Name: Unlock the Full Potential of General Ledger within Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®
Uploaded: 2025-07-09T18:30:58.103Z
Duration: 1 h 3 min 8 s
Description: Unlock the Full Potential of General Ledger within Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Transcript for "Unlock the Full Potential of General Ledger within Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®": Good morning and afternoon, everyone, and welcome. We are thrilled to have you join us today. Our goal of this session is pretty simple. We are wanting to help you all empower your f n x t solution to work at its absolute best for your organization. My name is Eli Dutcher. I lead the f n x t services teams here at Blackbaud, and I'm joining you all from the beautiful hot Charleston, South Carolina. I'm delighted to go ahead and introduce you all to the experts who are really gonna be guiding you all through the core of our best practices today, Lauren Agantian and Orion Petrie. Both Lauren and Orion are principal consultants here at Blackbaud. They bring a wealth of hands on experience working directly with organizations like yours to help optimize the Phoenix team environments, streamline operations, and enhance reporting. Their insights today are gonna be a fantastic glimpse into the depth of expertise that they provide us. Should you all ever need a more tailored guidance on your specific f e n x t setup or complex accounting areas, please know that resources like Laura and Orion are available for deeper dives, and we'll be sharing more information about that, and their dedicated expertise later on in this webinar as well. So for now, please join me in welcoming Laura and Orion. I've got an agenda here today that I wanted to share with you all. Our session is structured into four key areas here. So we're gonna start by discussing really the power of f n x t, reinforcing its role as a a strategic tool for your mission and highlighting its commitment to its performance. Next, we'll be moving into understanding the challenges of FENXT. We're gonna share insights from across our community, about accounting practices that really can create some friction. We're then gonna dive into some solutions and best practices, providing you all with actionable strategies to help optimize your f e n x t database. And finally, we're gonna conclude with an action plan outlining some clear next steps on how you can access further support and implement these best practices on your own as well. We have a lot of valuable information to share, so let's go ahead and get started. At Blackbaud, we understand that f e n x t is far more than just an accounting software for you. It is a critical tool that supports the incredible work that you all do to fulfill your mission. Our shared goal is to ensure that f e n x t acts a true strategic partner for your financial team. And when f e n x t is running efficiently, your data is clean, your processes are streamlined, and your reports are insightful, it gives your team something invaluable, the time and clarity to be able to focus on your strategic initiatives. This means less time wrestling with data and more time driving your organization and making a greater impact. We truly believe that an optimized FE NXT directly translates to stronger financial health, better decision making, and an accelerated progress towards your goal. As I mentioned, here at Blackbaud, your success is truly our priority, so we believe FE NXT should be a powerful asset, helping you streamline your operations and confidently manage your financials. Through work with many organizations like yours, we've observed common operational patterns with it, within FE NXT, while seemingly minor, can create inefficiencies. It can impact the accuracy of your reporting and even add complexities and cost to your audits. So many of you all have inherited the current workflows within the Resources in their prior roles have, handed you off, some of the workflows and, setups that you will have in f e in f e n x t. And many of you all may not have been a part of your initial setup as well. I wanted to go ahead and push out a, small poll here just to ask you all to participate. And I want you all to closely or, excuse me, pick one of these that closely describes, you all. The first option that you'll see on this poll is, that you were involved in the original setup and confident with its configuration. Next one, you're involved in that original setup, but maybe you have doubts about that configuration. Third, you were not here during the implementation, but think it's a good setup and it works well to meet your needs. And that fourth one was you were not here during that implementation and you all have some doubts about the configuration. So if you all don't mind, go ahead and selecting what best describes you. I do wanna emphasize while you all are putting this together here that you are not alone facing these types of challenges. These are common across the f n x t community and our aim today is really purely to share proven practices and equip you all with some powerful knowledge. We're help, we're here to help you all get the most out of your FAXT again. Perfect. We've got some results coming in, which are great. I really appreciate you all for participating there. So what can you all really expect to gain from our time together here today? By the end of this webinar, you're gonna walk away with hopefully three key things. First, we're gonna learn to identify some hidden obstacles. We'll help you recognize common f n x t usage pitfalls that may be costing you, again, time and effort. Second, you'll discover actionable solutions, simple, effective steps that you can help implement and improve your f n experience today as well as in the future. And third, we're gonna show you all a pathway to mastery. Again, you'll discover additional resources and support to help you achieve that excellence. We're confident by the end of this session that you'll have a clear roadmap to begin optimizing your FE and XT. Before we dive into the specifics and best practices, I wanted to highlight some ongoing commitments to improving our f e n x t's core performance and user experience. We're continuously improving the invest investing in the platform and making it faster, more reliable, and intuitive for you all. You'll see here in the graph, this includes optimizing core workflows like journal entries, which we've significantly sped up. We've also focused on reducing system timeouts and freezes, particularly during large batch operations, and we've revamped the payment processing. We're actively fixing missed and, fixing, legacy functionality based on your feedback from our idea bank, improving journal entry line insert items. We'll talk about that here as an example. And, of course, we're diligently addressing high impact bugs to ensure day to day usability and platform stability. These ongoing product enhancements will work hand in hand with the best practices that we're gonna be sharing with you all today. In a recent, enhancement, as I mentioned as an example here, we had improvements to the journal entry process. We've achieved a 10 x improvement in batch entry performance, making your daily task significantly faster. So you can now easily duplicate and insert lines within a journal entry batch, which dramatically streamline editing, reduces manual efforts, and it should save you considerable time during batch updates. This is just one example again of how we're continually working to make FEENIX team more efficient, user friendly, and supporting you and best practices, and the best practices we're about to share. So you now may be wondering how we identify these carriers that we're gonna be discussing with you here just shortly. Like many leading software providers, we constantly analyze, aggregate, and nominalize usage data from across our entire f e n x t landscape. This is a powerful tool for us and it allows us to be process focused and entirely on identifying broader trends and common operational patterns. We're never looking at your individual client financial data, as we understand your data privacy is paramount. This unique anomalized insight does allow us to proactively identify areas where organizations like yours, again, may commonly experience friction and encounter those inefficiencies. Our goal today is pretty simple, to share these valuable insights so that you can benefit from these learnings and strengthen your own f e n x t instance. So I wanna go ahead and explore some of those here today. With that ex that commitment to our platform and the understanding there of how we can, continue to transform your experience, we wanna start looking at those key areas again that we've identified. Laura, I'm gonna go ahead and pass it on to you. Alright. Thanks, Eli. I'm gonna go ahead before I share up on the screen. I have another poll out there for you guys. So poll number two. So, if you can go ahead, to stop sharing. Yeah. Let's go take a look at that. When was your last closed or preclosed or optimized fiscal year? So are we looking at '23, or later or current, '22, '21, 2020, or, you know, you've never heard of that. So I'm gonna leave that pull up for another second or two, and then, we've got some of those votes coming in. Alright. So I'm gonna go ahead close it. Well, let's see. I have a few more votes coming in. Okay. Let me go ahead and close that, and let's take a look at our, note results. So a good majority of you, that is amazing because, a good majority of you shows that you you are you have your last closed or optimized, fiscal year with 2023 or later. But then we have also a good amount of you that, you know, unvoted that you've never heard of that, and then we have a handful that's, you know, in between. So what I'm gonna go through, as as I go through this next few slides would be the challenges and, you know, why does it matter. K. So challenge number one. Right? So, I wanted to talk about fiscal years. There are different statuses for fiscal years. So there's something called hard close. There is a pre close and there's optimized. All of those stages of your fiscal year creates summary data. Right? Of the three, only hard close is irreversible. There are hidden cost to, having open fiscal years. So Financial Edge NXT has been designed to perform what's called a mock close, And what it gives you is it always provides you with a current fund balance or the rollover of your net surplus deficit. So this is a very convenient design. But if you have relapsed your management of your fiscal years, there are hidden cost to that. So, you know, what does it look like? So if you have any fiscal years that are, you know, three years being left open or maybe you are current, like, you currently close or pre close, your your fiscal year, but you have multiple fiscal periods open. The biggest potential impact of this is actually data integrity risk. So by having those, periods or fiscal years open, you have an increased, you know, chance of accidental entry to those periods. Right? So, if, you know, if an old period is open or old fiscal year is open, your team can maybe post to that period, which actually then brings on the next hidden cost, which is reconciliation issues. If you have transactions that are posted to the incorrect period, you have, you know, extra time that you need to trace those transaction to reconcile those and then, of course, make correcting entries. And, of course, if left and right, if we didn't know that that really had happened, this incorrectly recorded transaction can potentially increase your audit cost. And then the last one I wanted to talk about is, you know, slower system performance. Right? So I I meant that to be in quotes primarily because it's slower. I want to, you know, share that it is a perception that it's low. What the system actually has to do is it has to process more data. Right? So for example, if your last closed fiscal year is 2020, then what Financial Edge NXT would do, because it's doing a mock close, is it's gonna go to that fiscal year 2020. Every single debiting credit would have to be aggregated in order for it to display the current balance. So the more fiscal years that you have open, that's lower it is because, you know, it's processing more data. So, so that's the hidden cost of open fiscal year. So let's let me give you you know, we wanna make this session a little bit more interactive. So I'm gonna go ahead, put in another pull out here. I'm gonna share it and open it. Okay. So when was your last completed Financial Edge NXT Bank reconciliation? Are you current? You know, like, you done it last month, two months ago, three months ago, or are you not using Financial Edge NXT for bank rec. So we're gonna keep that, you know, all open, and we really appreciate your participation as you as we go through this. Like I've said, we wanted to make sure to keep this, a little bit more interactive. K. I'll leave that up. So we've got very popular, SaaS one current, so that's great. But then we've got a good amount of you who is really not using Financial Edge NXT for Vanguard. So, quite interesting. Alrighty. So I'm gonna go ahead. Looks like it all stabilized. I'm gonna go ahead and, stop that and close it. Let's see. Oops. I lost my slide. Bear with me real quick, and I am gonna go ahead, get that slide up. Okay. So then challenge number two that I wanna talk about is delayed or irregular reconciliation. So what does it look like? So if your organization hasn't reconciled your bank account, it in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, you know, I'm I'm sure that there's some you know, like, you you may be using a separate schedule. So if you have delayed or irregular, banking conciliation in epi and x t or if your general ledger, you know, GL balance is not tied to your HAP or HAR reports. Right? That that's what it would look like when we have delayed or irregular reconciliation. So why does it matter? By having this delays, you will have, you know, inaccurate reporting. So if you have discrepancy between your Financial Edge and Xtihad balance and your bank statement, the accuracy of your financial report would be questionable. If your AP or AR accounts are not reconciled with your aging report, then your receivables or your payables may be over or understated. With that comes delayed problem solving. Right? So if your reconciliation is delayed, small issues or small errors become large, and it becomes really hard to find. So that that, you know, then leads to potentially audit flag. Right? So lack of regular reconciliation is a common red flag for auditors. So you wanna make sure that, you know, you're current. Then the last one would be, you know, loss of confidence in the system. So, you know, the finance team or the board, would lose trust in your system's data. So, we definitely wanna make sure that, you know, we understand that that is a challenge. Alright. So then the next thing I wanna do is I have another poll out there. Let me see. Number of segments, I believe. Let me go ahead share share that. How many segments do you have in your chart of accounts? So oh, sweet. Popular. Alright. So we've got some more, a few putting out there. Alright. So let's see. Consistently, we've got, like, you know, three is moving up there. So two is very low and very interesting, kind of 10% ish. Looks like a good majority of you, you have, like, three, segments in your chart. So let's see. Alright. So I'm gonna go ahead. Yeah. Few more boats coming in. Alright. So let's go ahead, close-up this poll, and let's go through our slide. Okay. Our slide. Okay. So then the next challenge that I wanted to talk about is bloated or, you know, complex chart of accounts. So what does it look like? You know, if your chart of accounts has four or more segments, you know, we we probably would be, you know, saying that that may be, you know, bloated or maybe, a little bit more complex. If more than half of your account records have been added to Financial Edge NXT since your last setup. Right? So that's that's gonna be more, like, on on on that side. So why why is it you know, why does it matter? So what are the potential impact of having, this in your chart of accounts? So this would be reports complexity. Right? So, if you, if if those segments are not very well defined, whenever you're working on report, maybe you'll add a report filter that would say, you know, segment one, and then maybe you put in another filter that would be, like, segment two, and maybe those selection or your filters are, you know, con conflicting with each other. Right? So when you're looking at that criteria and when you look at the report, you may be looking at inaccurate report. So, that's that's gonna be, you know, one of the issues about, like, reporting and complexity. There's also data entry error. Right? So if I'm working through a transaction, I'm putting in the data, The more, you know, they have to pick from, the higher risk I have with incorrectly selecting the wrong account. And then there's also reduced, you know, efficiency and scalability because the more time, you know, like, you spend more time trying to search things because there's, like, you know, like, a bigger, set of records out there. Again, one of the things that I have in here is lower system performance. But, really, you know, more segments just means more data, which means more processing time. So it's slower in that sense because there's there's more data. Right? Then the last impact is that, you know, there's there's there's a burden when you have new users, when you're onboarding new staff. There's a steeper learning curve, when you have, like, uploaded or, you know, like, chart of accounts. Alright. So then before I go on to, like, my next challenge, I have one more poll out there for you guys, which for some reason I cannot find at the moment. So maybe I lost it. And that's okay. So chart challenge number four. So, missing or incorrect fund setting. What does that mean? What does it look like? So sometimes you're gonna know that maybe it's wrong or incorrectly set up because maybe there is an interfund balance or, like, a due to due from balance that you really cannot explain how that balance came to be. It's just there. Right? Or maybe it's just growing. You may be also looking at, you know, missing or inaccurate net asset or fund balance. Right? So, again, why does it matter? Data entry errors. So information for accurate record keeping, you know, like, if if there's required data and it's not being entered or it's not being supported by the system as being required, then it can cause, like, data entry errors, manual reporting. Right? If you, if you have net asset balances or in if it's not accurate, then you may have to just, like, run a trial balance report, explore export it, make manual entries, or, like, do your financial reporting in the system. And that becomes, like, you know, tedious in a very manual process. Right? So when you're relying very heavily on, external spreadsheets or schedules, getting to, you know, update that it's, you know, a tedious and a manual process. And then, like, the other impact would be, again, loss of confidence. Right? It's part of the theme in here is that when when when you're looking at your financial system and you cannot really use it for standard, you know, financial reporting, like, balance sheet, income statement, budget actual variance reporting, that's what the system is for. And if you're not able to utilize the system for that, then there is, you know, certainly that loss of confidence, with the system. And and those are things, right, you can do it you can trace it back to potentially incorrect one settings. K. See. And then, the last challenge that I wanted to discuss is about access management and system security. So what would it look like? So when you look at the system, if there's a lot of admin users or, like, this would be the equivalent of what's called supervisor rights in the database view. If you have a lot of users that are designated as system admin, that is a challenge. And if you have roles that are not, you know, very clearly defined, you know, that that would be an issue. And, yeah, how how would you know if it's not clearly defined? If you start inviting a user and you'd be like, oh, well, what role should I get? Right? Like, what role should I assign? Right? So that is a challenge. Why does it matter? Right? Like, what's the with the potential impact of, access management and security is that well, it's an audit flag. If you have checks and balances that are not reflected in your solution or we haven't implemented those in your solution when we can. That is an audit flag. And then, of course, there is, you know, like, security, like right? Access the sensitive or confidential information. You wanna be able to make sure that you have that in control. And then there's also costly mistake. Right? If someone has rights that they they shouldn't have and maybe they're, like, looking around or playing around, inadvertently, they could be making some system setting changes that could lead to, you know, irreversible changes, or maybe sometimes some of these changes can potentially, compromise your system of records. Let's say, I have full system rights and, you know, I'm new to the system. I'm looking around and there's one that says, oh, add a new segment or, like, you know, increases. Right? So those are things that can be be very costly. Or if I go into let's say, there's a little checkbox in in, like, the fun configuration that says preserve details during closing. Right? So if I have security to be able to make changes to those and I inadvertently, you know, unchecked it or checked it, that could potentially be a very costly, mistake. So, I've talked about, you know, all of these challenges. But what I'm gonna, you know, share with you is, like, now we'll have Orion take the stage, and he's gonna be, sharing with you the different ways to address some of these challenges. On to you, Ryan. Thank you so much, Laura. So for, for our our information so we're we're gonna kinda take a look at at some solutions and best practices here. You know, now that we kind of understand what those challenges are, you know, reasons to kind of avoid those, now let's talk about how to avoid those, how to, you know, use the system and and best practices to to make sure that we, can can go through that. So first, and these these best practices are gonna kind of mirror the challenges that that, Laura mentioned. So best practice one is gonna mirror challenge one that that, Laura mentioned. So managing fiscal years is is definitely an important part of creating accurate, and trustworthy financials, statements in the system. It's also one of the easiest solutions, for you to work through and and make sure is is correct. So first, it's important that you review your, fiscal year statuses in Financial Edge. Can easily be done by going to general ledger, settings and then choosing physical years on the left side, and that is shown in appendix a. You can download the the, the documents, if you go to the docs tab, and and you can actually follow along there as well. You can also follow, take a look at it afterwards. So let's kinda discuss a couple things here that that, that you may or may not see. So first, let's discuss the difference between hard closing and soft closing. So soft close is, is simply either the toggle switch or a checkbox depending on where you're looking at, in the system that tells us tells, the system, hey. We don't want you to be able to enter transactions, or we do want you to be able to enter transactions in this, in this period. It's a reversible, option. It's easily toggle toggleable, and it's just a an easy way to to make sure that you are, you know, not having, transactions entered into, you know, into periods that you don't need it to be entered. Hard closing is is a little bit different. So that is a permanent and irreversible option, and this only occurs when you choose the close option on that fiscal year screen. That is a that is a permanent close. It stops anything from ever being able to enter, be entered into those periods, and and just allows you to, you know, kind of keep keep with your your audit and ensure that you don't have, transactions entered incorrectly. Now, let's kinda talk about the statuses that you will actually see on that fiscal year screen. So first is open. This just means, that no action has been made on the fiscal year outside of potentially doing a soft close. Even if all periods are soft closed, it's gonna it's gonna show as, it's gonna show as, open. The fiscal year status will show as open in there. You can edit a fiscal year to see if there are any periods closed, or at the very top of the screen, you'll see the most recent, 14 periods, and and you'll be able to toggle those as needed. Open optimized, would be the next one you might see. So that just means that the fiscal year is still open, but it's been optimized. This process basically summarizes transactional data, for a year to help improve, improve, report processing speeds. Generally speaking, we do recommend that you, optimize your fiscal years when transactions are no longer being added to that year. That process is reversible. So you can go in and do it. If you decide that, hey, we need to enter some transactions, you can you can very easily undo that by opening one of the periods there. It'll say, hey, this is optimized, and you will unoptimize by by doing this. So it you do have the option to, to reverse that if if you, see need to. The next option you would see is pre closed. So this is basically just a mock closing that you can do in the system, to temporary close to temporarily close a year, to help speed report it up as well. Because it is, because the the the actual closing of fiscal year is permanent, we definitely recommend that you do the pre close, each fiscal year to kind of see what's see what's gonna happen, see what what everything looks like, and give you kind of a preview of what's gonna happen when you do close your fiscal year. As with optimize, this is a reversible process as well. And the last status that you would see is closed. So this is the only of the four statuses, the only status that is irreversible. This just means that the fiscal year is completely closed for data entry. So you wanna make sure that you have entered all transactions for that year. Make sure, you know, if you need to include audit adjustments that it's done. Once that's been completed, it's it's not possible to undo that that that process. So what what kind of best practices do we recommend here? So generally, with with physical periods, we suggest, ideally, only having one period one single period, open, in the system at any given time. This ensures that you're not gonna accidentally post to a previous period to a future period, you know, to a future year if you've got, future years open in the system, and just gives you more control of of what's being entered into the system. Now that might not always be possible. You know, you you may need to have a previous period open and a current period. That is fine. But what we always recommend is to have as few periods open as as absolutely possible. If you can stick to one, that's gonna be ideal and and and really allow you to to to control where things are being posted. If you do absolutely have to post to a close period, as I mentioned before, the soft close, is is reversible, and you can very easily go in and and toggle that, toggle that closed, closed, switch or check the, uncheck the box so it's closed, no no longer closed, and you can, enter transactions into that period. Once you've done that, once you've posted those transactions, you can go back in and and close that period. So now that we, you know, now that we kind of understand what those those statuses are, let's kinda talk about, you know, some some additional best practices here. Make sure that you are establishing a consistent monthly and annual process for open and closing those fiscal periods, and years in the system. You wanna make sure that you you have a process down to, you know, to quickly, but more important, accurately, closed periods and fiscal years in the system. While closing periods is re like I mentioned, is reversible, it's it's not possible to, you know, reopen a hard closed year in the system. So you wanna make sure that is one of the final things you do. Generally speaking, once you've had your audit, that's completed, auditors have signed off on any adjustments that need to be made and that are posted to the system, that's when you can really go in and and close hard close those those years. You know, that's gonna ensure that there's no changes to the to the information. You know, someone doesn't erroneously post to a to a previous period, you know, they they're they're working in the system and they post to 2024 instead of 2025 because that's not open or because that is open. And then your your information is is out of whack. So make sure that that you are, closing hard closing and soft closing, in there as well. We also suggest to, you know, complete reconciliations right after you've closed the periods, because that's going to ensure that there are no transactions that are being entered after, you know, after that. If you do need to make an adjustment, you know, with your reconciliation, you determine, hey, we you know, we're missing something or or something, you know, is is is a little is a little out of whack, you can very easily go in, open the period, make the adjustment, and then close it back. So, you do kinda have that ability there. Depending on which item we're looking at, whether it's an annual close, the the full year close, or or, monthly close, make sure to kind of, you know, do those in the appropriate times, either monthly or annually. And it's really gonna help improve your reporting performance. You have a lot more accurate and clear reports, as well as helping simplify your your audits. You know, it it can if periods are left open, you know, it it can leave, it can leave the door open for some some costly data entry mistakes that that would need to, you know, be rectified either through, you know, through through Blackbaud or external services to to kinda help, get that, corrected. So, also, make sure that you're closed as many periods and years, that that that you can. It's just gonna make your lives a lot easier. It's gonna make sure that things aren't being entered in incorrectly. Alright. On to, the the second best practice, slide here. So keeping your reconciliations current. As we mentioned mentioned in, in the previous slide with with the fiscal years, we want to make sure that hand in hand with closing the the the fiscal year or the fiscal period that you're doing reconciliations. That's going to, again, make your lives much much easier. This is a reconciliation is a very in-depth very in-depth conversation. So we're gonna get just kind of, discuss the importance of reconciliations. We're not gonna go into the nitty gritty of of how to reconcile everything in the system, but we will talk about some, some best practices to kind of help keep you keep you in reconciliations kind of, practices around that. So while the most form and com common forms, sorry, of reconciliation is bank reconciliation, You also want to to keep in mind your your subletter reconciliation. So your AP to GL or your AR to GL, fixed assets to GL. Make sure, you know, that that you're completing those reconciliations on a on a monthly basis as well. The it's just as important as your bank reconciliation to to make sure that, everything is getting posted, that you're posting correctly, that, you know, all the transactions are coming over correctly and, again, allow you to have your your accurate financial statements. In Financial Edge, NXT, so bank reconciliations are very easy to to track and complete, directly in the system. You know, as you've you've gone through and and, you know, completed your monthly close, doing that bank reconciliation is is important. Now, obviously, you might not be able to do that on, you know, July 1, for example, if you're trying to reconcile for June. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time for your your actual bank statement to come in, but the sooner you can do that, the the better. To view your your most recent bank reconciliations in the system, you can do that, a couple ways. So first, you can go to treasury bank accounts, and you can actually add a column there for for for a reconciliation date. That's gonna show you most recent reconciliation, and it kind of allows you to, to view that directly from from one screen. You don't have to dig into it. But if you do open the bank account, there is also on the bank details, tile of the of the bank account. It will show you that that most recent reconciliation date as well. If that reconciliation date is blank, that would mean that that that bank account has never been reconciled. So, you know, now now is a great time to really go in and and start that process, get your your bank reconciliation up to date. In and again, if you download this, you'll you'll you'll have access to it right now. But in the, in the additional, resources section here, we do have, a couple great resources. So the first one is how to prepare for a successful bank reconciliation. It's a knowledge base article, and it really gives you some great suggestions on on how to how to start your reconciliation, how to prepare for that reconciliation, and really how to to, to go about that, if it's your first reconciliation. There's also the bank reconciliation, toolkit, training course, that's provided by our our Blackbaud University team, and that is a great resource as well. There's, there's not only a course to take, but there's also some some documentation to kind of help you along with that process. So take a look at those and you can really kinda go in and and start your start your, your bank reconciliation process. We've also got, you know, some some new features like our bank feeds. Bank feeds really help simplify your reconciliation process. It allows the system to connect to your bank account and then download any type of clear transactions, and and clear those in the system. It it makes it a much quicker process to actually go through and do your reconciliation at the end of the month. So instead of having to look at your look at your, bank statement and say, okay. This check cleared. Okay. Let me check that. Now let me check that. Most of those items are already gonna be cleared for you. Now it may not be a 100%. There may be some things that you would have to manually clear, but it's gonna be a much much quicker process, if you have your bank feeds, successfully connected and and and clear in transactions, than it would be with without. So keep that in mind. Take a look at that. You know, if if you're not aware of what that is, we do also have some great resources, in the help documentation that that talks through the the bank feeds. I know we're gonna focus in on bank reconciliations, and I and I mentioned in the beginning that that it's just as important to have our, sub ledger reconciliations completed. We wanna make sure that you're doing that on a monthly basis. It's going to help with your your, your end of year reconciliations. You'll you'll have a much shorter time frame to kind of, hey, if if we do see an issue, we only have to look at one month. We know that, you know, we reconciled, perfectly fine at the December. It's, you know, we we just looked at at January and we're we're off by a little bit. So now instead of looking at, you know, that that whole year, you're only looking at one month. So it makes it a a much quicker process to kinda find those those, potential issues. And we've also got a great resource as well, the the how to reconcile the general ledger knowledge base article. There's some recommended reports to run, some, potential downfalls or pitfalls that you might you might run into with posting and those types of things. So, take a look at that. It's gonna give you some some great information on that. But some other things too that it that, we wanna discuss are are kinda some best practices for for accurate, reconciliations. If you go to general ledger and settings, and expand business rules on the left side, there's a couple couple business rules that we wanna want you guys to kinda take a look at and determine, you know, hey, can we enable this? Can we, you know, make sure that that we're we're following along with that? If you go to the transaction section on the left side as well, and hit edit, on that screen, you'll see a option that says, do not allow post dates to, be different than transaction dates in other systems. This is definitely something that we recommend. Now there may definitely be situations where where you may not be able to have this, this enabled. But if possible, we would recommend keeping these, these the post date and the transaction date to be the same. Just as a quick reminder, a transaction date in the system could be anything from invoice date, payment date, credit memo date, and then the post date is going to be the date that it actually hits your general ledger. So if those dates vary as they differ, it's going to potentially cause reconciliation issues. So you want to make sure that, if possible, to keep those the same, and then if if it's not possible to keep those the same to, you know, kind of keep a keep a log or keep keep some type of information to to very easily see that, okay. Hey. I know this these transactions have different post dates than transaction dates, for x reasons. So if it comes to the audit, you can very easily say, hey. This this is why those those dates differ. Another option that you'll see on there is do not allow default, account to be edited or used as a primary account in other black box systems. That's a mouthful. But we want to make sure that we have that, that box checked. What that basically means is that, for example, we have our AP Summer account set up in the as a default account. You're not able to to to use that account, in, you know, in in in a I don't know. If in a, bank adjustment, for example. You know, I don't have to use that bank that AP Summer account, for for your bank adjustment. It just allows you to to make sure that those accounts aren't being used in in a way that they're not meant to be. Also, if you take a look at journal entry on the left side and hit edit, there's a drop down menu for, allow journal entries to Blackbaud system default summary account. That is basically the same as that previous one we just talked about except for this is focused on journal entries. Generally speaking, we recommend, setting that to never, but at bare minimum, set that to ask each time. This is going to ensure that you don't accidentally use that AP summary account to, to, you know, create a journal entry, and then that's gonna throw your your, AP to GL, out of balance. So looking at, the next option on here, you want to, also uncheck the box to allow journal entries to cash accounts without adjusting the the bank register. This may or may not already be marked for you, but or unchecked for you. But by checking that, that allows you to create a journal entry, for the cash account. And then there's a checkbox that says to create adjustments to the register when you create, when you post that that journal entry. You can turn that off, if you do not have this box unchecked, and that can cause bank reconciliation issues. So you'll see transactions, on the GL side of things, but you wouldn't see that on the bank registered to to be able to clear. And that's that's one of the biggest reasons for for out of balances on the the bank register. Alright. So I know that was a lot of information pretty quickly, but we're gonna go ahead and jump over to, our best practice number three here. Keeping your your chart of accounts, you know, lean and lean and clean. The chart of accounts is really the lifeline of of the accounting system. Every transaction in the system has to be coded to an account, allows you to properly produce your financial statements, you know, for for all parties, whether it be your, you know, whether it be your board, your auditor, your your anyone that then needs to see your your your financial statements. It it allows you to very easily, have that that that information, sorted correctly. It's the first thing that you really need to do is is review your chart of accounts for for any type of redundancy or unnecessary accounts that exist in the system. You can very easily inactivate any account in the system. You can delete accounts, but depending on if there's ever been posted transactions or current transactions to to that account, it's not possible to delete it. But you can inactivate, any account in the system. And that's going to kinda help clean up that chart of accounts. If account is inactive, you're not gonna be able to accidentally code a transaction to that, but it does give you, a, an easy way of kinda controlling what what can and cannot be posted. You can definitely use the built in search and filter functions, in the list page. So if you go to general ledger and accounts, that's what we refer to as list page. And you can use your your filter options there or your search options to kinda see if you you you do have some types of redundancies there. You can also very easily use the export button and export that to Excel. If you take a look at appendix c, later on, you'll you'll you'll see the the option for that. You also wanna make sure that you are developing a clear naming convention, for any new new, accounts in the system, and it's a very easy process. If you take a look at appendix d, it it kinda gives you exactly what it, what it would look like. But if you go to general ledger settings and then, GL setup and account setup, there's a default account distribution, or description. Sorry. Account default account description for any new accounts that you set up. You can set that default up, and then any new account that you create, it's going to populate based on that that naming convention. You can add various options there to to automatically pop you populate the description. Generally, what I see, is very popular options would be something like, you know, your your, account code description hyphen your department description, if you've got an additional account segment, or just your just your, account, your account code, description. You've got options there, and you can really kinda control what that looks like. In that same screen, though, you also have the ability to set up invalid account combinations in the system. That is probably one of the the the lesser used, features that I see there on that page, but that really allows you to create combinations of accounts that should never be used in the system. So say, for example, we're gonna pick on you've got an optional segment, of, let's call it, department. So you've got, you've you never want your your departments, say, eleven and twenty one, to be used with your fund 10, for example. You can very easily define in that screen, that that's not a possible combination. And if someone attempts to create a full string, using that, it's going to tell them that that they're not it's it's not possible to create anything in the system. So if you do have, you know, certain combinations of accounts that you you don't want used, you can very easily define that in that screen. It's also important that you you document your your chart of account structure and your segment definitions. Well, some of those may be obvious. Hey, you know, here's my my natural account. Here's my my you know, maybe it's four digits, five digits, how many ever here's my natural account. So some of the items may not be as obvious. So you may have, for example, you may have a department, but that department may also, you know, be a couple other things. Your fund, for example, may be a representation of different locations, if you have different locations, but also your restrictions. So it it it could be a combination of things, and it's important that, you know, everyone that's using the system understands what exactly that is. You can very easily, you know, go in and and, you know, create an export or create a list of of those items. You should definitely initially, review your chart of accounts, but then that's gonna that's gonna take a little while, to kinda go in and review those, delete any accounts that don't have activity or inactivate accounts. But then going forward, you know, we kinda recommend taking a look at this quarterly. It is it's gonna be a much quicker process. You can just look at accounts that were created in that time frame by using filters on the list page, or or projects, whatever it happens to be. So So it'll be a much quicker process, outside of that that first initial review to to kinda make sure that everything's being created correctly and those those naming conventions, are are being held too. As I mentioned, while you do have the ability to mark things, as inactive, and delete accounts that have no activity, it's not possible to remove accounts from the system that have activity posted to them. Depending on what that looks like, you know, either not just Laura or myself, but anyone here on our professional services team can can, work with you, and kinda help determine if, you know, if it's needed to to kind of delete those accounts or to kind of handle those accounts in a different way. So we can help determine what the best course of action is for this. It could be as simple as, okay, we're just gonna mark these as inactive, or it may be as complex as, okay, we're gonna go with a whole new brand new implementation with a new chart of accounts and and completely restructure what we're doing. So it can really run the gambit with that. If that is something that you're you're, interested in, you can definitely reach out to your your account executive, and we'll touch on that a little bit later as well. Alright. So best practice number four, making sure that we we have a clean fund set up. As Laura mentioned, you know, with with the fund set up, it it is it's important that we have, that we have an accurate and and complete fund set up as well. So in a fund record, you wanna make sure to review all your fund records for for an accurate and complete inter fund account set up. So in Financial Edge, every every transaction will will need to balance by fund. The system also has this interfund functionality that will automatically generate a interfund account if you are out of balance by funds. If you do not have an account defined there, it's not going to it's not gonna properly populate in there. If you take a look at, appendix e here, and you go to general ledger settings, GL setup and funds, you'll be able to very easily view the inner fund, columns that you see listed there. There are two different settings or two different ways of going about interfunds. You can either have a single account, or you can have a debit and a a separate debit and a separate credit account listed on there. So you may see one way or the other on there. If you do see asterisk in place of, your account code, just keep in mind that that means that that fund is not set up with an interfund, and you you will definitely suggest to go in and edit that and and, add the appropriate interfund account there. When you when you set that up, this is gonna solely be for your journal entries. The other options here for posting from sub ledger would actually exist on a similar page, in the the GL setup. If you look on the left side, there will be, interfund sets. There you can define from, you know, accounts payable or fixed assets, accounts receivable, what have you, from those subledgers how the interfund, how the interfund accounts are going to function as well. So take a look at that. We're not gonna go into great detail with that, but, just keep that in mind, that the fund setup is solely for journal entries, and then the interfund, sets, on there would be from your subledgers on on how that's used. You'll also wanna review, the fund accounts to make sure that you have a a a net asset or a fund balance or, you know, whatever you call that, account defined on the record. You can very easily open up the fund record, and view the the net asset account displayed, in the transaction requirements tile. It's important that an that an account is defined here. If it's not, you're not going to be able to accurately produce reports. You're not gonna be able to to get that information, in the system. You're not gonna have transactions closing into your your your net asset account. So you wanna make sure that that is, that is defined as well. You also want to make sure that default class and other required fields, or transaction characteristics are defined on there. You'll see a few options on on the characteristics. So the first one that you'll see is reserve detail during closing. This allows, so this basically allows you to define if a characteristic. So a project or a grant or a transaction code, will carry forward a balance, when when you close a a a physical year, or when the system does a mock close in the in the fiscal year. So you wanna make sure that that is set up correctly, and and you are, accurately, using that. You'll want to also require or not want to, but if you do require the balance, there's an option for that where you can choose a project or a grant or, again, a transaction code to require the balance. What that basically means, if there's a debit, there needs to be a corresponding credit associated with that. Generally, it's only needed for characteristics in which a balance sheet is produced for, so keep that in mind. And then there's also the option to require an account specified. Here you can choose all accounts, no accounts, or income statement accounts only. If it's required on either income statement accounts or all accounts, then a default would be required to be defined, so keep that in mind. I do wanna point out, that while you go through and review these, it's it's imperative that you understand, the repercussions of of making changes there to to those, to those options. The system will allow you to go from a more restrictive option to a less restrictive option, but not the other way around. So think of it as, hey, I can go from requiring projects on all accounts to no accounts, But you're not able to go from no accounts to all accounts. So if you do happen to make a change here, to go from all accounts to no accounts, there's no way to go back, to to all accounts, to require anything there. It's determined that you do if it is determined that you need to to make a change, here from going from less restrictive to more restrictive, the recommended option here is to create a new fund, move balances to that new fund, and enter transactions to that new fund going forward. It is a process that that, again, Laura, myself, or anyone here at the the professional service can assist with, and help walk you through this. So if that is something you're interested in and and determine is needed, definitely reach out to your account executive again, for for that. So with this review, definitely do it once. Go in there, take a look at that as soon as you can. But then also, whenever you create new funds, make sure that you you kinda take a look at those. Alright. So best practices for, for security. So for security, as Laura mentioned, we want to make sure that that we have a, you know, we we have appropriate roles created in the system. With Financial Edge, you've got the ability to really define multiple roles, multiple, ways of setting up users in the system, and that can even vary based on the the modules. So you can have view only, users. You can have data entry user or roles in the system. You can have, you know, admin roles in the system. And depending on on how you set up those roles, you can mix and match that. So you can have a user that is an admin in, accounts payable, but they are only view only in in in GL or, you know, they are just data entry in GL. So you can really mix and match that. But it's important to not have a a a large number of admins in the system because that can that can get messy. As Laura mentioned, it can cause some security risks, and, you know, potentially potentially, you know, have some things deleted or changed that that shouldn't be changed in the system. You also do have the ability to, create record level security. In that record level security, you can very easily define that a user can view, you know, certain projects or certain accounts. They're not able to view other ones. It makes it a very easy, a very easy way of of controlling what what a user can or cannot see. Also, just, you know, some additional best practices. Documentation. Make sure you have, documented what these processes look like, where things are going to you know, how things are gonna occur. So then that way, if there is any you know, if if someone leaves or you have a new person come in, it's it's easily accessible. Make sure you have your your workflows, documented as well, and then business rules. Review those business rules. Make sure that they, they work for your organization. If you have questions about that, you know, the the help files are great. Support can also help with that as well, if you have any specific questions about what those business rules do. And just make sure to review, any other settings in the system to to kinda help minimize data entry. Utilize the system, utilize, new functionality that that that exists, is coming, to really kinda help, you know, kinda help you you get there. Alright. And as we've been as as I've been discussing, these items, take action today. You can very easily go in and and do some type of self assessment on on most of these items that we all these items that we talked about, actually. You can do some self assessment, prioritize, determine what areas, you really need to make improvements on, you know, closing out fiscal years, scheduling, that that next bank reconciliation or or AP to GL reconciliation. And then we've also got some, some some great on demand items. You will get that, you'll get a link to this coming up, and and you'll be able to to, access the documentation as well. We're right at time, so I'm gonna pass it over to Eli real quick for our last slide here. Yes. Thank you so much, Laura Ryan. Thank you all. I know we're just running over a little bit of time here. We knew this would be a lot of information. Just to remind you all, there is a, document within the documents tab here to be able to download this PowerPoint. And at the end of that PowerPoint, if you scroll all the way down, there is an appendix with all of the screenshots and a lot of the additional detail that Orion was speaking to. We've got some additional resources there that provide knowledge bases and walk throughs of a lot of what we just discussed today. Again, we completely understand that this is a lot of information, and we'll actually be looking to have you all give us some feedback on, what these sessions, will continue to, turn into. For the time being, there is also some additional support that you can certainly reach out to Blackbaud and certainly make sure that we're, acquiring. So you'll see here just a list of topics that you can go ahead and pick from, to help us understand what's gonna be best to really take that deeper dive as far as the next step in supporting you all in your organization. So, please feel free to, post in there and let us know your feedback on a little bit more of what you are looking for, and we'll certainly, be working to bring that to you all. On the slide that I was, speaking to here, there are some additional resources that I just wanted to call out, maybe two of them in particular. One of them is your customer success manager. That's an individual that's here and a team that's here to support you all and making sure that you all have, all of the resources and details necessary to be successful with the Blackbaud solutions. So, feel free to reach out to them with any questions, concerns, as well as your account executive. We put a contact in there. So, again, if you are looking and needing to take a deeper dive with either services or, anything else, in those regards, we wanna make sure that you have all those contacts. So, we will be following up with some future, communication here regarding this webinar. Again, some resources. We really wanna make sure that you are able to take action directly today. And then as we move forward, we wanna certainly provide you all some more solutions and help here. We really appreciate your all's time. I appreciate the, the time here, Laura or Ryan, and we hope that, you all found this, valuable. Thank you so much, and have a great day.