Name: Connected Systems: How to Eliminate the Divide between Fundraising and Finance
Uploaded: 2026-05-14T18:31:45.207Z
Duration: 57 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 Raiser'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 common organizational challenges. We'll begin here in just a few moments, but I wanted to go over a few housekeeping items while everyone is 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 it with a response. So just to go over, we are using a webinar platform today called Goldcast. 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 slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. Worst case scenario, feel free to leave and log in again. Just to go over again, my name is Caroline, and I'm part of the 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 to pull both of 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. Gonna push that out now. You'll see that pop up in the polls tab there. Awesome. Thank you for those responses. And 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 go ahead and hand things over to Elaine. Thank you, Caroline. I'm glad to be here today with everybody. And whether you're joining us today from the fundraising side or from the finance side, you're likely here because you recognize this process. You know the green 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 technical issues. They really create day to day friction for teams that are trying to do good work, like all of you all. One of the most immediate impacts is doubled effort when it comes to data entry. Gifts are entered once by the fundraising team and then reentered or adjusted by the finance team. And not only is this inefficient, but it increases the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Furthermore, if the systems aren't connected, neither team has full visibility. That leads to time consuming back and forth around checks and restrictions and allocations and adjustments, and fundraisers are asking finance for answers. Hopefully, you live in the same part of your org. Finance is asking fundraisers for clarification. Both teams are spending so much time chasing information instead of acting on it. Which direct what is the total what what total is correct? Why doesn't this report match? Where did this adjustment come from? These conversations are rarely productive, and they pull you away from what really matters. So instead of focusing on your strategy or your fiscal stewardship, teams are stuck reconciling spreadsheets and defending their reports, and that distraction impacts everyone. It takes fundraisers away from building relationships with donors, and it takes finance teams away from ensuring accuracy, compliance, and accountability. Ultimately, it takes the entire org away from focusing on its mission. And these challenges aren't caused by people or process failures. They're caused by systems that don't speak. Now this is what's possible with the connected systems of Blackbaud's fundraising CRM raisers Edge NXT and Blackbaud's true fund accounting tool Financial Edge NXT. With connected systems, revenue flows into your donor management system and then pushes directly into the general ledger. And that means no more duplicate data entry. Gifts don't have to be entered, reentered, adjusted, and explained multiple times across the teams. And because your systems start in sync and they stay, And because your systems start in sync and they stay in sync, you dramatically reduce reconciliation time. So 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 means better reporting back to your supporters and to your key stakeholders. So you can confidently report on how funds were received, how they were spent down, how they were allocated. And that level of transparency really builds trust with donors, board members, auditors, and leadership. So as you're looking at this slide, I want you to pause, close your eyes, start to imagine what a strong connection between development and finance could look like for your organization, Getting everyone on that same page empowered with the right data. With full visibility from funding all the way through disbursement with Razer's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT. In just a moment, you're gonna see this all this goodness in action. During the demonstration portion of today's call, we're gonna 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 then you'll see how those funds are managed and spent down over time. Before we jump into the live demonstration environment, I do want to briefly frame and kind of level set what Raiser'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 RaisersEdge NXT, at its core, as a stand alone tool, 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's not, it is not a database being a static, repository of donor information. Frasier's Edge NXT is an actionable hub where your team can collaborate in a really dynamic and efficient way while staying aligned on relationship activity where you can turn insight into consistent follow through for increased revenue to support your mission. It includes things like online donation forms, email marketing, event management, built in embedded wealth and prospect insights, all in one place so your team can segment, engage, and understand supporters in one single source of truth. So less spent less energy spent on manual work, tracking things down, more energy spent on donor relationships, stewardship, and revenue driving activity. While RaisersEdge NXT delivers a lot on its own, closing gaps for fundraising teams, today we're focusing on one really 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'm gonna hand it over to Heather who will 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, just a couple of thoughts when we think about Financial Edge NXT. So, obviously, this is gonna be for the finance side of the house, but I always like to say there's absolutely beneficial functionality within Financial Gen Xt for the fundraisers. So we'll look at quite a bit of that as well. But this is a total cloud accounting solution designed to meet the unique needs of nonprofits, schools, government entities, and all of the goodness happening in our communities. So 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. And there is a lot of of functionality within this full accounting solution, but it will certainly encapsulate everything from your native project, grant, and endowment accounting to built in tools for expense management and automated vendor payments. And definitely keep this in mind that this was built for you first and foremost. It is not an afterthought of commercial accounting, and it was built by Blackbaud just like Raiser's Edge and XT from the ground up. So we'll cover a lot of ground today. We won't cover everything, but this is definitely a good slide of information just to to really illustrate all the functionality that is native within Financial Edge NXT. Additionally, when we're thinking about really uniting fundraising and finance, I have some points up on the screen. I love these because they do equally apply whether you're on the fundraising side or the finance side. So a couple of thoughts. Definitely thinking about identifying funding, being able to have deeper stewardship. And this is created when there is collaboration around the various opportunities that your organization might be pursuing. Being able to capture, utilize, and reconcile, and have confidence in the data. And this happens on both sides of the house, in the fundraising and the finance systems, and this leads to better decisions for your organization when this is really going well. Being able to create cross department knowledge that gifts and grants were used for intended purposes. And that's likely enough said. You're all doing that every single day, but we can do it better. But are you able to answer this question? Are your departments equally tracking this information? And so this is definitely one of the best first steps towards eliminating the divide when we create this better knowledge. And then building 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 are thinking about your own organization, keep these points front of mind and ask, can both departments say their needs are met to accomplish these points? And then just one other item before I hand it back, to Elaine. But we're we're certainly focusing on fundraising and finance. These are certainly two critical departments. You all know there's other departments in your organization doing important work, but we're gonna focus on these two for today. And when they come together, it can really lead to a paradigm shift. You're gonna have better visibility, and the importance of greater visibility between these two departments cannot be overlooked. You'll have better collaboration. Fundraisers, they can't fundraise without financial figures, and donors want information. 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 then foundational tools, that's what we're gonna explore here live in the systems. But both sides need to have the basic tools to do their jobs, and each side needs to support each other in this requirement. If everyone can do their jobs easier, then everyone can be more strategic. So we are going to be telling the story of how money flows through your organization. I always like to say, having worked on both the fundraising and the finance side that this should be fun, and it should come together easily. And when it can come together naturally within your solutions, it is a proud moment to share the amazing work that you all are doing, and it's a true team effort. So as we make that transition to the live demo of both solutions, you'll see firsthand how these departments come together, because we do like to say connected systems equals connected staff. And as this visual is showing, that's where your mission and community impact are created. So let's start taking a look within Razer's Edge NXT. Elaine. Thank you, Heather. We are going to start out in RaisersEdge NXT. And in a bit, we're gonna follow a specific gift example that we'll post to finance. But first, I wanna orient everyone to the fundraising side and show how this solution becomes an actionable hub for relationship management. So right away, you can see, oops, one of the biggest benefits of having fundraising and finance on the same platform, one login, one consistent experience. Up here on this hamburger menu, users can easily toggle between the two sides of the house, fundraising and finance, without feeling like you're jumping between two totally different systems. So finance team needs to toggle over to the fundraising side to check on some details about a gift pledge agreement or if fundraising needs to take a quick look at their budget. It's very easy to do so. Now this is not a free for all. Don't worry. This have type of visibility. Those solutions include 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 AI is, responsibly embedded throughout Raiser's Edge NXT. This is Blackbaud AI for chat. It is purpose built to enhance fundraisers and finance team superpowers. So with that sparkle icon up here, both finance teams and fundraising teams, can utilize this with plain language. So I'm giving an example. Please give me a list of donors who gave last April, but not this April because I see from my year over year fundraising tile, we have some work to do. I'm gonna ask Blackbaud AI chat for a little help here, and it will quickly surface constituent insights, draft donor communications for me, get best practice ideas for stewardship, and save time on everyday tasks. So here it's pulled up my list of donors, and I can take this list and then take action. Another foundational point around visibility, for both sides of this house is all Blackbaud's platforms are designed to work wherever you are. So they are mobile responsive. No separate app is required. I'm here on the constituent record here. It's I like to call it the relationship record of truth. And Heather and I were actually just talking about this recently, how painful it is to be a new fundraiser, call a donor, or run into one at an event, and then learn from the donor that they serve on the board, or they've been giving for thirty years. If the information isn't captured or isn't easy to access even on the go, how are you supposed to know? So these records were 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 view and also by individual gifts. Event participation is tracked here, email history, actions, that solicitors have set up or plan to accomplish, opportunities tracked. Robert has been a great supporter to our demonstration environments, here in and you can see that this community garden project act ask was just approved. And you can each user can customize the information and how they would like to see it. So razors at GenexT comes with unlimited user license and anyone that can have access with that secure login. So finance friends can pop in to see what they might need to know. Your volunteers can be set up with special permissions for information to help them support your mission. So the right people can access the appropriate information in the right way so you can, you know, customize it to your look with, of course, the, the right roles. So here in my demonstration environment, you can get a full picture of Robert Hernandez's relationship with my organization. Now right up here at the top, these constituency codes, these are the magic behind targeted segmentation available throughout the platform. So they are customizable to your organization. These are a handful of examples, but you guys get to decide what, makes sense for you. And in my demonstration environment, you can see here, Robert is a major donor, a volunteer, and a board member. It's not just what we can see, it's how we get here. So the actionable data available to you right within the system. Raiser's Edge NXT can help you identify prospects like doctor Hernandez here. Ask the right amount for the appropriate initiatives like that community garden example, and at the right time for maximum support to your mission. So you can confidently know who to prioritize and what to ask for. And that's where embedded embedded, wealth insights comes in with prospect insights. It leverages AI driven insights to help identify individuals with the capacity and propensity to give to your organization embedded within the system. So you're less likely to leave money on the table. I'm gonna click into here this under giving, queue. Because it is native inside of Razer's Edge NXT, you don't have to buy a separate research tool. For example, if we see, someone with the potential to give at a higher level, like Kristen here, we can immediately turn that information into next steps. Even if it's early on, we can create an opportunity. And later, you can see how this opportunity surfaces and dashboards as pipeline for major gift initiative. My fundraiser's on the call. This is your pipeline and move management capability. For my finance friends, that pipeline view can really be helpful context for anticipating revenue and cash flow, timing, and forecasting. So once you've identified prospects and opportunities, the next question is how do you make sure nothing falls through the cracks? And that's where work centers come in. 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 make sure you meet all of those deadlines outside of that excel Excel spreadsheet. So within work center, you can get an added glance view of who you manage, the opportunities, so that pipeline that we touched on, and then next steps, the actions. The actions is like your to do list in a place for great cross team collaboration. So here, it looks like Jane needs to call doctor Hernandez. It's past due. And, also, there is an action for a finance team member to send a grant follow-up with spend down information and budgeting forecast for future funding programs. You can assign tasks to folks and then even add them to their calendar from here. This really gets into that heart of the collaboration between finance and fundraising that is possible when your systems are all on a single platform. So back over to my overview work center tab, Razor Stitch and x NextE can also prompt action with smart cues and flags. So CDs each of these constituents has a tag on it, and overdue items don't quietly age in the background with these tags. All of them, need the yellow, little nudging with these overdue pledges. And finance team might be interested to know what's going on here and help communicate the need to give these supporters a call to fulfill their pledges or ask questions around when this when will this money might coming in for budgeting or cash flow purposes. So we've seen, kind of the the actions on the individual level. Let's zoom out a bit, and look at the big picture. So both Raiser'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 in Excel. This overview overview dashboard gives giving trends at a glance. Everything that is blue is clickable and drillable. I'll show you that in just a second. I love this opportunities dashboard. Again, pipeline visibility, keeping tabs on what else can we be expecting. So finance might need some access to this kind of information. Fundraisers, all of the live list where you can actually come into this dashboard and click right here and get a an understand who is our who are our live ones, our first year donor retention. Click here, and we surfaced up a list of these supporters who donated our org last year, but not this year, and then take it over to the email platform. Let's talk about list real quick before I do that. So remember when I told you about the constituency codes? This is where, they come become super valuable when it comes to allowing users to target the right group with the right message. So these lists can be used for communication messages, for events, donor recognitions, or to encourage monthly giving from your usual one time donors. Invite community member to volunteer. You can have all collaboration in system list building. Let's get you again outside of Excel, both static and dynamic list creation that can be saved and shared when necessary. So once we've gathered our, our list, then we can go over into the email marketing platform, again, built into the system. And with email, the native email marketing built in, we offer best practice templates with easy configuration, and you can scale into deeper capabilities through integrations as needed. So if you have a constant contact, subscription and want to continue to use that, we're very tight integration there. With workflow with email workflows, you can actually automate outreach. So this is an example of a welcome series for first time donors. So stewardship remains consistent even if your staff is stretched thin. So this is a set it and forget it type of of tool so that you can focus more time on face to face stewardship and high impact activities. Our optimized online donation forms are designed to be just that, optimized for conversion, helping reduce friction and drive more completed gifts to your mission. Now here's the fun part of when Financial Edge NXT and Raiser's Edge NXT, their power couple ness really shines through. So as online gifts come in, we're gonna connect the dollar dots over to finance because this is where teams feel immediate relief. This is an example of a gift batch, that was created from that online giving form. And then folks can post from Raiser's Edge NXT over to Financial Edge NXT. I'm gonna show you that in example, but it's in just a minute, but it's creating a cleaner audit trail end to end. And if you've ever lived through Giving Tuesday or year end giving events and had to rekey high volume gifts into multiple systems, you know how meaningful this can be. You've also got tools for receding, thank you notes, documentation so you can stay responsive and audit ready. Another little sprinkle of AI here, to help you draft acknowledgments. We all know that it is super hard to think of different ways to say thank you each day, multiple times a day. You can use the power of AI here in our acknowledgment emails. Okay. The moment that we've all been waiting for as we transition over from Raiser's Edge NXT to financial Edge NXT, this is a restricted gift example because it ties together what we've seen, relationship context, actions, documentation, and then it will flow over to the financial side of managing and spending down those funds. This is an endowed organization working with other orgs to form and sustain community gardens. So you can see on this opportunity tile the steps that we took to cultivate and solicit and the 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 reporting needs and deadlines. Also, all documentation can be uploaded here right where you'd expect it. It's not hidden in someone's on OneDrive or buried in an email. You can drop in as much documentation here inside the system, and then click into attachments. So no file cabinets are needed. All of this work will flow back into work center across lists and reports so stewardship steps aren't missed, whether they belong to finance, development, or program staff. From this record, you can also access the account over in financial edge NXT to view spend down. And as this is a batch, again, we can follow that gift as it flows over to financial edge NXT with the posting tool. Again, no reentry. And with that, we've set the fundraising context, followed the gift to the point where finance then can take over. I'm gonna go ahead I'm going to hand things over to Heather to continue following this restricted gift over to the true fund accounting tool, Financial Edge NXT, and show how it supports transparency, stewardship, end to end. Thanks, Elaine. That was fantastic. So, yes, let's pick it up right where Elaine left off, and that is just the gift coming into Financial Edge NXT like she said. So in order to illustrate that, you should be seeing my screen now, and I am on a journal entry. So this is the $10,000 gift coming in from Wasatch Community Gardens. So all that legwork, the fundraising did to bring this gift into the organization, This is that handoff where finance now takes over and make sure that we're stewarding this gift and being accountable for what it was intended for. So the great thing about this journal entry is I did not have to create it here in Financial Edge NXT. So that integration, that hand off between Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT is seamless. And what it does for us is it creates the journal entry when those gifts arrive into the system. But the important part, I know there'll be someone on the line that will wanna hear this. The journal entry is auto created, which is great. We don't we're not manually reentering all those gifts, but it does arrive initially unposted. So you do have the control within the business office side of the house to review the gifts. This one's short and sweet, but we usually have the journal entries where there are many, many gifts represented, but you have the control within the business office to review that information, make sure everything looks correct. If there are any adjustments that are needed, you can factor that into your process and make sure that Raiser's Edge stays up to date as well. But there is a very tight reconciliation thread between Financial Edge NXT and Raiser's Edge NXT. I even have a couple of things on here that really were important to my own reconciliation as a customer. The first one is just that batch. In this case, that 2025Dash05. I have it in the description, but I also have it in the journal reference. So I preferred to do it that way as a customer just because that is that's like I said, that's that reconciliation thread. If I need to go back to that gift at any time, I can do that. And while we are on the the, journal entry, it does give me an opportunity just to illustrate a couple of things that are really, very foundational to Financial Edge NXT. We offer a chart of accounts that's purpose built for nonprofit. So 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. We do, in addition, offer unique records, and I'm just gonna make my column a little bit narrower here. Right here, I'm just kinda circling around that school garden program. These are those additional unique records, that can accomplish all of the different funding sources that are coming into your organization. So projects, grants, endowments, scholarships, that sort of thing. And it allows you to track funding across multiple parameters, maintaining both quantitative and qualitative data, and then access your net asset balance at any time all without expanding your chart of accounts. So that's very broad as far as what this can accomplish for your organization. Because like I said, this this makes sure that all the different funding sources coming into your organization and the restrictions that often accompany those can be kept very clean and everything in the system. So we do find a lot of organizations are managing a lot of that work outside of your system of record with multiple spreadsheets potentially, and so that really does shift when you have a solution like Financial Edge NXT. So definitely just keep that in mind. Next, let's explore the actual record. In this case, it is the project of the school garden program, and this is where restriction management happens for all your funding sources. So there is a lot of information within these individual records because like I said, it is a unique record in the system. You can have controls. So in this case, the school garden funds are very specific for the school gardens and we're gonna build out programs with that. And so here within the just the kind of the background of this project, I can have restrictions built right into the system the moment those funds come into the organization. So in this case, I'm only allowing with this school garden program certain accounts. I could also restrict as well. So it just kinda depends on what default in the system might help you and and build those internal controls directly into the actual record. Additionally, as I just wanna show you a couple of areas on this record, there's a lot of detail here, but it's really easy for me to really keep all of my data front and center. I can even look back on prior fiscal years of information if I'd like to. So in this case, I just changed it back to fiscal twenty twenty four, and all this summary information up here at the top was just refreshed as was the graph. And as I scroll down just a little bit more, you can see all the fiscal periods are here and all of that data was also just refreshed. So, oftentimes, depending on what it is you might be looking back at or looking for, I can do that oftentimes just right here on the record. We're certainly going to explore reports and dashboards, but I do really like to point that out that there's just a lot of detail right here as well. So sometimes I don't run as many reports as I used to, before we have this type of functionality. The same is true from the budget side of the house. I can look back on past information there as well. I also have attachments. I know Elaine talked about this on the razors edge NXT side, but they are equally as relevant for us on the finance side. And I often attach many of the same documents here within Financial Edge just because in this case, we wrote a grant. I wanna have that grant application and the budget that we submitted. I also have the award letter. Oftentimes, as you all know, there are elements of details in those types of documents that we may need to reflect back on as we're utilizing the funds. So I like to have all that kind of stuff right in front of me. So, you know, in this case, the budget. I have all the details that we propose to Wasatch Community Gardens as to what we would use these funds for just right here in front of me. I also have the ability to keep a live connection with Raiser's Edge NXT at all times. So in this case, I have a link right here on that record. And just like that, it takes me back into Raiser's Edge NXT and directly to the opportunity that Elaine showed you. So I can see, you know, what we put out there into the community when we were seeking these funds, what actions, all of that good stuff that she covered, I have direct access to that here as well. Also, contacts, these could be internal, external facing actions if there's follow-up work that needs to be done. Just a lot of details just right here in front of me. I also like to follow the breadcrumbs. I like to think of it as, just to illustrate the drill down capability that is a common thread throughout our systems. So as I'm moving around today, blue text, you're gonna see a lot of it. It means drill down. So in this case, if I want to look back on past activity, I can just do that with a couple of clicks. So if I am looking at a particular expense wanting to know, you know, additional background or distribution details, all I'm doing is using that blue text. And just like that, I can see that this was indeed an accounts payable, two different transactions actually, with j and j nursery. And if I click once more, it actually transitions me from the general ledger all the way into accounts payable and to the actual invoice record. So at this point, I can see the invoice copy. I can see the distribution details. Whatever it is that I might be maybe had a question on, I was able to just make that very quick transition, depending on what I'm looking for. I'll just take us back to the actual record, couple clicks, and we're there. So just an illustration of the drill down. I I do like to show that just just to show you how easy it is to to be very fluid within these systems and get to the different areas and and just get your job done a little bit easier and and and make your processes a little bit more seamless. Next, let me show you reporting and dashboards. Super important to understand how the information gets into the system and we've covered a lot of that. Also important is how do we get the information out? How do we report back to our various stakeholders? How do we stay on top of things? How do we share information even internally within our own organization? So couple of ways we do that, certainly with reports and then also dashboards. So reports with Financial Edge NXT are extensive. We do cover a multitude of areas with our reports, and the reports do come with the system. So it's a pretty lengthy list, 60 plus reports. So we've been at this for a while, all the reports and the different financial statements that you would expect to have in a full accounting solution are going to be here from day one. And with all of these reports, you can add different filters and parameters to them to make them as customized as you need. Also, you can schedule them. I do like this feature quite a bit, because depending on the different users within your organization, you might frequently get asked for different, bits of information. And sometimes you might get interrupted throughout the day for that type of information. So this is a great option here where you can essentially just put the system to work for you. Maybe there is a report that, you know, an end user needs to receive the last Friday of every month at 9AM. Why not just put the system to work, preempt that question or that request, and you can just put have them receive that automatically within their inbox. So you can just do a one off report or set this like I just did on a recurring schedule. This is great for different, maybe, program officers or, director of development that they, you know, they're they constantly may ask for different types of information. This just puts it right into their hands. Additionally, a couple just user preferences here. You can see in this particular environment, we have a lot of reports, and so we do have these other tabs up here at the top. Those are user specific. So it is a way just to more quickly get to the reports that you as a user are running on a regular basis. I tend to scroll my reports away over here on my favorites, and it's just much quicker to get to the reports that I'm running all the time. Additionally, you can run multiple reports all at the same time as PDF, Excel documents, that sort of thing. But I do wanna show you a couple of my favorite reports. The first one being this project activity report. This is actually one that I used very regularly. I have just filtered this by the one project, in this case, the school garden program, and I this was one that I was using all the time. It's a great format. I didn't have to do anything special on this report. This is just how it comes out of the system. But this was one that, the the Wasatch Community Gardens example is actually one from my own career. So that was one of my donors, and this was a report that I would give directly to them. We had six and twelve month report requirements that we had to to, you know, give them feedback on, and this report accompanied that all the time. And so I liked it just because I was being completely transparent, having it be produced directly from my accounting system. It's just a great format. Also, another example that I always like to share, and this one I'll show you in Excel. This one's just, you know, again, out of the box, budget to actual. I've added some additional columns for different months. I've also added a couple variance columns, but that's not all I had to do. So very easy to get my hands on my information and share it with different users because you do have flexibility with that. Elaine definitely touched on security, which is super important. I always add to that, which is thinking through access, and that will look different for every organization. So definitely think through your full users, but also your view only users. You can give that type of access to different people that can't edit or make any any changes in the system, but maybe they do need to be able to see reports or dashboards or the actual project records that they are responsible for from a budget standpoint. You can have that control and allow that type of access. So even with this, if I have sent this report to one of my view only users, let's say, and they are reviewing it and there's something about it that they see and they have a question on, they can drill in live to FinancialGen XT directly from the report, even from the PDF. So to illustrate that, I'm just gonna hover over that top account. In this case, it's contributions default because maybe I have question about it. All I have to do is click and it live directs me back into Financial Edge NXT and directly to that account record. So I do have security rights to do that, so that's always important to really make very clear. This does not open the system up to anyone that that and just anyone. It opens it up to the folks that have been given access. But at this point, if they did have a question, they have all of this detail right in front of them to maybe answer their own questions. So just a nice quick example with that, just to show you how easy it is to get your hands on your information. And next, I do wanna show you, the dashboards. You have options with the dashboards. I always like to to make it really clear that there are dashboards that just come with the system. You can also build your own, and then you can also even go further, and I'll show you an example of that. This first dashboard that I'm showing is definitely a go to. It's project focused, so we definitely see a lot of view only users accessing this regularly. And at this point, I do have it wide open. So it's showing all the projects within my system, which is pretty extensive. But just to illustrate, there are filters up here at the top, so you can really dial in much quicker to the maybe the the handful of projects that you need to see on a regular basis, quickly apply that filter, and the system's paired down to maybe what's most relevant for you. Even within the dashboards, there's continued drill down. So if you want to dig a little bit deeper into this particular scholarship record, you can do that. It is just opened into that side panel. It is the live record, so you can, you know, scroll through this information depending on maybe what you're looking for, or you could expand that record all the way out across your screen. Dashboard builder is also included with Financial Edge NXT. This is what's what's loading here is gonna show you an example of using prebuilt insights. And so this does allow you to essentially drag and drop information and build out your own dashboards and then share that depending on who needs to see this information. So these individual boxes are insights. And like I said, there are, a very long list of prebuilt insights that you can just drag and drop, resize, and then share that information. And then one more extra step that is available, it is an add on to FinancialGen XT. It's called Insight Designer, and it is for the types of users out there that want to start with a blank canvas is how I think of it. I do compare this to queries. There's a probably a pretty good group of us on the line today that happen to love queries, really digging into the data and, and really identifying very specifically what we wanna look at. I think about that with when I think about building out your own insights. So a colleague built this one out. These individual insights were all customized and then brought on to this dashboard. That's a lot of data, but depending on who needs to see this, in this case, this was built for a controller type role. They might wanna see this regularly and be able to go one to to one stop to be able to see that level of done, data. What's nice as well with Insight Designer is if you do add that onto financial gen x t, you automatically get it for razors at gen x t. So it is, buy it once and get it for both, which is great. At this point, I do wanna just shift gears just a little bit, to show you another example of just getting information into the system, and how easy that can be. We have some Excel add in tools that I always like to highlight, in these webinars. The first one is specific to journal entries. So this one I built out is just a payroll example. So not terribly exciting on the front side, but it does get interesting when you understand how it was created. It is very similar to the Raiser's Edge NXT integration where this information was auto created for me. I did not have to key all of this data in. So just to show you where this one started, I'm gonna take us back into Excel for just a moment, and what you're looking at here is the raw data. So in this example, I would have brought this out of my payroll solution, and I now need to get it into Financial Edge NXT. If you look in the upper right hand corner of my Excel environment, I have extra buttons up there. So these are the Excel add in tools as we call them. They are free for Financial Edge NXT. All you have to do is go to the Microsoft Store, type Blackbaud, and they are available for free download. So the one that we're looking at at the moment is specific to journal entries, but we do also have one for the budget scenarios, which are unlimited. I'll show you one of those. But what's nice about this process is it does replace 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, it was a little frustrating and didn't work as well. So with this Excel add in tool, all I have to do is click on that, create journal entry batch, and it auto connects to Financial Edge NXT and maps all the data for me. So I've got my accounts here. I also have my projects because I do distribute down to that level, and everything is good to go. If any of this information, maybe I transposed an account number, I'm good at that, had been incorrect and couldn't be mapped live to Financial Edge NXT, the system would have highlighted in red the exact cell where the problem existed so I could fix that and then be on my way. So in this case, I'd give this a description, and I would click submit, and that is how this journal entry came to be. That was auto created, originally arriving unposted, so I can review it, maybe attach the backup documentation, in this case, the Excel document that we are just looking at, and then I can validate and post when I am ready. So just a great tool with that. As I mentioned, we do also have that tool, the Excel add in tool for budgeting. And so you can have unlimited budget scenarios within Financial Edge XT. And if at any point you're working through your budget process and you need to use Excel, I know I did. I had folks that needed to give input into the budget process, but they didn't need to be doing it live in my accounting solution. So we did that with Excel, and then I just used that Excel add in tool to send it on in for review to Financial Edge NXT. So really great, maybe for some forecasting, what if scenarios, etcetera, depending on what your budget process looks like. Alright. Well, in the handful of minutes we have left, I'm just gonna switch gears just a little bit and talk about the treasury and expense side of the house. And to do that, just to show you here within treasury, this is where our bank accounts as well as our credit card accounts are created. You can have as many of those as you may need. You also have the option to connect those live to your various financial institutions and access that information as much as you'd like. So in this case, that's the view that you're seeing. In a live environment, the bank feed would automatically populate the left side of this screen and then place that next to your live bank register. There's automation that happens here where it will automatically match and clear transactions for you. You can manually do it. There's scenarios for that as well. But the important part with this is you can update this as much as you'd like. You're gonna use the same type of format come reconciliation at month end, but maybe spread the workout all month, and stay on top of that activity while it is happening. Also, you do the same type of activity on the credit card side of the house, so you can have as many of those accounts connected. You can also explore the Blackbaud purchase card, which I highly recommend. It is a true purchase card, so you can have very specific spending controls and spending limits by cardholder, and that seamlessly connects with expense management. So we'll go there next. This is one of my favorite areas of Financial Edge NXT because there is an opportunity here to really think through a lot of different processes in your organization. I know for me, a lot of my expense process, flow was very paper heavy, pretty manual in nature. I spent a lot of time chasing down, physical signatures of approval, and I I had a lot of credit card receipts floating around. And I know for me, I was really desperate for some efficiency, so that's why I personally love this area of our solution. But as you can see with expense management, this is where I can manage my credit card activity. Your end users that have cards can be given access to just expense management. We actually call them the non financial users because they only have access to expense management and nothing else within Financial Edge NXT. And as Elaine said, this is available on any device. So, definitely, we see a lot of people using their smartphone to, go and work with their charges, take a picture of their receipt, and just upload that live into Financial Edge NXT. They can even automate the approval process. So maybe their direct manager needs to approve their activity. If it's above certain dollar amount, you can incorporate even additional layers of approval, which creates an audit trail in the system, which is great. They can capture the the distribution details and, like I said, certainly, the copy of the receipt maybe before they misplace it. When they click submit, it's gonna go through the approval process, however you've built that out, and then it flows into accounts payable for review, which is fantastic. The other side to expense management, you can have invoices submitted through this. I also used it for reimbursement requests, for example. What's nice with this is you can even use some AI here. So, an example to that is all I had to do was upload this receipt for j and j nursery back to the school garden program, and AI reviewed that information, populated the fields, and now I just have to review it, make sure everything looks correct since it came from AI. But it does save time, for manually entering all of that detail, and it's it gets the copy of the invoice in one stop shop as well. Also, since I did mention budgeting, I do like to point out, I built this example for $15,000 knowing that it's going to exceed the budget. And what happens when I go to submit this is my system has some controls in place for me. So it's just letting me know, hey. You actually have a budget problem here. You don't have enough, and so you need to fix that before you keep moving. So definitely great, to have that budget check when you're utilizing budget management. Just help tie it all together to make sure that we're not overspending the funds that are coming into our organization. So we did cover a lot of ground today. Do note, as I said in the beginning, we we didn't touch on everything. So do you know that we also have fixed assets and purchase orders and accounts receivable and allocation management? And if you would like to dig deeper, ask very specific questions for your organization, let us know. We would love to do a tailored demo, and then you'll get to talk with someone like Elaine, to dig a little bit deeper into the solution. But we have covered a lot of ground. Do you know that we have extensive training available for our solutions through Blackbaud University? There are instructor led classes on demand for both Financial Edge NXT and Raiser's Edge NXT. There is an entire community behind you of your peers also using these solutions. So you have a community where you can post questions, get some best practices right alongside connecting live, with us and in the product to support. We definitely take it very seriously here at Blackbaud that we're here to partner with you within these solutions, to build that, community impact and help you be successful with your mission. So, like I said, we've covered a lot of ground between Elaine and I today, and we appreciate your time. I'm gonna hand it back to Caroline to wrap this up, though. Thank you again. Awesome. Thank you, Heather and Elaine. Just wanted to thank you all for joining today. And 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, and we've got some great resources in there to dive deeper into the topic of connecting finance and development. Thanks again for joining, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you.