Name: Optimizing Payment Workflows in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®
Uploaded: 2025-08-28T15:00:06.009Z
Duration: 39 min 44 s
Description: Optimizing Payment Workflows in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Transcript for "Optimizing Payment Workflows in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®": Hello, everyone. Just wanted to welcome you as you're getting connected to our payment processing workflow. We'll officially get started in a few minutes here, but wanted to give you all a heads up about some housekeeping as we get going. Audio for this webinar is gonna be broadcast through your computer speakers. So if you can't hear me right now, double check your audio setup. If you do have issues as we get going, refresh your browser. That's gonna be the best bet for this. Also, I cannot emphasize enough, you are gonna receive a link to this webinar by email for the recording. So we're gonna go pretty fast today, so I'm letting you all know now. Don't worry. You will get a link to a recording for this to go back and review anything you need to review. Also, take this chance to review the docs tab on the right side of your screen. We've got some FAQ. An FAQ document we've put in there, and you will be using the q and a to submit any questions for today. So, keep in mind, we're not using the chat. We will be using the q and a. So I'm gonna come back in just one more minute here, and we will officially get started. Hello again, everyone. We are officially here at our start time. So welcome to those of you who are getting connected to our Financial Edge NXT payment processing workflow webinar today. I'm gonna go through a few introductory slides, and then we will jump into our content. So first of all, welcome again. My name is Marie Bruck. I am a senior instructor with Blackbaud University here at our Blackbaud. I'm based in Austin, and I've been a teacher and education program director. So I love teaching people about FE NXT, RE NXT, any of our Blackbaud products. So glad you're here today to learn more about FE NXT. Few fun facts for me. I have visited over 20 countries, and I love Thai food. Food. I could probably eat it every day if I have a chance. Now most importantly here, I wanna share a little bit of webinar housekeeping. Some of you heard this earlier, but wanna make sure everyone gets a chance to hear this. First of all, audio is gonna be broadcast through your computer speakers. So some of you hopefully are not, but maybe seeing my mouth move but not actually hearing. So hopefully, you can read this. Your audio is connected through your computer speakers. So if you are having any audio issues, hopefully, you can get that worked out. If you do have any audio or technical issues as we go throughout the webinar, best bet is just to refresh your browser. That will reconnect you to the session, hopefully, get everything lined up as it should be. And then probably the most important thing on this screen is that you will receive a link to this webinar recording by email. We have a lot that we're gonna cover today. It is gonna be fast and furious. You're probably gonna wish that I could go back to a previous slide. You're probably gonna ask that I go back to a previous slide, but I cannot today. So please please please keep in mind that you will receive a recording, that you can watch again as many times as you want. You can rewind. You can go back and forth, hear things again, see slides again. So please keep in mind that you will receive a, email. I think it usually comes the next day with a recording of this webinar. Now we also have some resources in the docs tab. We have an FAQ document with some links to some different things that are gonna be helpful based on our content from our webinar today. And then you should be using the q and a to submit questions. We have a fabulous team here ready to answer your questions. They can get through actually a lot of questions, but, keep in mind that there's maybe five of them, and there are about 600 of you. So they're gonna do their best to get through all of the questions, but please use that q and a feature for answering, asking any of those questions. And, also, keep in mind that a question you might have, we might cover later in the webinar. So I'm gonna share kind of our agenda for today. So it might make sense to also save your questions until we get to that part of the webinar just so it might already be answered without you even needing to ask it. Alright. So, a couple final reminders then. There we go. Oops. Try that again. Today's session is a webinar, as I said, with a large audience. We are up to 600 people now, which means that really, really detailed product questions, not really the case for this. This is not really a support call. We are gonna make sure that we cover a lot of content today. It's really meant to be kind of an introduction overview to the payables process to make sure that you know what is available, and then I'm gonna let you know how you can find out more information about that. One of those things are Blackbaud University classes. So we offer lots of classes on payables. I think we've got about six different classes on the payables process, and you might actually have access to Blackbaud University classes and you don't even know. So definitely check out our Blackbaud University campus page. But even if you don't have a subscription, we have a fabulous trending topics page that is free to every one that has great on demand content. So you can access it whenever you want as many times as you want to also learn more about product functionality. Alright. So what are we gonna cover today? We have five basic topics. So our main focus is gonna be payment processing, but we can't talk about payment processing without also talking about vendors and invoices. So we're gonna do a quick overview of vendors and invoices and try to focus on what about vendors and invoices has the biggest impact on our payment processing. Then we'll look at payment processing preparation, what we need to do to make sure we can actually process our payments. We'll focus then on processing check payments as well as other payment methods, and then we'll look at some post payment processing. Now we have a few more people that are getting connected here, so welcome welcome to our payment processing webinar today. I said earlier, but I always like to repeat it, we are gonna go fast and furious in today's webinar. We've only got thirty minutes, so we're gonna get through as much as we can, but it's gonna feel probably kind of fast. So do know that you will receive a recording of this webinar. So if you miss something, don't worry. You'll get a recording. Usually, it comes the next day of this webinar, so you can go back and review anything you want to review as many times as you want, check out the slides, screenshot the slides, whatever you might want to do based on that recording. And then, also, if you do have questions, put those in through the q and a, keeping this agenda in mind. So asking about processing checks right now, maybe save that question until we get to the check processing just in case. Maybe I'll answer it for you, and then you'll be all set. Alright. So let's get going here, starting out with our vendors and invoices. Now with our vendors and invoices, these are essential to the payment processing because we can't process a payment unless there's an invoice, and we can't have an invoice unless there's a vendor. Now vendor records are going to have some defaults that can default throughout the rest of the payment process. So as we see here, many values from the vendor record default to invoice and payment records. So let's call out a few of those on this vendor record. First of all, every vendor record can have default distributions. These distributions then default to the invoice, and that way, you don't have to put in these distributions every time on every invoice. It's gonna save you a ton of time, and it's also gonna make your data entry more accurate so that you don't have everybody keying in those distributions on every invoice. Way too easy to put in a wrong number. So put them in once on the vendor record so that they'll default to all of the invoices. But the good news is if you ever need to change the distribution on the invoice, you always have that option. Also, ten ninety nine information can be created on the vendor record that then can default to the rest of the payment process. And contact information, putting in that vendor's address and indicating this address is meant to be used on invoices, then populates the, address information onto the invoice so you don't have to, again, enter it every time. And maybe most importantly, we can set up payment default on the vendor record. So we could indicate, alright, what bank account should this vendor be paid from? What is their preferred payment method? So that automatically the default is gonna be they're paid by check or paid by EFT or bank draft or whatever it might be. We can also indicate payment options, and we'll see this in action a little bit later on. Does the vendor prefer to receive one payment for all invoices, or do they prefer to have a separate payment for each of their invoices? We can also indicate credit limits as well as their payment terms so that when we generate an invoice for this particular vendor, it will automatically calculate when that invoice is due for us. So we don't have to try to remember which vendor is, due on receipt versus net 30 versus net 15, whatever it might be. Alright. So this is an example of a vendor record and the default on the vendor record that are gonna have a big impact on our overall payment processing. And we're also going to have similar things for our invoices. So with our invoices, there's gonna be information on our invoice records that are going to impact our payment processing and can default into our payment processing. So we've got our distributions again. So the distributions that came from the vendor record over to the invoice record that will default to the payment record, as well as the payment information as as far as how should this invoice be paid. Should it be paid through check, through EFT, through bank draft? Again, these can come from the vendor records. So if we get our vendor records set up correctly, invoices are gonna be a whole lot easier, payments are gonna be a whole lot easier, and a lot more consistent and accurate. Now with invoices, we have to have an invoice in order to process a payment, and we can actually create those invoices from two different places in Blackbaud. We can go to the vendor record itself, and up at the top, we can click on add invoice. We can also go to the invoice list and add an invoice from there. So your organization will have its policies and procedures for how invoices are added, or maybe it'll be different depending on the vendor, returning on your preferences if you add in that invoice from the vendor record or from the invoice list. Now we'd like to help you be as efficient as possible, so I also wanna call out a few in, efficiency tools for generating invoices. The first one is you can copy previous invoices. So when you have created a new invoice record for a specific vendor, you will see on the right hand side, there's three most recent invoices, and you can choose to copy any of those. There will also be a search bar if you wanna search for invoices that weren't one of the three most recent, and that will populate in values into the current invoice record. Now those values will populate in, but you can still change them if you need to, if you need to change the amount or the due date or anything like that. But this can really increase your efficiency so that you don't have to enter in all of the values every time on every single invoice. Another efficiency tool that might be helpful for your organization is the ability to set up recurring invoices. When you create a recurring invoice, you're basically creating a template with all of the invoice information. And these can be helpful for maybe monthly invoices for rent or other services, things like that, where you put in all of the information, everything except the invoice date. Then you generate a schedule for when those invoices, those recurring invoices should be generated. If it's every month, every week, every two months, every quarter, whatever it might be. So you're putting in all of the basic invoice information and then creating the schedule. So keep in mind those efficiency tools, copying previous invoice, and generating recurring invoices. And that was our, very quick overview of vendors and invoices. For any of you that have joined since the beginning of the session, welcome. I'm gonna do my reminder here that this webinar is recorded. So if that felt fast, it was fast. It probably wasn't just you. This is where you can go back, view the recording. You can take a look at those screenshots. I like to put a lot of screenshots into my webinars so that you can go back and see, okay. Where is that button? How do I find that option? What does that look like in f e n x t? So that's where that recording is gonna come in especially helpful because you get a chance to go back and view that recording. You can see that screenshot and check all of that out. Alright. Moving on from here, let's now talk about payment processing preparation. The first thing to talk about is invoice approval. Now invoice approval is an organizational decision. It is a business rule that you can set up. So I'm actually going to jump ahead and then come back a minute so the slides are in a little bit different order here. But you can require invoice approval as a business rule. This is gonna be found under settings, payables, invoices, and you can require that invoices be approved before payment or posting. As a reminder, business rules apply to all users, So it doesn't matter who created the invoice, who the user is, even if they have supervisor rights, that invoice will need to be approved before you will be eligible for payment or posting. So you won't even see it on the invoice list unless it's been approved if you have this approval rule turned on, and this is a great way to increase kind of those checks and balances in your, payables process. Now once that business rule has been turned on, one thing that can help with your efficiency is to filter first in your invoice list for all of the invoices that are pending approval. So if you're the approver, you go in, filter to just see all of the invoices that are pending approval. Then from there, you can click into any of those invoices and view the information. So you don't just have to blindly approve invoices. You can click on the invoice from the list, get a preview of the invoice information, and at the top, approve that invoice kind of one by one. Or you also have the ability to approve multiple invoices at the same time. So, again, from the invoice list, you click on the invoice number, see that invoice information, make sure everything looks good. And then either at the top, you can click on the box to select all of the invoices, or you can check on the box next to each of the individual invoices, and then down at the bottom, approve all of those invoices at once. And whether you approve invoices from the individual record, you approve them using the check checkbox, the results will be the same. These invoices will will now show as approved and will be eligible for payment and posting. Alright. So once we have our invoices approved, another thing we might wanna do to prepare for payment processing is to see the impact of paying these invoices on our bank accounts. This can be done from the bank account record. So whatever bank account you're processing the payments from for this particular payment run, you'll go to that bank account to the pay invoices tile, and it's gonna show you your current balance, total payments based on whatever filters you set. So the top of that pay invoices tile, the default is that's gonna show you all invoices due at any time. You paid absolutely all of the invoices in your system. But you have the ability to say, actually, I'd like to just see the invoices that are due on or before today, or I'd like to see the invoices due on or before a specific date, maybe next Friday or something like that. Then, again, you'll still see the current balance, but you'll see the total payments due based on whatever filter you set and then the impact of those payments on your bank account, what the balance would be after those payments. Plus, you'll also see a pie chart that will show you the amount of that that is checks, the amount that's EFGs, and the amount that's bank draft. And this can all be viewable right from that bank account record. But if you want some more detail, you can also run your cash requirements reports. So this will give you more detail, and you actually have more filters that you can set. You could use a query maybe to filter to only view approved invoices if you wanted to view it that way, maybe invoices for certain vendors, maybe invoices with a certain date. So running that cash requirements journal a report, sorry, is gonna allow you to see that information in more detail to see what that impact could be. So depending on the process at your organization, and what you might wanna see, it might be that just viewing the information from the pay invoices style will give you the data that you need, or it might be that you wanna get more detail based on that cash requirements report. Make sure that the required cash is available in your bank account, your organization's bank account for those payments. Alright. That is some set of steps that your organization are prepayment options your organization might go through to get ready for payments. Now let's talk about actually processing the payments. We're gonna start by focusing on checks because that's the most common, but we'll also talk about other payment processes as well. Now when you're ready to process payments, you can actually initiate this from multiple places. You can go first to your bank account list, and on the three dots to the left of the bank account, you can click on those, initiate process payments from there. Or you could go into the actual bank account record, and up at the top of the bank account record, you've got a process payments button, as well as on the pay invoices tile, you have a process payments button. So lots of routes to get to process payments. When you click on any of those buttons, it will pull up a window to ask you which type of payment do you want to process in this payment run because each one is set up a little bit differently, so we process each type of payment separately. For now, first, we're gonna look at computer checks. So once I've clicked on process payment, selected a computer check, and clicked on my blue process payments button, it will now show me a list of all of the invoices that meet these qualifications. Qualifications meaning they are set to be paid by check. They are set to be paid from this bank account. If we have the approval role turned on, it is only good to be our approved invoices. And then we can see at the top of this list, the default is to show all invoices that are due on or before today. But you could change these filters if you wanna extend out that due date and process payments due in the future maybe. You could change those filters. And then we can choose which of these invoices we want to pay, in this case, via check. So, again, up at the top, you can check the box to process all of these checks, or you could choose specific invoices that you want to pay. Now as we select these invoices, down at the bottom, SENXT is going to be, following this process, letting us know the amount that's going to be paid and also how many checks will be generated. Now you'll notice here that I have selected four invoices, but it's only generating three checks. That's because two of these invoices are to the same vendor. This is where way back on those vendor settings that we talked about, if the vendor said, yes. You can pay multiple invoices with one payment, it's only gonna be generating one check for those multiple payments. So those vendor, defaults, again, are going to affect our whole payment process. Now when I am selecting the invoices that I want to pay, I can also change the amount to be paid on the fly. So for some reason, I actually want to have a payment amount that's different than the invoice amount. These are all editable check boxes that you have the ability to change that amount on. Then once I've chosen the checks that I want to pay, I may want to double check and possibly change the check settings. So down at the bottom, I can change the format of the check settings. First of all, I can change the starting check number. Maybe if somebody, not me, of course, spilled coffee on our pre numbered checks, and we can't use 67884 anymore. Maybe I wanna move ahead to 67885. We can change that number. We can also say what do we want the payment date to be. The default date is today, but you can change that to a different day, and that payment date will be what the check date is. Now as far as the format settings on the right, you can decide if signatures are required, if you wanna put in notes, if you wanna put in vendor numbers, customer numbers, all here during the check run, as well as the same information can be accessed from the pay invoices tile under format check settings. Okay. Final thing before we actually generate checks, we may want to run a prepayment report. This allows us to look at the information for this specific payment run. So it's kind of a basic cash disbursement journal report that shows us specifically the information for the payments in this particular check rep. Then once we verified everything is good to go, down at the bottom, you'll click on generate checks. Now something intentional in f e n x t is you are not going to be printing checks directly from f e n x t. This is always going to be generating a PDF so that you always have the backup documentation. So it will generate a PDF. You'll find that PDF in your downloads folder. Your organization then prints it from there, and then you can decide what you wanna do with that backup documentation. Maybe you have a shared drive where you keep everything. Maybe you have a specific process for how long you keep that backup documentation, but SENXT will always automatically generate that for you so you have it to go back to if needed. Okay. That was check processing. Like I said, we're doing everything fast and furious here today, but that's where you'll always have that recording to go back to because we wanna make sure we also talk about our other payment methods, including EFT. Now we're gonna see some similarities between EFT and our other payment processes, but the first thing we need to do with EFT is make sure we have the EFT information set up on the vendor record. So they need to be indicated as paid by EFT, and then we're gonna put in their bank information. What is the bank? What is the routing number? What is the account number? This all gets put in on the vendor record as well as an EFT email. If we're sending out EFT remittances, we wanna make sure we have an email that those remittance gets get sent to. So we set this up on the vendor record. We can see it on the vendor record. And then when we go to process our payments, we're starting with the same process we started with checks where we click on process payments, but now we choose electronic funds transfer. And now we're gonna see all of the invoices that meet this eligibility. So, again, bank account approved on or before today, but where the invoice is indicated that it's paid by EFT. Then down at the bottom, we will be able to generate the EFT file or the EFT file and email remittances. These email remittances are gonna depend on the email that we put on the vendor record. But if for some reason, we forgot to put in the email on the vendor record, we can also add in those emails on the fly. So at the end, you will say, hey. This is the email that we have on the vendor record that the EFT remittance should be sent to. Does this look correct? Do you have some information here? And so we can always put this in as we're processing the EFTs. And then once we generate the EFT, we'll get this notice from FBNXT. The EFT file has been generated successfully in your Internet's downloads folder. A download yeah. Once you update the EFT file to your bank, we recommend you delete or archive the file. So that ACH file has been generated in your downloads folder, but then your organization still needs to send it to the bank. So FD NXT does not send the ACH file to the bank. It only generates it for you because each bank might have a different process for how that ACH file should be submitted. So FENXT generates it for you. You submit it to the bank. But what FENXT does do is send out those remittance emails. As long as there's an email, address available, it will send out those email remittance to your vendors. Okay. That was EFTs. Now let's talk about bank drafts. Bank drafts, again, are gonna start with the same process where we click on process payments, then we choose bank drafts, and then we process payments. And these will show us all the invoices that are marked as, paid via bank draft. And we can process this from the actual bank account. We can say these are the invoices where we want to record the bank drafts. Now here's where I wanna call it a little bit of a difference, is when we are doing bank drafts, these have already been processed. The things we already talked about, checks, EFTs, we're processing those through FENXT. Bank drafts are processed outside of FENXT. Bank drafts that you set up with your bank and with your vendor, but now we need to get them recorded in FENXT. So you could think of bank drafts more as being recorded in FENXT versus processed in FE NXT. So we wanna record that all of these bank drafts have been taken care of, and so we can do this in through the bank account here. We also have the ability to record these from the individual invoices. So we can go to the invoice record. If that invoice is marked as paid through bank draft, then up at the top, we'll have a record bank draft. So this reinforces that idea that we're not processing the bank draft. We're recording the bank draft in FE NXT to make sure we've got all of the accurate up to date information in our bank register. And when we record this bank draft, we give the bank draft a number. We can, then put in the, distributions that we need, put in other information based on the bank that that date that that bank draft was processed. Final payment method to call out here, I promise we're gonna fit this all into our thirty minutes, is onetime check. One time checks are used specifically for nonvendor payments. So this might be employee reimbursements as a common use of one time checks. So there's no vendor, which means there's no invoice, but we still need to be able to process the payment. So we put in that individual payment information as we're generating that one time check. Now here's where I wanna call up a really fantastic feature that has recently been added to f e n x t based on requests from all of you through the Idea Bank, and that is the ability to process multiple one time checks at the same time. Now then in this case, again, we start with processing payments, but we choose multiple one time checks. And we're gonna put in the information for each of those one time checks separately, but then we have the ability to run all of the checks at the same time. So we don't have to put one in and then run it. Put another one, run it. Another one, run it. We can create all of those checks at the same time, generate all of those checks at the same time. Okay. Now, if you have not started using payment assistant yet, payment assistant kind of encapsulates all of this. Payment assistant is where you can have somebody else take care of your payments. And if you haven't heard, this is automatically included in FE NXT. So all these things we've been talking about, if you want somebody else to help you with this, this is where payment assistant comes into play. Definitely come back and check out this particular slide. Payment assistant, free. Automatically included in f e n x t, and you can do virtual card payments, ACH processing, remote check printing. Doesn't that sound fabulous? It is faster, more cost effective, more secure way to pay invoices, and we have a ton of payment assistant information in that trending topics page that I mentioned earlier that is free to everyone. This is also in your FAQ document that's under the docs tab. Spotlight on payables walks through all of this payment assistant, information. And after we process any of these payments, we're gonna get confirmation in our bank account. This transaction is gonna show up in our bank account, and, also, it will show that our invoices have been paid. Now in our final two minutes here, what might we do after we have processed these payments? Well, unfortunately, sometimes we might need to void payments. You can void a single recorded payment, from the bank account if you need to do it that way, as well as from the payment record. And once you choose to void that payment, you'll put in the void date, the reverse post date, and you can decide if you need to now delete that invoice. Maybe if it was a duplicate invoice by accident, you can avoid from a single recorded payment if it's just one payment you need to void. Or if there are multiple payments that you need to void, you can do that from the bank account record on that pay invoices tile where you can choose a range of payments that you might need to void. Once that payment has been voided, you can then, see at the top of that payment record that it has been voided, and it will show as voided in your bank accounts. Now from here, your organization might say, well, we also like to delete voided payments. You can absolutely do that as well. However, you can only delete a payment after it's been voided and, of course, if you have the right permissions. So after a payment has been voided, at the top of the payment record, you'll get a delete button. In the bank account, line in the bank account sorry, in the bank register, you'll have a chance to delete it from there. And then similar to voiding, you also have the ability to delete multiple payments at the same time. So you can void and or delete single payments, and you can void and or delete multiple payments at the same time. With this, your organization is probably saying, we don't want everybody to be able to void and or delete payments. Thankfully, there are specific security settings around this where you can decide who can delete. Deleting is also known as purging, so who has the, security rights to void and or delete any of your payments. Finally, last thing you're gonna do with all of this is make sure everything gets posted. Your organization can set up post parameters for payables to decide, do we wanna post every all of the payments from this week, from today, payments from a certain vendor, payments from a certain bank account, whatever it might look like. Alright then. We are at time. So I told you this is gonna be fast and furious, but I also want to let you know that you can continue learning from here. So great options are the help center. Tons of information in the help center. I mentioned the trending topics page that we have at Blackbaud. And, of course, we have courses on all of this. Like I said, I think we've got six different courses on the overall payables process. So definitely check out Blackbaud Campus. Like I said, you might have a subscription to Blackbaud Training that you didn't even know about. So check that out, search for that content, and then also check out that trending topics page. Our recommendation from here would be to take the payment processing course and or check out the payment processing elearning. So thank you so much for all of your time today. Definitely keep an an eye out for the recording of this webinar that should be coming out tomorrow. I think you'll get that email. If you still have questions that haven't been answered in the q and a and you wanna hang out, wait for the answer to those, I'm gonna jump into the q and a. Our team has been working furiously to answer those questions as well. But for now, thank you so much for your time today, and I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their day.