upper right hand corner of my Excel environment, I'll highlight it, I have some extra buttons up there. So what I wanted to talk to you about here are our Excel add in tools. And so this can automate data entry, really just reduce that manual work that maybe some of you are doing today. So these are free. You actually just go to the Microsoft Store and type Blackbaud, and they're free that you can just download right into Excel. We have one for journal entry batches. We also have one for budgeting, distribution sets, and what's nice about them is they all work the same way. So once you've done this a time or two, you'll have it down. So in this case, I have brought this data out of my payroll system into Excel, and now when I click that journal entry batch, it auto matches all of my data for me. So I'm gonna scroll over just a little bit to the left. You can see my account number, account description are there. It live connected to Financials NXT and confirmed that those accounts were active and correct and ready to receive data. I also distribute down to that project record that I've mentioned, so it also confirmed that those projects were correct and active and and ready to go. So in this case, I didn't have any issues, though if I did, this could be compared to traditional importing. I don't know about all of you, but I had a love hate relationship with importing. Sometimes it worked great, other times I fought with it just a little bit. So this, as I compare it to traditional importing, the Excel add in tool, as it reviews that data, if anything is incorrect or maybe I just transposed an account number and it doesn't exist in my live system, I've done that, it's instead, it would actually just highlight in red the exact cell where the problem exists. So it's really just much faster to fix that, and then I'm good to go. So in this case, I would give this journal entry a description, click submit, and that is how this journal entry came to be in the system. So what's nice about it, like I said, it's very similar to the Raise's Edge connection where it does create the journal entry batch for me, but it's originally unposted. So what's nice is I can review that, have eyes on it from within the system, and then I'm good to go. Right alongside the journal entry Excel add in tool, we also have one for budgeting. So a note about budget management in Financial Edge NXT is you have unlimited budget scenarios. So there's a lot of examples on my screen here at the moment. What's nice about that is if at any point in the budget process, you are working in Excel, maybe there's folks within your organization that need to get input into the budget process that they don't necessarily need to be doing it live in your system. You can do that in Excel, use the Excel add in tool, push it on in, and it creates the budget scenario like what you're looking at here. So just a couple of really great tools to keep in mind with that. Next, let's look at the treasury side of Financial Gen XT, and this is gonna lead us into expense management, which is one of my favorite areas of the system. But here within treasury, you can have your bank accounts as well as your credit card accounts. You also can lean into payment assistant, which is included with Financial Gen XT, that is that automated payment vendor activity, we've got you covered there. But with your bank accounts, as you build those into the system, you have the option to have a live bank feed connected as well as a live credit card feed. And what's nice about that is you can interact with that feed throughout the month, really stay on top of your activity, which would definitely expedite reconciliation at month end. It's a side by side view like what you're seeing now, where in a live environment, the bank feed would auto populate there on the left side of the screen, places it next to your bank register, so you can have some automation here. It will automatically match and clear activity for you. And like I said, that just expedites reconciliation at month end. You're gonna use this transaction, this matching feed, when you actually do reconciliation that maybe you can stay on top of things and and and not have to clear out an entire month in one sitting. You also use that feed with the credit card side. So very similar here. You can have as many accounts connected to the system. You could also choose to look into the Blackbaud purchase card, which is fantastic because it is a true purchase card with very tight spending controls and spending limits by cardholder. So if that's of interest, it's available to check out. But either way, you can have those existing credit card accounts, and those are going to be utilized in expense management. And this too is just part of what comes with Financials and XT, but there is a lot of goodness here. So many different accounts payable workflows can be really thought through and how those might be adapted with expense management. This is an area of the system that captures, maybe for you, I know it did for me when this first came live, I had a lot of these processes. They were very paper heavy, very manual. I did a lot of chasing people down for signatures and credit card receipts. So I was actually pretty desperate for some efficiencies in this department, so that's probably why this is my favorite area of the system. But we'll explore both sides as far as what we can do on the credit card side as well as the invoice side. We'll start on the credit card side. This would be where I do have those existing credit card accounts. I've set them up, indicated who holds the cards, etcetera. And now this would actually be used by nonfinancial folks, so people outside of the finance team that maybe have those cards, need to submit invoices, etcetera. They can actually just log in and only see this piece of Financial Edge NXT. So it's a very targeted type of user, and they are unlimited, which is great as well. But they can actually do this. If you recall, Elaine showed you how you can access Raefers Edge NXT via any mobile device. This would definitely be an area we see a lot of people doing on their smartphone because they don't necessarily have to be sitting at their desk to quickly send you a credit card receipt and let you know what it needs to be paid from as far as those projects. Because they can just come right here and work with their charges, and what would happen is the credit card feed would populate just their credit card charges, so they're not seeing other folks' activity, just theirs. They can upload their receipts and have AI review the receipt and populate the fields for them, or they can walk through that process. It's very simple. You can also have automation with your approvals. So you can see with this particular example, Heather reviews everything, but if it's above a certain dollar amount, Ryan also has to approve it, and that's creating an audit trail automatically on these transactions. They can give you distribution details either by using expense categories, which preloads the account just to keep it super simple for your end users, where they just need to come in here and maybe identify what project this particular transaction is related to. They can split those transactions over, you know, more than one account and or project, which is great as well. And then when it comes time for the receipt, they can just take a picture of it and it's live attached to Financial Edge NXT before they maybe have a chance to misplace it. This then would flow into the accounts payable area of the system as credit card activity, which at that point you'd match against your credit card statement and get that paid on time. The other side to expense management would be the invoice side. So we have a really cool tool here as well, where I can just scan in the invoice and AI will review that and populate the fields for me. And so it's kind of a quick quick simple process where not only am I attaching that invoice, but I'm saving time on manual data entry. But it's a very simple field connection here as what we saw on the credit card side. And what's nice too is if you are using the budget functionality within Financial Edge NXT, it does a budget check. So I built this particular example circling us back to the school garden program, and I built it with an amount that I knew was going to be a conflict. I didn't have a budget for it. So when I go to try to submit it, the system is actually putting some controls in place, letting me know that I do have a budget conflict here, and I can't go any further before I fix it. So just some nice functionality there to keep everyone on the same page, making sure we're using funds correctly, not overspending, and that sort of thing. So just to tie it all together with expense management. We have covered a lot of ground today. We have not covered everything, though. So do you know that from both Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT, we can always dig deeper with you, especially if you need to see additional functionality such as fixed assets or allocation management or accounts receivable. We have all of those areas as well. But to round out our time, I do just like to end with support and making sure that you understand that Blackbaud is here to be a partner with you. So right from within the products, there are a lot of help resources to make sure that you're using the product well and that you're getting the most out of it. So the first one I always like to mention is this help feature. This is all going to be the same functionality that you would have in Rage's Edge NXT, but you have the ability to search for help topics depending on what you might need resources with. You can chat live with customer support. We also have extensive training options. We call it through our Blackbaud University, but each of our solutions have extensive courses that you can dig into. You can take instructor led classes or on demand courses depending on your learning style and the time that you have available, but I definitely recommend looking into that. I took advantage of these classes as a customer, and it it set the course for my entire career utilizing these solutions. So I highly recommend that. And then lastly, we have Blackbaud Community. This is a good mention here because this is where your peers are hanging out. So as a Blackbaud customer, you also have the ability to tap into peer support, ask questions, maybe get some best practices to hear how others are using different areas of the solution. Also, here within Blackbaud Community, you can make suggestions to make these products better and better. Because with them all in the cloud, we can continually add in new enhancements and functionality as your needs change and just kind of our nonprofit world continues to expand. So we've covered a lot of ground today. I express my thanks for Elaine as well just for being here and spending some time with us. I'm gonna hand it back to Caroline to wrap us up, but have a great day. Caroline, I'm hopping on because you are muted, I believe. We cannot hear you. Sorry about that. Thank you, Elaine and Heather. I also want to thank you all for joining today. Just a reminder that you will get an email shortly with a link to the recording of today's presentation. One note too before you head out, check out the docs tab. We've got some great resources in there to dive deeper into the topic of connecting science and development. Thanks again for joining, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you. Thank you, guys.