Name: When Your ERP Becomes a Bottleneck: How to Make Financial Edge NXT Truly Work for You and Your Organization
Uploaded: 2026-08-18T18:30:43.045Z
Duration: 56 min 56 s
Description: When Your ERP Becomes a Bottleneck: How to Make Financial Edge NXT Truly Work for You and Your Organization

Transcript for "When Your ERP Becomes a Bottleneck: How to Make Financial Edge NXT Truly Work for You and Your Organization": Hi, everyone, and welcome. My name is Caroline, and I'll be kicking things off today. Thank you for joining us for when your ERP becomes a bottleneck. Here's our agenda for today. I will cover some housekeeping and CPE things, and then we'll hand it over to Andrew for his presentation. And then we'll go over a quick Financial Edge NXT overview. Let's quickly cover a few housekeeping details. On the right hand side of your screen, you'll see the control panel with chat, docs, polls, and q and a. These are your tools to interact with us throughout the webinar. In the docs tab, you can download today's webinar slides, and we'll also send you an email of the webinar recording after the session. For polls, all poll questions will appear in the polls tab, which pops up in the control panel during the presentation, and each poll will stay open for a few minutes so you have time to respond. If you are looking to earn CPE credit, responding to polls is required, and the polls tab will disappear once the polls close. For chat and q and a, feel free to chat with us and other attendees during the webinar. If you have questions, submit them in the q and a box in your control panel, and we'll answer as many as we can during the session and at the end. And then for streaming issues, if you do have any problems, try refreshing your browser, and this usually resolves the issue quickly. If you are a current customer and have a question about your software, we recommend using the chat or calling the support number provided here. And then just to go over, CPE credit is available for this session. You must answer all three poll questions to receive CPE credit. Certificates will be sent out within two weeks of the webinar over email. And if you have any questions or issues, please reply to the email or contact here. Just to introduce everyone behind the scenes, we have Andrew who will be putting on today's webinar, and he will go over more about himself on the next slide. We have Cindy from Blackbaud who is our financial solutions expert, and we'll be sharing more about the connection between today's webinar topic to financial eds and XT at the end of the presentation. A little more about me, I am a growth marketer here at Blackbaud, and I've been at the company for a little over four years. And then we also have Rachel here from Blackbaud. She's a principal growth marketer and has been on the team for almost ten years. Awesome. And with that, let's get started. I'm excited to hand things over to Andrew. Hello, and thank you, Caroline, for that introduction. I'm happy to be with all of you here today. So thank you for joining us. So today, we're gonna talk about kind of, in the past, we talked about how to kinda reclaim our day, how to work together as a team. And we're really gonna talk today how accounting systems and processes, can become a bottleneck and really be prohibitive of what you're trying to do in your accounting or finance department. Just up top. So some of this is gonna be very black box specific, financial ad specific, but I know not all of you are on financial ad, so I will try to keep some of it general. Another thing I wanted to mention before I get into myself. So when I say ERP, I do talk about systems and I do mostly mean your accounting system. However, in my mind and the work I do, that always goes hand in hand with your processes because you can have the best system. But if you're still doing everything entering by hand or doing everything in Excel, it doesn't matter. So a lot of this is gonna be both process and system based and see how you can really unlock that, potential. So a little about me. So I'm Andrew Harrow. I'm a CPA. I am, located in, Queens, New York today. So I'm the director of finance at Fifth Avenue Committee, which is a Brooklyn based community development nonprofit and a property manager. I'm also the founder of partner Innovate for Good, which is really the goal is to help nonprofits either unlock efficiencies with the system and processes they have or help them through that change management part. Just my background, I've been in the accounting space for fifteen plus years and every day that number grows. So I've been in audit, tax, industry, consulting. So I've kinda seen it all and use that to help not only myself and my clients. And you can see here my two real bosses, my four year old and my one month my one year old as of next week. So they're the real bosses of life. So what are we gonna talk about today? We're gonna try to name the bottleneck of where your problem starts. So some of this will be general. Some of this will be try to get you thinking about it. I always try to make sure that you come away with this webinar for something. It's so easy after listening to somebody talk for an hour to open up your email since you hopefully have a close right now and realize how much you've missed. So try to give you some time to really get that brain the brain juices flowing so you can really think about it. And thinking about how we can separate what are organizational limitations, what are financial limitations, what are time limitations versus what are gaps in our setup. And trying to separate what we think of those blockers, What really are blockers and what are things that we adjust are kind of causing for ourselves? And then try to think of, okay. We've identified some problems. What are some fast wins we can do in the next week to start to take down these walls, take down these blockers? And really thinking about, like, doing the ERP, the goal isn't to take back everything. The goal isn't to become an admin. The goal isn't to become a bottleneck. The goal is how can we save either yourself, the CFO, yourself, the controller, yourself, the staff accountant. How can you save yourself time? How can you get back to doing things that are really gonna further the mission of your nonprofit? So thinking about the accounting bottleneck. Before we get to that, we're gonna launch our first poll question, and I now realize there's a typo. I apologize. When was your last close? Oh, what ate your last close? No. That's correct. Sorry. My son is sick. It's been a week. What ate your last close? So what took the most time away from you during your close? So that so if you look on the right where the chat is, there'll be a poll tab, so that's where you're gonna answer the poll question for CPE. So I'll give you a minute to respond. So thinking about that accounting bottleneck, so it's the second week of the month. So if you are lucky enough to close the first week, I wanna talk to you and see how you got there, how you got the funds to have the staff to do that, what you're doing to close that first week to really understand how you're getting there. But most of us cannot close within a week or we'll close. So think about the second week of the month. You have to get your board packet ready if you have to do one monthly or for an executive director. You need grant reports done. Every month, there's something new. Every quarter, there's something new. Somebody wants them different. You know what? Your program director needs those budget actuals so they can decide whether or not they have to hire or fire somebody or they can expand the program. And that's not even counting what you would have to do as a CFO, which is, hey. Let's look at cash flow. What is our funding strategy over the next five years? What is what should I be thinking about as a CFO that no one else is thinking about? I was just on a call before I got on this webinar, and it was with two program people. And they were talking about their specific program budget, and they were talking about how they need to make they're trying to expand to another site. So they have it in their budget for an expansion. I think it's about $200 to put a deposit down on a location. And that and I said that's great in your budget, but I need a timing so that we can prepare cash flow to have it. Just because it's in your budget, that might not mean our revenues line up with our expenses. And this is one of those things that a controller or a CFO, they're probably gonna be the only person thinking about the organization as a whole. Everybody else is gonna be thinking about their individual piece. And going back to the bottleneck, if you don't have time to really put it all together, you're not gonna be able to see the forest through the trees and and figure out how to do it. So that's really the risk that comes with these types of things when I talk about this bottleneck and this slowdown. It's really what is going on that's slowing everything down that's gonna take away from that work that's really gonna allow your organization to do what it do does best and thrive. And I think for a lot of this, it hits a lot harder for nonprofits that, a, there are usually either the same or more complexity when it comes to for profit. There's different complexity. For profit, it's a lot of revenue recognition and tax positions and saving owners money. We're a nonprofit that's more funded by those grant funders, those government funders. What do we have to do to get the money and keep the money? And thinking about I think with nonprofits, you end up with less staff. You end up with less systems in place. I I when I was in consulting, I would always envy my for profit colleagues because they would always just say to their clients, oh, just choose the best system. Like, this is the most expensive one. Choose it. It's gonna give you what you need. Nonprofits don't have that ability. We don't have unlimited budgets. We have to work within very tight, walls and with staffing. It's very hard to look a nonprofit management team in the eye and say, you know what? We can expand this program, but you know what? I really need is two staff accountants. It's just not a conversation that anybody wants to have Let alone when you come to the intricacies when it comes to fund accounting. Every dollar that comes in the door for a nonprofit needs to be examined. Is it restricted? Is it for a specific purpose? Is it something that we have to wait? Is it a contract or is it a fee for service? Is it something that has to be put in a separate bank account? How do we have to monitor the outflows related to this money? And where this gets complicated is everybody on this call, I'm sure, knows is one program can have six different sources of funding that requires six different reporting requirements. And I talked to a lot of nonprofits that are trying to build their system going back to ERP, So they're building their financial edge and thinking about what their account string will be. And it always comes down to 95% of our funders need x, but that one funder who we report on once a year needs y. And the question comes down to how much of a bottleneck is that for you, that one funder? Do we have to design our system around that one funder? What's the timing that they save? Usually, you're gonna have a small team. Corporate teams, they have treasury, FP and A, grants, and reporting. Most nonprofits that those four things are done by a CFO or a controller, where there's usually four individual peoples with their own department. And I think where this bottlenecking and systems not set up right comes into play is a CFO or director of finance really becomes both that strategic mind, but also an air traffic controller. Making things are moving. Making sure the balls are moving. If you are lucky enough and you're a CFO on this call and have a strong controller who can do that kind of, traffic direction, that's gonna free up your time. That's gonna lessen some of this. And thinking about nonprofits have a lot more stakeholders to report to. If you're a for profit company, you're pretty much answering to the owner. That's that's the person who's gonna matter. But the nonprofit's gonna be funder. It's gonna be board. It's gonna be an executive director. It's gonna be your program directors. And in some cases, it's gonna be fundraising depending on how your organization's structured. So thinking about how to report on all these different things in so many different ways just becomes I mean, it makes me shake sometimes when I think about all the different reporting requirements that come into my organization and all my clients' organizations. So that kinda brings us I think sometimes we get lost in trying to solve every funder's reporting needs with our basic structure, which become means it's too detailed or it's too cumbersome. I've seen both sides. We've designed our system for our most detailed funder that we have to report on once a year, and which means every entry needs a mass amount of details. Our payroll entry is split 16 different ways. Or and I talked to somebody yesterday that had this problem. Their GL was designed for no reporting. That every piece of reporting they do, they're dissecting the general ledger. So come budget to actual, somebody's going line by line to that general ledger and categorizing expenses outside of the system. That essentially their accounting system is what you if you're old enough to remember this, it's an old school green sheet. It's just the cash the cash transactions, everything else is done in Excel. And they're paying for a system that they're just not using. And it's really just that goes back to they've designed the process very poorly. And I think it's not just NXT. I think this is most softwares, but especially nonprofits because NXT is designed specifically for nonprofits and that's fund accounting, that if you're having a bottleneck and you're closed and something's not working, it's more than likely gonna be, a, it was not set up correctly or it's a workflow or process design. And I think I was also a victim of this early in my career that if something wasn't working, it was the software's fault and not my fault because how could I be wrong? It's it's a software. But I think a lot of now that I work a lot more with nonprofits, I've been in the field for almost my whole career. I understand that, like, getting a new software isn't always an option. That just because it was implemented badly, we can't just throw it out. So how can we work to make this better? How can we think about this bottleneck to make it better? So then thinking about what are my so I'm sitting there. I'm I've listened to me talk. I've listened about this bottleneck. And how do I know something is a bottleneck that we can fix as opposed to something, you know what, this is just there's always going to be that one exception to the rule and I deal with this a lot when clients are going through system of selection or system implementation that you're not always gonna be able to solve every single problem you have. But what you should be able to do is be able to do 95 to 99% of your reporting out of the system. If you have that one funder that just demands something that is so different and you know what? This funder gives us 30% of our revenue, but you know what? We have to report once a year, so we just know this is going to be we're gonna have the process mapped out. And we know going into it, this process is going to be separate, but everything else is gonna come to the system. That's not necessarily a bad thing. We try to avoid it, but it's gonna happen, especially at nonprofit. So thinking about how we can fix the get the 95% into the system as opposed to these rare exceptions. So, let's see what what think about these things as we go through them. And some of them are are NXT specific, but think about your system in general too. So you have to print financials for your board. Are you printing them from the system, or are you putting them in Excel, doing some major manipulation, and then sending them all? And I'm not talking about a little formatting. I I've worked with I my last nonprofit I work profit I worked at, our system produced negative numbers as red, and we couldn't change that. We also had a board member that contributed a million dollars annually that hated the color red from her private school days, because everything was a red pen on her essays. So she didn't like the color red. So every report we would have to put into Excel to change the color of negative numbers for this one board member who was very generous. But that wasn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about are you doing major manipulation to your reports that you need a crosswalk to what you did? Is every journal entry sitting with one person for review? And does that become a bottleneck? I was talking with an organization yesterday that they have a culture that journal entries only happen at month close. If they identify a error on the set like, they identified an error in July today, The staff accountant would not book that until they close August, and it's just the culture they have there. But what that does is all those journal entries funnel up to one person, which means he is reviewing 25 journal entries in one day. And I don't care how good you are. By the time you hit number 17, you're not doing as good of a review as you did on number one. So thinking about, does every entry need to be reviewed? I I go back to an organization I work with that they had they were recording all their deposits as journal entries. That's just the way they did it. Couldn't get them to use a deposit feature in their accounting system. But then they have the controller going line by line during a bank rec and reviewing all the deposits and all the coding. So I asked, why do you need to review the journal entries if you're reviewing at the bank rec level and doing the same review? One of these you can get rid of. End up getting rid of the journal entry review on revenue and just doing it at the bank rec level. But thinking about is there is there a way to make this easier? Is there a way is there a minimum threshold we can put on journal entries that need to be reviewed? Is there a type of journal entry? Is there a person that puts them in? Can we review them at a global level? Thinking about that. Can your program directors get budget to actuals by themselves? One of the really nice things about FE NXT is you can just keep adding view only users. A lot of other softwares, you have to pay for that. So can have you set it up that they can go in, open their own reports, and drill down? Can they do that? How long does your close take, and what are you actually doing? I was I was talking with another client last week, and the biggest struggle they have with their close is coming from their fundraising system. It produces a journal entry, but then that is hand keyed into their accounting system. And it's not even manipulations happening. It's just that they are not using the journal entry import. It's something as simple as that, that they are hand keying in 500 line journal entries, which as soon as you do that, you're opening yourself up to even more error. But that was taken an entire day. The other example I give there is when I started in my nonprofit, I had a staff accountant, and she handled my payroll journal entry. And I asked her, how do you do payroll? She goes, I have a spreadsheet. We download AP. I put it in the spreadsheet, and then I put it in the accounting system. Great. I'm I'm a tech savvy guy, so I thought, okay. She imports it into an Excel, does some formula manipulation to get it into the format that our accounting system at the time needed, and she imported it. A year later and I did not I made the mistake of not asking for more information. A year later, she decided to leave, so I was I was like, I need to sit down and see how you do entry. I need to understand your formulas in your spreadsheet. Turns out she was taking the ADP report, hand keying it into Excel, and then hand keying what Excel produced into the accounting system. And I then understood why it took her an entire day to do one payroll, but it was one of those things that that was a process and a spreadsheet limitation. And I just accepted that she had a spreadsheet. When you have funder reports, are those canned? Are you using what you did last year? Are you starting everyone from scratch? And I think when you're thinking about designing systems and processes, think about your common reports. What are people asking you for? And if you've looked in any of my my other webinars, it's bringing that development team and bringing that contract team and what do you guys need. And then thinking about those fund allocations, those grant allocations, is your fund allocations, are they being kept in Excel? Do you have one fund in your accounting system and then a spreadsheet with 30 funds? When you do grant allocations, how are you doing them? Are you using an allocation module in your system, or are you doing those by hand? And it always comes up. I love Excel as much as the next person, but as soon as you excel as the backbone for everything you're doing, you're opening yourself up to potential error. Mhmm. So just some things to keep in mind. Alright. Do any of these hit home? Are you thinking, you know what? That sounds familiar. I think the biggest one I see at nonprofits is the rekeying of the same entry in multiple systems and then the overreconciliation. I'm always surprised that most nonprofits, they overreconcile certain things and then never look at others. And it's just kind of this is what we're focused on. We're not focused on that. Another example I give, I worked with a client. They were very hyper focused on their bank rec every month, but didn't book anything outside of cash until year end. So it was interesting because when I started working with them, we kinda tweaked that. And I looked back at all their funder, like, their headquarter their corporate financial statements that they sent to funders. All year, they showed a loss because they were heavily government funded, which all that funding was delayed. And then all of a sudden, at the end of the year, they booked, like, $8,000,000 in revenue because it hadn't come in yet. And it was just it was so skewed to what they were doing because it was all kind of fee for service, contract revenue. They were performing the services. It should have been booked all year, and it was just throwing off funder reports. And I'm sure in the past, there were there were opportunity that they didn't get because they'd be showing a $2,000,000 loss in April. Get the May financials, you now have a $6,000,000 gain. And it was just throwing it off. So thinking about how we can make things better. So how many of those things kind of triggered your brain and gave you that little that little noise in the back of your head, the little beeping? I don't know how everybody's brain works. Mine's mine's a little siren that goes off when things start going wrong. So I think if you have zero to one, it's kind of a fine tuning. You're probably just here for the CPE or to get some tips and tricks, but nothing's really long. Two to three, I call that probably some workflow friction. You probably have some bottlenecks. You probably have some historical templates that are doing the bulk of the work. Things work. I would always call the two to three. I always describe that as most nonprofits, and I always describe it as a slow moving ship. It always gets to where it needs to go. You're always gonna get those funder reports out. You're always gonna get the audit. But if you've ever seen a movie like Titanic, there are people in the engine room pumping the coal into those engines. And there's a lot of human capital that's going in to that workflow friction to really make it work. And if four to six of those really triggered your brain, I think you have a shadow system risk, which means if your accounting system died today, you really wouldn't lose that much because it's all being kept in Excel. If your SharePoint or your Google Drive crashed, then all would be over. So really thinking about is Excel or hopefully not paper files handling your workload. So that brings us to the, second poll question, which will be launched. When someone says f e n x t or your or insert your own accounting system, can't do that, what's usually behind it? Is it a have you found it's a true system limitation, a setup gap, a workflow that was never redesigned? Not sure because I don't know enough. And I run to a lot of CFOs who are newer and inherited in a system, and it comes out to be d and ends up being b. But they don't know, and they're just being told by the staff it doesn't work like that. And a lot of times, the other thing I see and to be cautious with as we talk about this is if it's a setup or a configuration gap, be weary of quick fixes. That there are so many as you get into these accounting systems, thinking about Financial Edge and all the things they can do, there's so many interconnected pieces that just because you are fixing what you think is a little gap, it might end up breaking something else. So I always say if you're gonna make a change to your configuration, talk to your account rep, talk to your support, talk to somebody knowledgeable of the system. You can talk to me. But just make sure that, like, what you think is a little fixed isn't going to cause a cascading effect. Leave that poll open. So that kind of brings us here. So we've thought about where our problems are, and I think this is the key part of what to think about. Is it a limitation of the system? Because every system does some things really well. And it's clear always when you open a system where the developers has spent their time and resources. And every system doesn't do a few things well. And it's there's there's always a give or take. No no one's fully staffed. No one's able to fix every problem. So thinking about when you have a problem, is it really what we are doing or what the system is designed to do? And so really think about what is the difference between these things. So limitation, what can your software not do, or what can it not do without creating a risk or a potential area for fraud. The the example I give is the system I was I was talking with a client who uses the system. They have multiple entities set up. And for one of the entities, they have their own executive director. And that exec director, along with their their CFO, signs all the checks. And they kinda have their own accounting team. They do their own thing. It just all runs through one common CFO. And the executive director had asked, can we load the CFO signature in because sometimes they're harder to find because they don't do as much work for us? And the problem with that was to load that in, the system could do it, but then it would be available for all the entities based off the software they were using. So it's not that the system couldn't do it. It just posed a risk because there were no real controls because for that organization, the executive director was a second signer. For another organization, there was only one signature required on a check. So the accounts payable person, in theory, for the smaller organization could have written a check and passed it through without anybody knowing. So thinking about just because the system can do it doesn't necessarily mean the system should do it. And where are the where do the risk lie? On the other end is a configuration gap. And thinking about I've seen too many nonprofit at some point, usually between the years of 2020 and 2022. Made the switch to an online platform because of COVID. Everybody's remote. We couldn't keep in touch with the old server based products and didn't really think through that implementation of that integration. And they're left with either a chart of accounts that's not optimized for their new system or workflows that are really based in an old chart of accounts and old processing way and not taking advantage of what modern systems can do. I wouldn't say automatically, but efficiently. Or where are their permissions? Sometimes setting up permissions can be such a bear because you're taking away things from people, and you have to make sure all the right boxes are checked. And not just financial, it's just all the accounting systems out there. They're so hyper specific when you are setting up permissions that to truly configure them takes a lot of time, will take a lot of tinkering to get it right. And then thinking about workflows and how you get system information from the system into the system. So thinking about, is it just that we're not able to get the information into or out of the system correctly, or is it the system can't do that? And a great way and I'll get into a little later, and I always say this, and I'm gonna hammer this home. A great way to know if that's true, and I see some questions about account executive, ask your account executive to just give you a demo like you're a brand new customer because they're always putting new features into your accounting system. Find out who your salesperson is. Stand out who if you're in Blackbaud customer, find out who your executive is and ask for a demo. See what the system should be doing, how it should be operating. And then you'll know, okay. Are my problems my problems or Blackbaud's problems? Who who do I get the yell at? Do I get the yell in the mirror, or do I get the yell at Andrew next time he's on a webinar? So thinking about a few common things I see and really how it can be a configuration question. I'm always told, you know what? We can't track this grant in the system. I always go back. Are you using your project and grant feature? Are you using your attributes and restrictions and reporting cadence? Like, did you think about okay. Who do we who who do we have definite reporting to and when? How can we go about doing this and thinking about this? Sometimes it's just not something you thought about during setup. And that goes back to as you're thinking about fixing some of these things, make sure you're bringing in those development teams, those contract teams. What do they need to report? How can you give them a nice it's a nice report from the financial system that they can then go put into that government template or that government website and make it easier? You know what? Our approval system just doesn't work. Everything gets stuck by a bottleneck or we just turned off approvals and we'll just do everything in Excel. Or the other thing I see is a lot of nonprofits, they're just like, we'll we'll put everything in draft. We'll run reports with unposted transactions, do all our reconciliations, then post everything at once. And so for that, I would say, hey. Your approvals don't work. Let's think about changing it. Let's think about routing rules. Think about who should be approving. And I always say, get journal entries through. Have them be approved. Get them in the system. If you need to correct something, go back and do a correcting journal entry. An auditor does not care if you correct something. What they care about is that it's right at year end. An auditor does not wanna find a finding. They're not going to judge you if there's a lot of correcting journal entries because you know what? You're getting it right, and you're trying to get things out. I always say that accounting is this push pull between time timeliness and accuracy. And really trying to find that balance. Sometimes you're gonna have to correct things or you're gonna be waiting thirty two business days to get out month end and another month has passed and it's worthless. Another complaint I hear all the time is the reporting in the system is too rigid. Okay. Is it really too rigid? Which some systems it is. Some systems it's not as configurable or or, tolerable. But did you have you set up your dimensions the right way? Have you set up your account string the right way? Are you using project codes in a way that you can really slice and dice your information? Thinking about if you have to do a lot of reporting where you are going line by line in the general ledger, 99 times out of a 100, that is a configuration issue. You do not have the right segmentation in your account strength. Last piece, allocations take forever. So how are you doing allocations? Does your system have an allocation module that you just haven't looked into? And is it sometimes allocations are I've seen nonprofits keep that in Excel because it's the way they've always done it, it makes them feel good, but it takes time. And Excel is always gonna break at one point or another. And how can we get this in the system and have the system do it? Because you know what the system does? The system creates a backup. The system creates its own audit trail. The systems can't go into that Excel three months later and accidentally change a number. So when you send it to the auditors, nothing ties. That's really what you're gonna get out of a system. And thinking about changes and getting into that new ERP or fixing your ERP, it really does come down to system and process going hand in hand. It and I I think this is true. A new tool running the old process that produces the same bottleneck, it just produces it faster. You're just gonna get to the the same inflection point faster. I was talking about another client example I have is they use their CRM produces a report, and they're they're a large foundation. Their CRM produces a report. And right now, what happens is they spend three days hand adjusting the journal entry that comes out of their CRM to put into their financial system. And part of what I've been brought in to do is document their processes, but we're also their system's being sunsetted, so they need a new system. And one of the things we were talking about is there are things they need to change out of the CRM that they don't think they can change because this the the CRM is run by the fundraising department. They need the information the way they want it. They're not gonna key in anything else. They raise a lot of money, so it's kind of like an a deal breaker. They're they're never gonna get what they get. So thinking about designing the systems and doing things in a certain way, thinking about it, can we use a an intermediary system that can slice and dice the data automatically that's not Excel? That think about how we move from one system to another, how our data moves. That if we move into a new system but don't think about how our data is gonna be connected, we're gonna still have the same bottleneck. We're still gonna have the same three days where this one person can't call out sick, can't go on vacation, can barely go to the bathroom because everything has to be done. So thinking about how we're gonna design this process, knowing what our true limitations are versus what we wanna configure. So thinking about we thought about what bottlenecks could be, whether or not they are true limitations or identifying what might be a configuration thing. And now we're gonna talk about where these these bottlenecks really end up I see them most. Like I said, the biggest one I'll see is data entry and reconciliation. Being the bridge between systems that a CFO always ends up being the person that's going between systems, making sure everything ties back, making sure that because I think the biggest thing that that happens is they're the ones that are sitting in that board meeting when development presents one number, fiscal presents one number, and programs for that's a different number. So they end up being that that transition. So how can we automate the data between our systems? Approval chains. Does everything flow up to one person? Now I understand if you are a team of one, a team of two, this is you're gonna roll your eyes as I'm talking because you don't have this type of ability to have an actual approval chain. That there's one person to do, and that's all we can do. But thinking about if everything waits for one person, is there a way to get around that? Is there a way to move stuff around and do it? Is there a way to have if you have a staff account, a senior account, a staff or a controller, is there a way to have controller or the senior account review some of that lower level work and you're reviewing at a high level. And really thinking about how do we do our reporting. And this this is a big one that I hear a lot when I talk about, okay, we're gonna get standard reporting. A lot of I hear a lot from program team. Can we either get new systems or we change reports? It looks different. I had an executive director call me up, and he hated the new reporting his system sent him. And I said, Bob, your old report took your controller six hours to put together. So we closed, and then they would spend six hours manipulating Excel, checking, rechecking. They had to make an adjustment. They'd have to make a journal entry, reexport, and take it over, and then send it to you. This report was printed from the system the minute we closed. So, yes, it looks a little different, but I'm saving you six hours a month. He immediately did not have a problem with the look of the report. So thinking about people don't like change, especially to reporting, especially program people, and this is usually where it's gonna take some time, you as the accounting person changing it to explain. You're still getting the same information. It just looks a little different. It might not be as fancy, especially when you're putting things into an Excel. You can do a lot more formatting. But you know what? It's gonna be a lot quicker, and I'm gonna be able to drill down on things faster. It's gonna have a lot less data or a lot less data errors. So thinking about how you can really rebuild if you're building things from scratch or doing things in Excel, how can you put it into the system and mirror what you're doing today? It's not gonna look exactly it's not gonna be exactly the same. But what do you have to change to really get that reporting in a timely manner? Alright. So we wanna change data entry and reconciliation. I always call this it's a low judgment work, and I always say, you heard me talk. Every problem in an accounting department, it's either people, process, or systems. I have never met an overstaffed accounting department in a nonprofit. If you have one, please talk to me. I wanna hear how you got the budget. So it always comes down to process assistance. So which means I wanna put these people to their highest and best use. Give them interesting work. So thinking about using Blackbaud as an example, using your accounting system as an example. Can we have bank feeds come in? Can we automatically start reconciling items that line up, creating rules, bay clearing checks so that it will come in month end? We're just looking at the exceptions. Do we have reoccurring are we doing the same journal entries over and over, especially for things like prepaid or accruals? Can we make those actual reoccurring entries in the system? Yes. Things are gonna change. Things are gonna happen, but can we actually set those up to become reoccurring? Do we have rule based allocations? If we're allocating you know what? Most of our payroll personnel most of our personnel come out of the payroll system tied to their departments. But you know what? Our executive team or some of our program staff really they get allocated more thoroughly. So how can we go about allocating based off these rules and get those in the system? And you know what? I I hear a lot of people, but it might not do it right. You're gonna have to review everything that you set up automatically, but it's always easier to review than doing it from scratch. And how can you make these reconciliations standard? How can you standardize? I always say, if you're thinking about how do I make a standard reconciliation, look at what you send to your auditors at year end. How can you do that monthly? What do you have to lose, or what do you have to gain in your monthly process to really produce year end reconciliations monthly or quarterly? And think about what you should be doing monthly, quarterly, or annually. Because if you can do everything on a monthly basis, come year end, you're done. Your audit's ready when you close your last month. And really think about those people you're paying in your accounting or finance department. How much are they copying and pasting from one spreadsheet to another? Because that is not a valuable use of time. I was talking to somebody the other day and they said they were doing a job rotation, so they were all examining what everybody else is doing as part of a bigger project. And somebody says to them, 95% of your job is copying, pasting from one spreadsheet to the other and then reconciling it. And this person said to me, it was depressing to hear, but also, like, gratifying. So it was interesting. So thinking about approval chains, I think it's letting go of some control as a CFO and really allowing your team to do what they do best. And I know what you're thinking. They're like, people are gonna get stuff wrong and being okay with that. And just knowing I in my last nonprofit, I had worked with the same staff for three years. I knew exactly where the mistake they were gonna make would be, and we had we had control set up. We had when I would go through month end, I would look at budget to actuals. We would reconcile all the balance sheets. Like, we would look at everything very detailed at month end, but that's because we weren't doing all this data entry at month end. We would have our books closed the third business day because we had just decided certain things. We're making an estimate. And we would we then had three days to actually review everything. So thinking about how can you reduce that oversight to get the information into the system so that you can review it at a higher level. And where is your threshold for an error? Because errors are gonna happen. And even if you review every number, every journal entry, every deposit, you're not gonna catch things. I I go back to one of the nonprofits I worked with is in microfinance. So there was an average loan size of $3,000, weekly repayment on a twenty six week loan cycle, and we had a portfolio of 70,000,000, if you could just figure the volume. My I had a staff account, and she was just in charge of bank recs for our branches because there was so much cash moving. And I eventually had to say to her, I I want you to tie out the bank recs to zero. But I personally, as the controller, do not care about anything under $500. And I had I eventually had to raise that because because she would come to me with, like, 11¢ difference and things like that, and it's just like, I didn't have the time for that. She would document it. We would look at it at the end of the month. But when I first started, she would come to me with everything. We have to have our process. We we can't get bogged down in these bottlenecks for little things. Yes. They matter, especially when tying out cash. I wanna know where every dollar went, but we have to do it in an efficient manner. So thinking about reporting and how to do a better oh, let's let's go to the third poll question just as we as we hit. Make sure we get it for time. So thinking about quick wins, which one would create the most room for strategy? And thinking about reporting, it really comes back to coming up with that reporting list of things you need every month. What do you who do you report to? Do you report to your executive director, your board, your program team, any funders? Okay. Now what are the funders that take so much time to do? And who are our reoccurring funders? Who are the ones that always give us money? Don't design your system for a one off grant you got. Do you get federal, state, or local funds that you're gonna need to report separately? Really designing your system around your known reports is gonna make it easier. And like I go back to, there's always gonna be that one exception. But design your fund structure, design your account strength to be able to pull what you need. Do you think about what lines are on your general reports that you do in terms of expenses. How is the best to do it? How do you need salary detail by person, or do you need it by just a salary line by position or department? How what kind of detail do you want in your accounting system, or do you wanna rely on your HR system? Thinking about and I think another thing to come back to is thinking about all these questions I'm asking. When when we talk about ERP, we can also talk about the ERP environment. So if we know we're gonna reconcile payroll from our payroll provider to our accounting system, I don't necessarily need that detail as long as the people who need it have access to that detail. So thinking about how can we get some quick wins? What's hiding in our current setup? What can I automate? Thinking about what journal entries we make every month. Are any of those very similar and can be set up as recurring? Thinking about prepaid, thinking about depreciation, thinking about, some government funds that we recognize. What can you automate? Or the other thing, could you put bank feeds into the system? Can you connect your bank? And not all banks you can, and that can be a little bit of a downer. But can you connect your bank feeds to your system? So come reconciliation time, it's gonna pick off some low hanging fruit and automate. Think of what you do at month end. What can you delegate? If you have somebody to delegate to, and I'm I apologize if you don't and you're rolling your eyes at me again. But if you do have somebody to delegate to, what have you been holding on to? I always say one of the hardest job changes in the accounting world is from controller to CFO because controllers will not give up some of the duties they had because most controllers do that one thing and it makes them feel good. I get to enter something. And but think of how you can delegate that. How can you show somebody else? How can you give it to somebody else? Because then you're reviewing that instead of doing it. And this is a word I made up for this webinar, templatize. How can you get report templates that are standard? How can you bring everybody together and people are gonna complain, people are gonna moan, they're gonna not look at things up for a little bit, but how can you get everything to the same place so that it connects? So thinking about like I said, I want everybody to take something away from today. So can you give yourself a thirty day action plan? And I I I this is where I started, and this is where I would start. What is one painful report you have to do or reconciliation that you have to do? Now put that down. Let's map out where the information is coming from, where the blockers are, who approves it, where does it have to go, what spreadsheets are used. Think about how much of so once you have it mapped out, think about what you think should be coming from your accounting system. How much of that work isn't being done in the system? Are we doing allocations outside of the system? Well, you know, we can make a journal entry in the system and then it looks there. And then once you have a process you like, configure the system and map out ownership. And I'd say one of the easier ways to do this, which I think AI has been helpful for nonprofits where we're short staffed because traditionally, when I thought about doing this, mapping out the process was always the thing I just don't have time for. I can sit and explain a process to somebody, but I don't have time to map it out. Like, I don't I can't sit there with Excel or a chart reader and actually map out my process. But what you can do today, open up Teams, open up Zoom, talk record the meeting and just talk about the process, talk through it, screen share, and then take your AI of choice, plug that recording in, and ask for a first draft of process flow. That's a great place to start this whole exercise. And, a, now you have documentation of the process that you didn't have before, but, b, you also now have something you can review, you can tweak, and you can insert the things that are missing and share with people. And I think thinking about how we can get away from translating data from spreadsheet to spreadsheet to system to person, it really opens up that hour for strategy to think about things like cash flow for a five year plan for are there any areas within the organization that really need that TLC? So go back to just start with one thing. Think about your monthly close. Think about what is the biggest bottleneck, and is there a way to fix it? If it's your credit cards, how are you doing today? Is it worth the investment in a system where you can automate that type of stuff? Is it your is it your, CRM data coming in? Is it something you can tweak on the CRM side, or do you need to think about how are our spreadsheet designed? Do we need somebody who can design some macros as a short fix? And thinking about, does that data really need to be segmented if it's coming from the CRM where all the detail lives? Can we get a report come audit time that ties back? So I'm gonna turn it over to wrap it up just to my friends at Blackbaud. We'll pop on here. I thank you, and then, we will wrap up. So while we wait for them I thank you very much for your time. Hopefully you've taken something away, and we'll be able to help you move forward. There's Cindy. Just before Cindy comes on my little pitch, so Finiti for Good, the goal is to really get nonprofits to the place where you're using your system and processes efficiently. The goal is always to have a margarita at 3PM on a Friday or a margarita if that's your your goal so to help you. More than happy to talk to anyone. Feel free to reach out. I think there'll be a poll question with my to to for me to follow-up or you can find me on my website. I'll talk to anybody. I I like it and hopefully I see some of you at BBCON this year. But Cindy, just to wrap up. Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much. That was so much great information, and I was reliving all the stories that I've gathered throughout the years working at nonprofits as you were speaking. I was following along in the chat as well, and there are a lot of really great themes that are happening. And, you know, a lot comes down to configuration and, with not just chart of accounts and accounting strings and how do we track different pieces and reporting and expense management. Definitely, reach out, to us and AE. So maybe there's some help that we can provide with consulting services of making sure that we're setting up, or you're getting those approvals set up, appropriately. I saw some pieces in the chat about approvals. Make sure there's more than one approver. Make sure they're getting pinged, in the ways that make sense for them. If it's the every time they log in on FBNXT, they see that they have certain invoices they need to approve so we can get a payment out or, they're receiving an email. Maybe that's a better form of communication. But these are things that we can get set up in epiNxt. Other things reporting, yet I remember back in the day having a bit of struggles of trying to figure out how to get all these reports that I want exactly to be the way that I want them to be, especially since development wants their numbers and finance wants their numbers when presenting at the board. That's a really great opportunity, because once you put the time in and you get them set up, they're really ready to go, and you won't have to do a lot of work beyond that. As we all know, Excel sheets can be a little tricky. Having lived in Excel sheets for many, many years, having other people in them that can go corrupt, not having that audit trail of, someone who creates and someone who approves. So that's definitely a piece there. That's that's all fits into that accountability and transparency. At the beginning of this, webinar, I did see a lot of comments about, expenses and expense management. Or do I remember those days, days, somebody coming to my desk and unearthing everything from their pocket and calling that their, their expense management, and you just had to deal with it. But we do have a module in financial edge called the called expense management. There's unlimited users with people being able to go in and, handle their own expenses, attach their own receipts, and so that it really minimizes the amount of work that is put on the accounting department. So that is something to chat with an account executive about. There's also document intelligence along with those. So when the receipting goes in, there's a lot of automation that can happen as well. And that is has that built in transparency, the whole approval process of the entering and the managers approving, and then it goes to accounting for those approvals. That follows all along with that audit trail. So there's a lot of different pieces and parts that can, be a part of FE NXT. And having started in FE seven and moving all the way to the cloud, we know processes change, controllers change, CFOs change. Sometimes along the way, we we just don't keep up with all the things that are, coming along and all the new features, and we don't upgrade our processes maybe as robustly as we should. So that can get lost, and we just don't know that those things are available or we don't know how. So those are really great things to reach out to us about. With that, I will send it back to, is it Rachel or Caroline to conclude us out, but thank you all for coming and please reach out for any questions. Awesome. Thank you, Andrew, and thank you, Cindy. I pushed out two more poll questions. Just it's not required, but feel free to respond to those. Also, you'll find that we have today's slides, a few blog posts, and a buyer's guide in the docs tab, so feel free to take a look at that. But thank you all so much.