Transcript for "Data Gaps Jeopardizing Your Institution's Future? Explore the Vital Role of a Connected SIS and General Ledger": Hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Maribeth Robards. I'm a member of our financial solutions marketing team here at Blackbaud. We'll get going in just a couple of moments, but I wanna go over a couple of housekeeping items while everyone is getting a chance to get logged in. So this is an interactive platform. Please feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation using the q and a function. We'll try to get to, those questions either in chat or live at the end of the session. But if there are any that we don't have time for, we will make sure to follow-up with you and get you a response. The the platform we're using today is called Goldcast. Just a couple of things about Goldcast. The audio for the webinar is broadcast through your computer speakers. And If you have any technical issues, just try refreshing your browser. That'll typically do the trick. We are gonna send out a link to the webinar recording to the email address that you used to register. You've got the q and a there. Again, if you have questions during the presentation, there's also, some resources for you in the docs section. You've got a cogwheel there to adjust any settings as we go along. I also want to let everyone know that one of our reps, Lauren, is on the line today and ready to chat with you if you have any sales specific questions. Hey, Lauren. During our time together, you'll be getting a high level overview of the Blackbaud and Student First partnership today. But if you'd like a more in-depth or personalized demo pricing, anything like that, Lauren is gonna be here to get you connected in real time. You can drop her a note in the q and a or, message her directly in the messages section. Alright. So we have some great presenters joining us today. I'm gonna invite them on stage, and let them introduce themselves. Alright. Thank you. And I'll just start us off. My name is Marty Singleton, and I'm a consultant here at Blackbaud. I've been with the company for going on six years now, and I specialize exclusively in higher education with our clients and prospects. And my background before coming to Blackbaud is I was a director of finance and accounting at a small college, and I partnered with Blackbaud using the Financial Edge NXT solution for my campus wide needs. So everything that you can do in accounting, I did with accounts payable, accounts receivable, all the things you would expect with a general ledger and more. I also had additional responsibilities, for student billing. So I didn't have, the good fortune of partnering with Student First. They weren't around back in the days when I was at the college, but I did post all of the student, billing activity to the general ledger, and that's one of the things we're gonna be looking at today in our partnership with Student First. So with that, I'll turn it over to Joe. Thanks, Marty. I appreciate that. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Joe Fisher. I'm Student First senior vice president of marketing, and I've been in the EdTech business now more than twenty five years. I don't think we need to get more specific than that. You know, like Marty, I came from a higher education institution. And unlike Marty, opposite, I spent all of my career in the student information system. So whereas he was having to to post student billing, I was, taking that the transactional data and and sending it over to the finance system. So we were I guess we could say we're, opposite sides at the same point. Looking forward to our time together, and I'll pass it on to you, Jen. Excellent. Thanks, Joe. Thank you, Marty. My name is Jen Taylor. I'm the director of solutions here at Student First. I've also been in higher education now for over twenty five years, and I started out my career as a tour guide on the school from which I graduated. So graduated on a Saturday, started giving admissions tours on Monday, and, held a bevy of positions during my time there. Leaving, I was the associate director for admissions, and then I did a bump into the world of educational technology, started doing implementations, ultimately working with solutions for folks like yourselves who are considering evaluating a new suite and are excited to show you what we have to offer you today. So we appreciate your time. Alright. It looks like I'm going to be up next, and we're gonna just start off with a few slides. I'll show a few slides, then Joe's gonna show a few slides, and then we're actually gonna get into the software. Jen will be demonstrating some really, nice features and functionality within Student First, and then I'll transition to me. And I'll be showing you some things in Financial Edge NXT. For those of you who might not be familiar with Blackbaud, this is kinda what we call, our our brag slide. There's a lot of good information, in here on awards and things that we've received. With our past clients, it looks like I'm jumping here. I'm not quite sure what happened there. Let me go back. Apologize for that. Here we go. So, we have over 40,000 clients worldwide in 60 countries, and we've been in this business for over forty years. We actually started with a software that was written for student billing specifically. Our founder responded to an ad in the paper, in New York, and that's what started Blackbaud. Not showing on this slide, we have over 65,000 users of Financial Edge NXT worldwide. So a lot of use there, a lot of experience, and, we're really helping a lot of people achieve, their missions with Financial Edge. So it's a it's a very powerful solution. And as you can see on your screen there, it's everything you need and nothing that you don't. And, again, I can personally attest to this because I use the software. I like the fact that, it can do everything from the beginning to the end of the processes that you have in your business office. We're also mobile responsive, so you're not tethered to your desktop or or your laptop. So it's a very powerful solution, and we'll show you a lot of that, as we get into it here in just a few moments. Now one of the things that really differentiates financial ed when you're talking about any other accounting platform is the fact that this is purpose built for fund accounting. And when we talked about fund accounting, we're talking about restricted, unrestricted, temporarily restricted, and things like that. And, again, for those of you who might not be familiar with Financial Edge, you might be thinking, well, I'm using QuickBooks, or I'm using Excel, or I'm using some other, competitors out there that I'm not going to name, they do not do restricted fund accounting out of the box natively. You have to bend their solutions and trick them and augment them, and there's all kinds of things that you have to do. One thing that really differentiates Financial Edge, though, is our GL account structure, and that's what you're looking at here, with the slide on the screen. So you have a segmented GL structure. You have up to 10 segments. Each segment can be up to 30 alphanumeric characters. But then beyond the actual GL account, when you're booking revenue or booking expenses, you can actually have projects. So those can be grants. Those can be projects. It's synonymous with funds, so scholarships, things along that nature. And then as you go on, you can also have transaction codes. You can also have custom fields. So when you're talking about different dimensions and different ways that you can not only, book things into the general ledger, but then also report out. This is very powerful when we're talking about getting, granular reports and the details out that you're going to need. And this is important when we're gonna be talking about student first here in just a few moments. They, Jen, specifically, are gonna show you how you can map things on the student first side. So I'm not just throwing over information into financial edge about tuition buckets. Like, this is a giant bucket of tuition. You can actually get very granular and say, these are all the different tuition buckets that we have, and we can break it down by program, even by class. And so that's how when it comes over into Financial Edge, we're able to track that. And as I'll show you in a few moments, we're able to report on that. And with that, I will turn it over to Joe. I appreciate that, Marty. Thank you so much. I get to talk about student first and maybe more importantly, this relationship that we have with Blackbaud. We we announced our formal partnership in December, and what really happened was we we at Student First as a student information system, we're looking for what is the best accounting system that will work for higher education. And, you know, where we started our search was was where we ended our search with Blackbaud because we know that, you know, with with tried and true products like Razer's Edge and Razer's Edge NXT, we knew that this was the right the right choice. So we we we we knew from a technology standpoint, from a system standpoint that that worked. But then what we really found out is that from a cultural standpoint and a mission standpoint that it really is a good home to be at. So we got together with them and and really sort of, you know, I think as the old commercial goes sort of something about two great things, better is one. And that's why we got our presentation here today. What we know in a college or a university setting is the student system sits at the center of that, universe. And with modern day computing, you can have systems that are talking to each other like Student First and Financial Edge NXT through modern APIs. So you have a connected system that you don't have to send information back over through spreadsheets and and uploads and downloads or other kinds of connections. But through true APIs that Student First and Financial Edge and XT have exposed to each other, we can share information seamlessly. Similarly, like, you might share information with your learning management system if it's well connected or other solutions like you can see up here. All of those things will play together nicely and give you a single solution, but yet meet the best needs of the registrar's office and the admissions office and meet best needs of the finance office, the student accounting office. All of those things get met together. One of the things that that people will will sometimes say to us as student first when we're talking to new schools is, well, you're you're a new you're a new company. What does that mean? And I and I quick to remind them that, sure, the the company started just a couple of years ago, but all of us that work here and all of us that are in leadership at Student First have many many many years of experience. All of us haven't have experience in other EdTech companies and more importantly you know more student information systems from other companies. So we come together with that knowledge but we come together with that experience. And I and I like this Albert Einstein quote that that we come together with is that, you know, information is is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. And and with that experience, you'll gain wisdom. So we like to believe that we've got some smart people working with us, and to really create a solution that's a disruptor in the marketplace, and to really help those schools that are struggling with some of the legacy vendors in the market. And with that quick introduction, Jen, I am going to pass the baton over to you. Excellent. Thank you so much, Joe. I appreciate that. So we're gonna come in here and just start talking a little bit about what we have going on here with Student First and what's available to you. Just some of the foundational aspects, if you will, of what you have with what we term the Student first foundations here. So the ability for you to, do dashboarding reporting, why we consider ourselves a student first focused solution here, and, of course, the integration that is available to you here with financial, Financial Aid Financial Edge. Pardon me. So alright. Let me see if I can get my, screen shared here. So give me just a moment here for us to get that on tap for you. So when we start talking about, Student First itself and can one of my colleagues please verify for me that you can see Student First in front of you here? It is looking good. Thank you so much, Joseph. I appreciate that. When you launch student first, which is the software as a service application here, so entirely entirely web based available for you from wherever you are, You're gonna be able to come in and see right away here, exactly the areas of the solution to which you have access. You can see here everything. I'm logged in as a Uber user or a super user here, so I can see all of the components that we offer, and you can, of course, take into account here all of the aspects you have within the student life cycle. And so the first thing to call your attention to here briefly, simply why we consider ourselves student first and student centric. So if you think about the relationships that you have with your students on campus, certainly, if they raise their hand and say, hey. I need some assistance, you're gonna wanna be notified of that right away here, and you're gonna wanna be able to see exactly what it is a student is reaching out for you about. So you can see here my pointer finger has changed, or say my index finger has changed to a pointer. And just like I expect this would happen, I want student first to take me directly to, the student's message to me so I can immediately see what they're asking for help with. And this is super important because if you think about the constituents who serve your students on campus, there tend to be, some of those folks who are a little technologically adverse, so to speak. And perhaps they really need to just make certain that if you see something, you can click on it and get directly to all of the information you need to see about that student. So if I wanna reach out to Wade Reed, make sure I can help him, it's gonna behoove me to come in here and look at an overview of what is going on with this record. And, conveniently, I can come in and see a synopsis here of his student profile. I can see and even get to, if I have security rights to do so, what's going on with his account transactions. And perhaps as someone who's experienced as a student adviser. I know students do tend to have questions both about their GPA and their balance. So it's very helpful that I can actually get to details from here if I need to do so. Now in keeping with the same navigational shortcut we saw before, if I wanna actually see what are the courses that comprise this 3.72 GPA, I can click on that data point and student first, again, is gonna take me directly to that area within the database. I don't have to open another screen. I don't have to do a drill drill down. I don't have to navigate to a different module. Instead, I see the data on the screen and I click on it and I get to exactly where I need to be in the solution. Now you can navigate directly from that respect. You can also if we come in here and look at everything that we have access to related to the student, I can come in here and collapse these menus so it is a little more manageable for me to see all of the things for which I have access. I can also search. So if I wanna talk to this student about their degree plan or about their registration for an upcoming term, I can come in and see the details of any of that information, including if, for instance, the student has blocked out personal time when they don't want to actually take courses. You can also simply navigate directly to where you wanna be in the menu. So a lot of ways to think about how do you want to work with your student information system and how is it that it makes sense for you in terms of navigation. Now once you have a pincher in your head of who Wade is and what it is he might like to talk to you about, you've got the ability to do what is called coming in and viewing his student portal. So what Student First allows you to do is to come in here and actually impersonate your students so that if they've got questions about anything that they are seeing on their portal, you're looking at exactly the same information that they're seeing, and therefore, you're able to give them exemplary customer service if you think about making certain they're having a great experience. So in Wade's instance, he can see here he's got a message about his new financial aid transaction. Perhaps the world of financial aid is new to him. This is an example of a workflow message that we can send out automatically based on activity that is happening on the student's account. So if he says, doctor Taylor, I'm a little confused. I don't really know what this is talking about. You're able to direct him that if he comes into his account area here, he can see any types of financial aid transactions that may exist here on his record, such as this institutional grant. And it's an opportunity to educate him about what types of financial aid information he may see. He says, I think I completed something called a FAFSA in preparation for next year's financial aid awards that I might get. You can let him know. He can always come in at any time and see the status of any upcoming aid that's being packaged here. It's a loan. He you can give him the ability to accept and decline or adjust that, and this is can include insight into his financial aid offer based on how he is being packaged if indeed there is an offer out here. There are any things that he still owes you, either from a financial aid admissions or a student record student accounts perspective, Wade's gonna be able to provide that information to you, and he's also going to be able to request documents and information from you. And this includes being able to generate documents from a self-service perspective, such as this confirmation for enrollment. Wade says, I got one last question for you. My overall GPA and my program data, what's behind this? You'll notice very helpful, Lee, in the same way you navigate student first, the student navigates his portal. So he can come in here and see exactly what those grades are that comprise his GPA and even see and generate an unofficial transcript directly from here. Because you're able to see everything you need to in one place, you're able to actually talk to Wade and, answer his questions in a very comprehensive fashion. He's gonna walk away from that conversation quite happy, and you're going to be able to go about your day with the other responsibilities that you have at your institution. Many of you, have as part of your duties the responsibility to answer questions that you get from internal institutional stakeholders and also to find out answers to the questions that you have yourselves from an operational standpoint. So Student First has got you covered for that. You can see here this my reports area in the middle of my summary screen. And just like you might expect, if you click on a slice of this pie chart, Student First is gonna come in and actually tell you, alright. The 87 students that are currently enrolled, here they are for you, and you have just generated your first report in Student First simply by interacting with the data and information that you see in front of you. If you wanna, refine these results, so maybe you wanna come in and say, okay. I only only wanna see folks with a start term of spring of twenty twenty five. You can come in and do a search, for instance, for that data element. You can make this a multi select filter if you want to. And then you'll notice, just as you're accustomed doing with many Windows based solutions, you can drag and drop and group this information if you would like to, for instance, by program. Or maybe you wanna group it first by campus and then by program. Very quick to drag and drop and change the sort order, the order of these columns here, and whether or not you're actually even seeing specific columns here on this grid report. If you're an Excel aficionado, you can take this directly to Excel and design pivot tables and manipulate further to your heart's content. Taking that data to Excel, however, is going to preserve all of the interactive formatting that you have done here while you're looking at that information in student first. So this is just one example of how we give you the power of having data and information at your fingertips. If I click on the menu items here to the left hand side, you can see more of the embedded reporting and tooling that is here. So, for example, I mentioned I grew up in enrollment management. It's always of interest to me if I have a high number of applications in progress here. That tells me there's something going wrong here in terms of moving these folks through the pop funnel. I wanna, again, come in and see for this prior term because we're in April right now. Where I worked, we had a rolling admissions deadline, meaning we took took applications throughout the year. I could come in and filter and say, who are all of these folks whose apps were in progress that left me hanging here in spring of twenty twenty five? Maybe that's not a whole lot of those. So I also wanna come in and see who those are from the full perspective. So I can come in here and add to this pool of students here. And if I want to, I can select all of these individuals because I know their automated communication streams and workflows will have been, exhausted by now, will have reached the end of that communication life cycle. I can choose to click on this little envelope here and say I'm going to do a communication here on demand because I wanna let these folks know, there is still time for them actually to get those applications complete. You can preview this email. It's contextual based on the data points that exist on the record of the individuals, and you can come in and send this and reignite that admissions process in hopes of refining these funnel numbers and, of course, ultimately, giving more students enrolled. Your enrolled students, they're gonna show up here directly underneath your student enrollment menu. Again, you can manipulate the view of information that you see. You can save views of data and share them with other users on campus. So maybe the dean always wants to know the folks who have a four point o GPA because they wanna come in here and do an ad hoc communication directly to them. You can see this also from a more corrective slash punitive viewpoint. So I can see all of my students with a two point o GPA. And in addition to communications, I can take action on this group of students so I can apply a hold to them. Can also automate that process from a workflow perspective. You might want to assign a special adviser to help them out or even create what is called a student group so we can use these these, records and additional processes throughout the database. You wanna come in and, again, group this information. Say, maybe I wanna see what this looks like from a program perspective or also based on, for instance, a campus perspective. You can group this data as you'd like to see it here, and then you can utilize this chart icon to come in here and create charts on the fly for those populations of users who serve who want to see this in a sum total from a data perspective. As you might imagine, with the student information system, in addition to the types of operational questions you're gonna wanna answer on a regular basis, you certainly are going to need to have your, your cadre of regulatory reports. So if you think about that from a clearinghouse, from an iPads, from a service perspective, as well as the ability to produce things such as your ten ninety eight t's and publish those here to the student portal. There's a built in report designer as well as ability to take any reports that we deliver for you, and put those up on a dashboard for your stakeholders to be able to consume information in that way. Last but not least, there are extensibility tool sets for you if you use things like Power BI or Tableau. Speaking of using applications outside of Student First itself, one of those is, of course, our partners at Blackbaud with their financial aid financial edge solution. Excuse me. If I come in here, for instance, and I look at Wade Reed's account balance information that we have, his transaction, student ledger, whatever it is that you wanna think of, at your institution, you'll be able to see here there are different types of charges that we have. And if I group this here from a charge perspective, you're gonna be able to manipulate this data the way you wanna view it just like you can on a master, view of your grids. Every data point within student first, it does have what we call an API or an application programming interface behind it, which means we can exchange data with anything out there, on the market that can talk to us. And, of course, Financial Edge and Raises Edge are two of those such solutions. So if we navigate to our settings area, this is where we're gonna be able to see where our integrations are housed, including that to our partner accounting solutions. And as it relates to the information that is in, your general ledger system, you're gonna be able to see for all of your student related receivables where this is mapped to your GL codes. And, of course, that's predicated on the fact that we have the general ledger, mapped to your chart of accounts here. So the great reporting that Marty is gonna show you here in just a moment is looking at this integrated tie together here to make sure we can book revenue as you need to on the finance side. The student account receivables, those are sent to your GL directly from your student's account menu here. So you can preview what that is gonna look like before you send it, and then you can come in here, view any exceptions, and see exactly what that posting detail is gonna look like when it posts that information, into finance edge Financial Edge. So from that perspective, I return here to our, to our PowerPoint that we have. You're gonna be able to come in and take care of the business that you need to, from a student first accounts receivable perspective, and then you're going to be able to take that information, thank you, directly, directly to Financial Edge NXT. All the while having that ease of reporting, that centralized student's view and those delivered interactive reports and dashboards. That, Marty, I'm gonna turn it over to you and pick up the ball from when we pass that data over to Financial Edge. Alright. All I need to do is get my screen to share, and then we're gonna be off and running with Financial Edge. So I'm gonna do my entire screen, share it, and off we go. What you're looking at right now, I'm going to take the data that Jen just shared with you that you're sending over directly from Student First over into Financial Edge into the general ledger as a journal entry. Before I get into the journal entry itself, I just wanna highlight a couple things about where data lives and what you can expect to get out of our two software platforms. On the student first side, that is your granular data at the student level. So for example, Jen was talking about a specific student. If you wanna know about balances, you wanna know about financial aid, you wanna know about payments, All the details about that student are always gonna be on the student first side. What gets sent over to financial ed, if you noticed on a couple of the last screens that Jen was on, you could actually see, the program. You could actually see the classes, things like that. So you can get that level of detail, but it won't be at the student level. So when we send tuition over from student first, it can be by accounting. It can be by business. It can be by engineering, you know, business majors, by engineering, medical, you know, nursing. Whatever those happen to be, you can break those tuition buckets down. So when it comes over to Financial Edge, if you wanna say, well, hey, Marty. I wanna know the balance on John Doe's account. I'm gonna send you back over to student first to find that. But if you wanna know how much tuition revenue have we received for the accounting program over the last semester or the last, academic year or the last calendar year, that's where I'm gonna be able to help you on the financial edge side. So what you're looking at right now, I'll draw draw your attention to the upper left hand corner. The batch that has come over from student first, it's a tuition revenue batch. And as I scroll down, we're gonna get into some of the details. Now these batches can be whatever the size is, however many transactions you're sending over on a given day, week, month, whatever frequency you are posting those, from Student First in that direct integration over. Now as Jen said, you'll notice over here on the left hand side. Typically, the ideal situation is you've got Financial Edge up and running. You've established your chart of accounts, your GL account structure. So when you do that mapping on the student first side, it's mirrored over here on the Financial Edge side. So when that tuition revenue comes over in a journal entry batch, it knows exactly what that GL account is, and it knows exactly which tuition bucket to put that into. As we scroll across, you could set it up so your journal reference is actually student first. It's going to be considered a subledger for our software. You'll also notice here in the middle of the screen now, I actually have a project or a bucket. That's synonymous with programs, and that's really important because as we're booking tuition, we can actually get specific to the program that it's in. So you might have a very detailed journal entry batch that's coming over with a breakdown of all your different tuition types and the programs that they apply to, of course, your debits and credits. And we also have the ability to do transaction codes so we can do locations. And if you are watching an astute, you pick that up, that they can capture that over on the student first side. Maybe you've got a large campus or multiple campus locations. And then you'll notice here we also have custom fields. So this is an existing batch that has come over, but what I wanna do is come out of that batch, and I'm going to show you if you are going to add a batch from scratch just to show you some of the functionality here in journal entries in financial edge. So, obviously, you're gonna name the batch, batch status, those types of things. But as we add our batch, you'll notice that the entire chart of accounts is a pick list. And I showed you this in a slide when we began the webinar, but we have a segmented chart of accounts, but you don't have to build it. So if I start typing in a revenue account, for example, you don't have to remember them all. Just type in o one, and it'll give you a pick list. Same thing is true for expense accounts. If I know that they're o five or any other thing like that, I can just type it in. So the the point here is it's simple. I don't have to build that out. As I go across, I've got standard things like post dates, encumbered or not, journal, journal reference, of course, my debits and credits. In the project column, again, think of this project slash program. For those of you on the fundraising side, it's also synonymous with funds. It's kind of an umbrella term here in Financial Edge. You'll notice that I also have a table. So you get to load these tables in Financial Edge, so you can have unlimited programs here to be receiving that data from student first. The same is true for class. We can book all of your transactions to class. So it can be restricted, unrestricted, things like that. And then as I spoke about, we've got the transaction, codes. So if I'm booking this to a specific campus location or building or something like that, I can have that in here. And then we also have unlimited custom fields. So sometimes when you think about putting data into a journal entry, you think about how many different dimensions can I do? We don't really call that that at Blackbaud, but with the custom fields, it becomes unlimited because the custom fields are unlimited themselves. Now we've been talking about programs and projects and funds. Let's look at that in a little bit more detail. So up at the top here, as Jen showed you in student first, this is how you navigate in Financial Edge. Our menu happens to be on the top. Today, it's called an omnibar. We're actually moving that to, what we call left navigation, so it's gonna look like student first. But today, it's here. Let's go into a project very quickly just to give you a feel for the information you can store and the and the detail that you can get out. So let's just say that I'm setting up a new program or project. I'm gonna go to the add button in the upper left hand corner. I can set up my own project ID, a description of what that is, what type is it. So maybe it is a specific program, and then I can even name that. What is the status? It's going to be an active program, start date, end date. For your accounting types that are in the webinar today, this is really important because I can straddle fiscal years. When we're talking about school years, that can be calendar years, semesters, things like that. So I don't have to worry about closing this out at the end of a fiscal year. I can straddle that, and then most importantly, I can report on that. I can tie this specific program to a division, department, or location. I can set up restrictions, for example, when I'm booking, revenue or expenses, I can allow with or restrict from. I can select a GL account or a range of GL accounts. I can put contacts in my records. I can put custom fields in my records. What I really like is I can also have unlimited documentation for these program records. So when we reference projects and programs, it's very, comprehensive. And if we were to go in and look at one, for example again, this is an umbrella term, so this might not be a program for engineering. This might be a scholarship that I have. Now what we'll do in the record itself is everything is organized in financial edge in nice organized tiles. We have an activity tile that is going to track all the activity coming in through the journal entries. That would be revenue, disbursements, expenses, and so forth. We can pick a fiscal year, and then you'll notice we can go into any fiscal period and see that activity that is flowing in. Within this record, we also have the ability to do budgeting. This is really powerful because it's not just a static budget. If we establish a budget for this fund or program or project, this is going to be active. So any impact happening from a revenue perspective or, an AP or disbursement perspective will impact that budget and then automatically update our reports. Now as I scroll on down, you can see that attachments tile, but a couple of other things I wanted to point out is we do offer an actions tile within each record. So, for example, if you're managing this particular project or program, I can create actions. You know, maybe we need to have an internal meeting here on campus and discuss this program. Is it profitable or not? Well, I don't know yet, Marty. Let me see the reports. Well, I'm gonna show you those reports in just a moment, but we can set up a meeting with a description. Save that. That's gonna be a constant historical memorialized record here, in that program. Underneath that, we also have a notes tile. So anything, related to this program or project, we can create notes. So no sticky notes anymore sticking all over your monitors or files all over the place. We're gonna have all of our notes and our actions captured right here in the record along with those attachments that we talked about. Incidentally, when I talk about attachments, it's any attachment type, and we could always add attachments. There's no limit. So you can go out to your desktop or a server where I have those. It could be Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG, doesn't matter. If you've already got attachments and you don't wanna rescan those, just link out to where they live, Google Docs, Dropbox, SharePoint, and we'll be able to, give you access to that. So this is what those records look like, and they're unlimited. And when you go through your implementation with Blackbaud, we're actually gonna bring all of your with Blackbaud, we're actually gonna bring all of your existing records in in this list, but then you can always add new ones as you go. Now let's talk about reporting. It's beyond the scope of this webinar today to go into all the details about the comprehensive and robust reporting available in Financial Edge. But suffice it to say, if you want it, we can build it. I like to say the only limit to our reporting is your imagination. We have lots of, templates out of the box. All the standard accounting reports that you would want to ever have are here, and then you can also build your own custom reports beyond that. Once your reports are built, they live right here in this grid view, and you can always search for reports. You can always save them in your favorites, And then this is gonna track your frequently run reports over the last thirty days, your recently run over the last thirty days, and this is sticky to your credentials. So everyone's tabs here in your organization will be sticky, to when they're logging in with their specific credentials. So building out the reports is straightforward. When you partner with Blackbaud, we've got comprehensive curriculums at Blackbaud University. We've got four specific classes on building reports. I've taken all those classes. They're wonderful classes. You're gonna be off and running. But let me give you a couple of samples of what the reports might look like. So we've been talking about the way that you can get very granular on tracking programs and classes and things like that. This is a very simple report. I can be much more detailed than this. You can have up to 30 columns in a report. You'll notice on the left hand side, I've got revenues. I've got, expenses down here, and then I've got my various different programs. So, again, I can have engineering. I can have business. I can have nursing. I can have as many things that I want, and this is the granularity that I'm going to be able to get from the student first side if I map it correctly with my GL accounts. Here's the power with this reporting. For many of our clients and prospects, before they partnered with Student First and before they partnered with Blackbaud, they were trying to manage all of this in the dark or through Excel or QuickBooks or something like that. And what I'm talking about specifically is, is that program profitable? How many students do we need to have enrolled in this program or this class, to be profitable? Are we losing money on it? In other words, can I do strategic analysis on my data? Well, for a lot of, partners out there before coming to Blackbaud or Student First, the answer to that is no. Or at the very least, it's a very manual process to do all those calculations and to be able to figure that out and to share that with the stakeholders and the decision makers. Maybe it's the deans. Maybe it's the president. Maybe it's the board. They ask the question. Your answer is I don't know. Going forward, if you partner with Student First and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, you're gonna be able to have this report at the click of a mouse button. The same thing is gonna be true, in this format. Again, revenues and expenses on the left hand side, I can break this down into operating, restricted operating. I can look at endowed funds. Anything that I wanna put in these columns, I can pull that out at the segment level of a GL account, and I said we can have up to 10 segments. If you looked at Jen's screen as she was showing you student first, there were some sample GL accounts there. They had four or five segments. Just rest assured, we can report on each and every one of those segments as well as those project and reporting codes. In addition to standard financial reports in financial edge, I showed you the access to that. We also have the ability to build dashboards. We have out of the box dashboards, and then there's dashboards that you can build yourself, what I like to call key performance indicators. And this allows you to pull in performance metrics all in the same dashboard. So for example, this is gonna show you revenue by program, expenses by program, program usage. You can build these with whatever visualizations you want. I'm showing you three different visualizations for the different areas. If you liked all bar graphs, you could do that all on all of your visualizations. Again, pull in different KPIs all on the same dashboard. As I scroll down, I've got a a tile here just on budget versus actuals. Invoices, that's another one that I can have. Program income and expense activity. I can put a income statement as a tile right within the dashboard. So I could build everything that I care about, everything that I need all in a dashboard. And when I build these dashboards, I can also share them with key stakeholders. So think about the ability to do a dashboard, for your board. So I'm getting a little bit beyond tuition right now, but let's look at one that is already built. It'll just give you another idea about the the types of things you can have on a dashboard and then the types of visualizations. So board meeting book, and don't be overwhelmed by this dashboard. I've got lots of examples in here just to get your mind thinking. So we call these scorecards, but, again, it's like a building block. And look at my visualizations again. Sometimes it's just going to be data. So revenue, fundraising efficiency, operating margin over here on the right, grant awards, budget to actual. As I scroll on down, I can break it down by department budgets, year over year spends, department spends, budget remaining. And notice as I'm showing you these, the different visualizations, this is a line graph. I got just basically tables and bar graphs. So any way that you want to build these and present the data and consume the data, you're able to do that. Again, all on the same dashboards. Now a lot of times, you wanna know how can we get data into Financial Edge. Well, we have import functionality that you can bring in templates. We also have a partnership with Microsoft. Your subscription with Financial Edge is going to come with free access to the Microsoft store in the upper right hand corner. These are add ins you can put right onto your Excel. So I can create a budget. I can create a journal entry batch. I can create a a distribution set, create statistical unit counts. So you can drop it in from an extract from any external software and put it right here into Financial Edge. That's gonna be true. If you're using this campus wide like I did, you're gonna run payroll every two weeks. So I can do a payroll extract, and I can drop it in here as a journal entry or any other things. If you're not fortunate enough to be using Raiser's Edge, our fundraising software, and you're using some other CRM, you can do a extract of all your gifts, all your revenue in your batches, drop them in here to the Excel API add in, create a journal entry batch. It actually validates the batch before it brings it in to make sure that the GL accounts are correct. Your fun buckets, your projects are all correct, and it'll bring that in. And the last thing that I wanna cover before I turn it back over to, Marybeth and Joe and Jen over, for student first, just a quick tour because I've talked a lot about what all is available in financial edge. So it's a full general ledger with budgets, with all projects. We can support grants and grant projects. We can do, investment and expense allocation. We also have a comprehensive, spend management module called, expense management. It's tied directly to your treasury. So transactions flow into here from credit cards. You can also submit expense reports. We have a fully functional accounts receivable, so you could set up clients. We also have fully functional accounts payable. In the treasury, as I mentioned a moment ago, you can link your bank accounts and credit cards, directly into Financial Edge, so all those transactions flow in here for you automatically. We also have fully functional fixed assets. This allows you to depreciate with straight line depreciation, creates the journal entry batches for you, automatically. A couple of things coming down the road is we have, artificial intelligence invoicing. So you can scan in all your invoices. It'll create the invoices for you automatically in AP. We also have payment assistant. We'll pay all your bills for you, and there's no additional cost. So I've got everything approved. It's in accounts payable. We can have payment assistant reach out to your vendors and pay them by traditional check, EFT, or a virtual card. So that's a quick overview of Financial Edge and the relationship that we have with student first. And with that, I'm going to stop sharing, and I'm going to turn it back over to Joe and Jen. Thank you, Marty. As we wrap up and before we take a look at the questions, I've got a quick poll for the audience. So let me just get that open. And that's would you like follow-up from Student First? So if you'd like them to give you a call or email you more information, let us know. Let me get that open now. You should see it in the poll section of your screen. And I'll leave that up. It looks like we had a couple questions come through, for Student First. So, Joe, Jen, if you'll join me on stage, and we can take a couple of those questions. So we had one. How hard is it to integrate our LMS with student first? So it's very straightforward. So every field in Student First has an API behind it, and we have integrated with about seven or eight different learning management systems to date. Those are bidirectional integrations, first sending the data over you need to to your LMS, and then bringing back attendance and grading, and then providing reports and actionable insights for your students on those. Awesome. Thank you. Let's see. It's another one. We may be merging with another college. How would that work with the student first? I think you're muted, Jen. Yeah. So so Standard First was designed from the, from the beginning to accommodate a multi institutional structure within your organization. So what that allows you to do is share common settings throughout the database, but then have, disparate business rules for each of your institutions. So that could be different programs of study that they offer, different courses, different academic schedules that you have, different billing rules, or what have you. So it's as simple as adding an additional institution. You don't have to license another instance of the database. You don't have to, pay for a a full blown solution as though you don't have one already in place. And the beauty of it is, Marybeth, as it relates to Financial Edge, is if you do have a different chart of accounts operating for a different institution, they can have their own COAs and mapped as they need to be from the finance or to the finance system. So great question. Great. Thank you. Okay. It looks like we've got another one about academic standing. Can you calculate SAP and academic standing differently in Studio First? You can, and that's a huge value add within the solution. So those are two separate setups and processes, and then we have default reports related to both of those things with the ability to alert folks on campus, staff who need to know about it, as well as communicate directly to students, require them and assign automatically documents they may need to submit to you, and also put them on a hold or stop, if indeed what's going on is going to prevent them from doing something such as registering. Awesome. Thank you. I think that's it on questions. I'll give one last call if anyone has a question to drop in the q and a. Also, one last call out for the poll. If you'd like more information on student first, let us know. Let's see. Questions? Nope. We're good on questions. Okay. So we'll go ahead and wrap up. A couple reminders, we are gonna send out an email where you'll have the link to the recording of today's presentation. In case you would like to revisit it on your own time or share it with any of your colleagues, we certainly encourage you to do so. You'll also have option in that email if you would like to hear more from Blackbaud or Student First, you'll be able to let us know, and we can get you connected with someone for next steps. So thank you so much for joining. We're excited to continue the conversation with you, and have a great rest of your day.