Name: Unlock the Full Potential of General Ledger in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T18:32:14.577Z
Duration: 58 min 52 s
Description: Unlock the Full Potential of General Ledger in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Transcript for "Unlock the Full Potential of General Ledger in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®": Well, welcome, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. Today's session is gonna be focused on helping you all unlock more value, confidence, and efficiency in Financial Edge NXT. We're grounding this conversation in real patterns that we've been seeing across organizations and highlighting where small changes can really have an outsized impact. This is not about calling out problems or mistakes. These are really just common patterns that we've been consistently seeing, and the goal today is to help you all identify where small practical adjustments can make day to day work easier. We're gonna go through some general housekeeping here just to get started. So the webinar audio, if you all can't hear me, will be broadcasted through your computer speakers, so please check the volume and adjust it accordingly. If you do encounter any audio or technical issues as you're going through this, the quickest way to get that working is just to refresh your browser. If you are still having issues, I do recommend maybe leaving the session and then logging back in again. You're gonna receive a link to the on demand recording of today's session within twenty four hours of the session ending. And then I really wanted to point out, at the very top right, you'll see there's a widget for docs. Again, that's where you're gonna have access to several links and resources that you can download for future reference as well as even in this meeting, the slides that we're gonna be going through. Lots of great resources, some appendix at the end there. So, again, it's important that you all do have that, and you can certainly download it in the meeting as well. We're gonna be referring to some screenshots and details throughout this. So, again, that is in the PowerPoint that you may not see on your screen, but will be in that deck. And then also on the left there excuse me. On the right there, if you click on the q and a widget, you can submit questions. We've got a great team of financial experts that are backstage, and they're ready to answer those questions. We are gonna prioritize those questions that are related to today's topic. So if you do have questions that are very specific to your organization's process or setup, we most likely won't be able to answer those here today. K. I'm Eli Dutcher. I'm the portfolio lead for our Financial Edge NXT services. And joining me today is Elizabeth Quintero, our functional expert, and then Laura Nagantian, one of our principal consultants. Here's our path today. We're really gonna start by sharing the landscape and insights that we're seeing across Financial Edge NXT communities. This sets the foundation for success. And from there, we're gonna move into some of the most common challenges organizations encounter. We'll start to walk through some of the solutions and best practices that you can act on immediately. And then finally, we're gonna wrap up with an action plan and additional resources to really help you all continue after today. Before we get started, we are going to use a few polls throughout the session to get a sense of the room and help guide that conversation. So before we dive in, I would like to get a quick sense of the room. This will help us just better understand where you are individually. So please take a moment if you can and answer this first poll there that you see pop up. How long have you all used Financial Edge and XT? Perfect. Thank you so much for that. We've really spent the last year and even further gathering insights from the Financial Edge NXT users, support groups, interactions, training sessions, and webinar conversations like this one, across organizations, we have seen consistent patterns where teams are juggling new staff, new processes, and increasing reporting expectations. Fiscal year reconciliation workflows vary widely and from highly structured to still evolving organizations. Chart of account structures tend to grow over time, so often they create complexities with your teams not even realizing it. Fund configuration details like interfunds, net asset settings are frequently overlooked during your day to day work. So why this really matters is simple. These patterns show us where organizations are succeeding, where friction typically appears, and where small changes can again create meaningful time savings and accuracy So since the original webinar that we held last summer, I believe it was in July, several things have changed. There's now been new Financial AgenXT enhancements and resources released, including improvements to reconciliation and cash management. We've got a lot of great best practices guides tied directly to the product, and there are some new Blackbaud University and on demand trainings available as well. We have a clear adoption scorecard and usage insights through our customer success managers. And at the same time, many teams have experienced staffing changes and shifting responsibilities that create new questions and new usage patterns. So over time, clearer insights have formed around the most common challenges organizations face today. But before we move forward, I do again wanna ask another question just to help frame what's coming up next here. So one thing we consistently hear that many teams are working in systems today that they did not originally design. I'd like for you all to go ahead and answer this question if you don't mind. Were you involved in the original setup of Financial Edge NXT and your environment? Perfect. When we step back, we can look across support cases, health checks, and training sessions, and there are four consistent areas in which we see a lot of friction show up. Fiscal period and year management often includes too many periods left open, posting incorrect periods, and slower reporting. Reconciliation cadence is often disrupted by staffing changes, maybe missed monthly goals, and difficulty catching up once your teams do fall behind. Chart of accounts complexity grows gradually over time leading to harder reporting and duplicate accounts and more data entry errors. So fund configuration gaps, another one that may include missing or inconsistent settings, creates confusion around interfund activity, your net assets, and there's a reliance on often manual workarounds, sometimes even having to bring that data out of Financial Edge and Nextiva back in. So the most important port, and most important part here to, suggest is that these are not signs of you all doing anything wrong. Again, these are just simply areas where organizations could benefit from more clearer structure and routine. When these trends go undressed unaddressed, they show up in very real ways. Teams experience longer closing cycles. They spend more time validating and troubleshooting data, and they struggle with inconsistent and less trusted reporting. Right? The good news, is that every one of these challenges is fixable and often with more straightforward steps than teams expect. So before we move forward again, I wanna pause, and I'm gonna ask to hear from you all another time. We talked about how these trends show up in your day to day work. I wanna hear from you all based on your experience. K? How do you all feel about Financial Edge NXT? There is no right or wrong answer here. When we look at organizations with smooth closes and consistent reporting, they tend to share a few habits. Those organizations that we've been monitoring and speaking to, they have disciplined approaches to opening and closing fiscal periods. They reconcile their bank and their subledgers regularly. They maintain a clean and well structured chart of accounts that does not grow without purpose, and they have clear fund settings that prevent surprises on any interfund activities or net assets. They also often define user roles and permissions to avoid avoid accidental changes there. These teams consistently tell us that they trust their data. They spend far less time chasing issues, and everything we have covered so far, again, sets the foundation of what's next to come. K? We will show you all how to identify whether these trends exist in your environment. We'll show you all how to strengthen your f e n x t setup, and we're gonna show you how to prevent the most common accounting headaches. Again, this is just a start. This is a webinar series, and we would love to encourage you all to continue on with us. Our goal here today is to help you start to fully leverage FENX team and your team gain that confidence and clarity. I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm gonna pass it over to Elizabeth now, and she's gonna help us understand these challenges a little bit more in detail. Thank you so much. Sorry. Alright. Today, we'll be talking about understanding the challenges within our database. We're gonna cover a handful of common challenges that we see customers deal with starting with the hidden cost of fiscal years. So as we shift into this challenges section, we're gonna put out another question for you, that helps frame the discussion. So please answer this following poll that we're putting up. We wanna know what your last closed or preclosed or optimized fiscal year if you know that information. And we'll use this as context for for our next section. Okay. K. Thank you. Okay. So first, let's let's talk about what what all this means. You may have fiscal years older than three years that are still left open. And by open, I mean that they're open to post transactions. In some cases, multiple fiscal periods, either the current or prior years are open. Okay? So if if you haven't thought about that, that's really what it means. Periods could be open, soft close, and we'll get into the details of that. Why does this matter? It matters because there's an increased risk of accidental entries being posted into prior periods. This can create issues when you're trying to balance accounts or close out reconciliations. Transactions posted to incorrect periods increase the time needed to reconcile and can also increase audit costs. Auditors can flag these transactions posted to incorrect fiscal periods or years, which means additional review time. There's also an impact on system performance. Open fiscal years affect Financial Edge NXT's ability to process reports in a timely manner. So if you're you're struggling with that, you you know what we're talking about. It it impacts all reporting activity. These are some pretty critical areas to consider when reviewing your fiscal years and determining whether you fall into this category. So let's just do a quick just a quick overview of what the different types of years that I'm referring to. So what open means that, like I said, I mentioned earlier, that just means that I can go in there and post transactions to any of the periods that have that status. Soft close, the period is closed to data entry and posting, but it can be reopened. That's why it's called a soft close. It's it's a matter of just sliding the little widget over. In the system, it may appear as open, but you can actually view the details and confirm whether it's open or soft close. Soft closing, again, prevents posting, but the period can be reopened. Hard closed means the entire fiscal year is permanently closed. The status is irreversible. In in the system, it appears as closed and is grayed out. So posting is completely disabled. So we wanna consider that for some of our older fiscal years that we absolutely have nothing to, enter anymore. Optimize, this is a tool, that means the fiscal year is either open or soft close, but optimized for better, reporting performance. So optimization compresses data behind the scenes to improve reporting speed. This is reversible and does not apply to hard close periods. And then, we have a pre close, which is a temporary close used to set up reporting. It's also reversible and represents the step just before, a hard close. Alright. So the the last one's a little bit redundant. Hard close and hard close, they're kinda the same thing. So if you're wondering, how to check the status of your fiscal years, there's two ways that you can do this. We recently added a a feature called the just the overview. And so this allows you to go to the general ledger menu and select overview right underneath general ledger. This screen will indicate whether any fiscal periods need attention, such as prior periods that should be closed, and it provides you hyperlinks that will take you directly to the relevant settings. Okay? So that's kind of a a time saver there. The second method is, you know, the traditional way, you're gonna go to general ledger I'm sorry, to settings. Apologies. Settings on the left hand menu, you'll see general ledger, and then you're gonna select fiscal years, and you'll be able to view all fiscal years and change the status. You'll notice that now we have a status filter where you can actually select the type that you wanna see. So if you're curious to see how many open years you have, you can select on the filter, and it will only show that. So it'll display the different types of statuses. So for those of you that weren't really sure where you stood as far as fiscal years, that's where you can do that check and ensure that. Alright. So let's move into our second challenge now that we wanna talk about today. This typically means your organization this it's basically having to do with irregular, delayed, or regular reconciliation, and it means your organization hasn't reconciled a bank account in Financial Edge NXT for three months or more. It can also mean that your general ledger balance does not tie to subledger reports such as accounts payable or accounts receivable. These are two critical types of reconciliation. So why does it matter? So if you have delayed or missing reconciliations, this can lead to inaccurate reporting and discrepancies between FENXT and external bank statement. Small errors can grow quickly and become much harder to find over time. So there's also a significant audit flag. Right? As mentioned with fiscal years, auditors expect regular reconciliation, and it reduces confidence. Your finance team and board may lose trust in the system's data if reports can't be relied upon. So let's build a little bit on that with one more question related to reconciliation. So we're gonna put up another question for you. When was your last completed, FENXT bank reconciliation? So we'll let that alright. So this is gonna help us connect, what we're seeing across organizations to to real experience. Okay. Okay. So if, like, you're unsure of where you stand in the reconciliation, you can just go to to check your reconciliation, you would go to treasury. You would select the bank account in question. And then you if you click on the reconcile button, as you can see, this is gonna show, the last period that was reconciled and allow you to begin, a new reconciliation if needed. So you'll see in this example that the second box there shows the last time this was reconciled was on 06/30/2023. Alright. Okay. And then the the next slide has to do with subledger reconciliations. We've included, this information, which is a list of reports that we recommend, to compare general ledger to the subledger. So as an example for accounts payable, we recommend using the account distribution report and the open invoice report and comparing those to the total in your accounts payable summary account in general ledger. These recommended reports will be included in your deck, so you'll be able to see that detail, when you download the the PowerPoint. Alright. So moving on to the third challenge. This is gonna have to do with a bloated and complex chart of accounts. So, this is gonna occur when you typically your chart of account has four or more segments, and so and then 50% or more of your accounts have been added since the initial setup. So there was a certain number of accounts that were created and then a bunch more or more than 50% were added as as, the organization took off. So there while some growth is expected as an organization expands unnecessary account creation such as adding multiple similar accounts instead of using existing ones can lead to an overly large chart of accounts. It's important to periodically review whether accounts can be inactivated rather than continually adding new ones. And why does this matter? Well, a complex chart of accounts increases reporting complexity, makes it harder to find specific data points, and raises the risk of data entry errors. It's also gonna reduce efficiency and scalability. It slows down system performance and increases the training burden for new users, it can be overwhelming. So before we move into a little bit more about the structure, I wanna ask another question. How many segments do you use your, do you currently have in your account structure? How many are you working with? Is it two, three, four, or more than five? Okay. Thank you. Alright. So to view and modify your account structure, maybe some of you weren't familiar with how to find that information, other than what you see every time when you enter, your accounts, of course. So what for this, we're gonna want you to go to settings again, and then we're gonna do general ledger. You choose account setup. I'm sorry. General ledger, then general ledger setup. Account setup, and this screen shows your current account structure. So let me see. Including the number of segments and their lengths. Alright. So in that example, you'll see that we have three different segments, fund account code and department, and I would say that's probably one of the more common ones. So an account segment is one part of the full account string. So Financial Legendx t requires just to fund an account code, but you can have up to eight optional modules. I'm sorry. Segments, not modules. Alright. So all accounts must use all defined segments, and segment lengths must be consistent across the chart of accounts. The the fund segment represents a self of a balancing set of accounts often used for restrictions or entities. So because funds significantly expand the chart of accounts, it's important to consider, whether something truly needs to be a fund. The account code defines the account type. Right? So it's a asset or liability. While optional segments, those are entirely up to you such as department location. They're gonna be used, for for grouping. Alright. So that demystifies the the account structure a little bit for you. So you can review that slide. Okay. And then another common challenge, as Eli mentioned, is missing or incorrect fund settings. That one is this can result in unexplained under fund balances. It's gonna be inaccurate net assets or fund balance reporting. These issues affect accurate record keeping, prevent the system from being used for standard financial reporting. If, you know, if you can't rely on that, then it's gonna make it very hard. Often forcing reliance on external spreadsheets, right, to separate things out. As with other challenges, this is gonna reduce the confidence in the system data. So just imagine, doing a debit expense to, you know, like a fund two, for example. You have your with donor restrictions fund two, and you have a debit there. And then your credit, you wouldn't do it to cash, but you do it under fund one, unrestricted. So from a GL perspective, the entry balances. Right? But from a fund perspective, it does not. And so that's why we have to really look at at how we're using our funds. To review your fund setup, we're gonna go to settings, and then you'll go to general ledger, select funds. And then from here, you can view each fund, its restrictions, its configuration details. And reviewing this information can help identify issues with interfund setup. So, you can see on the example, you can click on the actual number of the fund, and you'll be able to see a lot of those details that we're talking about now. And, the final challenge that we'll be looking at today is gonna have to do with security and access management. So this often includes excessive use of solution administrators or solution admins. So if you have 25 users and 12 of them are system administrators, that's gonna be a concern. Solution administrators have broad access, including the ability to modify business rules, open and close fiscal years, manage security, post transactions, delete records, you name it. Everything can be done. So we typically we we typically say no more than three solution administrators. Of course, this can vary by organization, but something to look at, closely. So, and then then we have another issue that's poorly defined roles. So non administration users or non admin users have to be assigned a role, and these roles should be clearly reflect on the responsibilities. So poorly designed roles weaken checks and balances and can create audit issues such as users approving their own journal entries. And why does this matter? Of course, it's gonna excessive access increases the risk of mistakes, exposes sensitive information, and can result in costly errors. So just, very quickly, we we to review, how how your how many solution admins you have, you can just see this slide here, and it'll go to the very bottom where you have that little pet lock for security. And you'll you'll click on user management, and you'll see the number of solution admins under the Financial Edge NXT column. And then to review the roles, the current roles you have, again, same place, security, You you're gonna select role, management, and you'll be able to see the roles by module and how they've been created. So, take the time to review these settings, whenever you get the opportunity. And with that, I'll pass it over to the next presenter. Alright. Thanks, Liz. Now that we have an understanding of the challenges, let's start, you know, talk about best practices and the solution, how to's. Right? Okay. Our best practice number one is really just focus on routine fiscal year and period management. Your actionable steps. Right? Review your fiscal year statuses. Make sure you utilize Financial Edge NXT's built in tools for year end close. Establish a consistent process for opening and closing those periods, and you wanna apply that same concept for fiscal years. I Liz already reviewed the definition of fiscal year statuses previously, so I'm not gonna focus on that. But instead, I'll review with you in here. There's a table. I know I can't like, my mouse isn't moving, so you're not seeing that. But in this table, you're gonna find that ideal state would be your current fiscal year. You're keeping one period open. But, of course, from a practical perspective, you're most likely, you know, gonna keep two periods open as you work through your month end close. But when your bank reconciliation has been completed, your month end financials are done, you've published it, you wanna keep that prior period closed. And then, of course, don't reopen. So for the prior year, you want to keep all of the periods closed. And you're only gonna want to reopen maybe period 12 for any year end audit adjustments. So when your year end trial balance and financial statements are reconciled with your final audited statements, just close that period and then don't reopen. So the good news about it is, like, you guys, there's, like, 75% of you a whopping 75% of you are actually doing a lot of these things already. So based on the poll earlier, 75% of you are already doing this for fiscal period maintenance, so that's great. However, I've noticed that there's still about, you know, at least 12 to 15% that are not current with this guideline. So we encourage you to actually go through and optimize those fiscal years, try to talk to prior fiscal years, and then make sure that, you know, anything that's been audited, make sure to hard close that. So one of the things, of course, that that made it a little bit easier is an enhancement in the system. So Liz alluded to do, to this one earlier in the presentation. But we have, added, a general ledger overview. So this is really also helping you support this fiscal year maintenance. These are enhancement that that's been made, of course. And you're gonna find a tile that says needs attention. Right? So you can really spot items that that can stall the workflow such as, you know, out of balance or pending batches. You know, you don't wanna be discovering a lot of these issues late. There's also now a closing assistant tile. So it helps surface those unposted transactions by subledger. And as you go scroll through that tile, you're gonna see that there's a quick link to quickly close that period. So a lot of these things are out there, improvements, enhancements to financial edge NXT to help support these things that we're kind of, like, presenting in in this webinar. So you also can see, like I've said, like, there's a fiscal year status out there for a summary of those fiscal year status. And if you don't know how to close the fiscal year, there's actually a small link out there that would say use this link, and it's a tutorial for closing a fiscal year. So make sure to use that as a reference. Alright. So now once your your view you routinely can, you know, close and open those periods, you have that in place, the next best practice that I wanna talk about is reconciliation. Right? So let's practice number two. Reconcile and close monthly and make really the reconciliation steps, you know, part of your month end procedure. So actionable steps. First and foremost, you want to have a detailed documentation of the procedure. You wanna make sure to train your staff on the detailed steps, including what reports to use, you know, when do they need to produce it, where do they store it. Right? Make sure that that's all part of your documentation and training. Leverage a Financial Edge NXT's bank reconciliation and bank feeds. And then, of course, like, maintain that, you know, reconciliation history. So, again, I have a little table out here. Baseline guide, of course, for reconciliation would be top of the list would be bank statement to your BookGL cash balance, AT subledger to the, you know, AT control account, your encumbrance, right, for purchasing subledger comparing that with your, you know, with the open POs comparing with your PO encumbrance account. For AR, you know, the subledger. Right? Like, aging, open invoices, compare it with your air control. And for fixed assets, take a look at your, you know, fixed asset report and compare it with your fixed asset account plus, of course, the accumulated depreciation. So we don't really have, like, a lot of time during this webinar to cover the step by step, the click by clicks, to be able to work through this with you because these are, like, you know, topics, of course, that are, you know, you can go really deep into each specific ones. But, you know, what we're highlighting in here is we want for you to have this, you know, guidelines or templates so that you can operationalize those reconciliation, and you want for it to become a routine. Right? So you basically have, like, you know, a closed calendar, make sure that, you know, we're sticking to it, we have deadlines in place. So the good news is that there are specific features in Financial Edge NXT that's gonna help you, and, you know, they're available now, and it will help support a faster, more consistent month end work. So see. So these are the available features that I want to highlight. Right? And this is really just supporting, like I've said, the month end close. First one is online bank feeds. So if you're not already using this, this is a way for you to connect directly to your bank account for real time visibility, and it allows you for auto matching or clearing of those transactions. So, however, some some organization would prevent this online connection, maybe, like, security, you know, maybe you're just not comfortable connecting to an an external source or maybe you just don't want to connect or maybe bank feeds isn't working for you, maybe it's not, you know, supported, you still have another alternative to help with bank rec. So we have a feature out there called clear transactions electronically. So how this works is that you go into your bank's portal and take a look if they allow you to download specific files. So, generally, it's like BAI or maybe BAI two, QBX. As you can see in here, there are different supported file types. So what you'll do is go to the bank, download the file, take that file, and plop it into your, you know, Financial Edge NXT. So the reason why I wanted to see this to to share this is that for bank reconciliation earlier on in our poll, I mean, a good amount of you, like, that more than half of you, 65% of you actually are current with your bank rec. However, there's 25% of, you know, the those who participated in this survey, and they said they're not using Financial Edge NXT for bank reconciliation. So, hopefully, after this webinar, you can start taking some of the steps to maybe use Financial Edge NXT for your bank rep because we do have those tools. Right? Online bank feeds and clear transactions electronically. Or if you want to actually just do it manually, that's fine too. But we offer and, you know, we we encourage you to utilize bank rep. So the other feature that I want to highlight in here, so we have what's called a report scheduler. So scheduling reports, right, automated report generation really fosters I mean, it helps with accountability. Right? So when you say this is the timeline, right, you basically can have a report to be automatically generated based on that timeline. So when reports are delivered automatically, you know, you can coordinate, like, certain task, follow-up, and have, like, a little bit more efficient process during your month end close. Alright. So let's review another one, another update that supports the visibility of, you know, kind of like this day to day things, especially for cash and, you know, monitoring reconciliation. So a recent update that we have made as an enhancement is a customizable home page. So this is a practical way to bring key bank information into one central view. So you can choose up to five bank accounts and surface it up as part of your home page. You can also add credit card accounts as part of the home page, and there's also a way for you to add favorites to reports, queries, so it's a little bit more accessible. And, again, helps with a faster way for you to, like, you know, access the data and helps with your month end close. Alright. So then let me go move on to the next one, which is best practice number three. So keep your charnel hounds lean and clean because, as Liz had mentioned, this impacts reporting clarity, coding accuracy, efficiency. What are your actionable steps? Make sure to review the chart of accounts for redundancy. Update the status of unused accounts or projects or table values, so there's a status that allows you to mark them as inactive so that they don't get used anymore because it's redundant. Right? Make sure you have a naming convention. Because if you don't have a naming convention and people aren't aware of it as they are maybe coding invoices, it may be confusing to pick one versus the other. Right? Define a process to add accounts only when you really need it. Right? So let's say you've gone through a budget review cycle, and you have established that these are the new accounts that's needed, then those are valid reasons for adding accounts. But if someone was searching and they cannot find it, that's not a reason to add a new account. Right? You wanna take a look at what exists and really start making sure that you're using that for consistent coding. So which is really aligning with making sure you have a documentation for your chart of accounts structure so that your users and the they understand what those mean. Right? When you look at the different segments. Right? Well, what does it mean? Is it a call center? Is it a department? Is it a location? When you have new staff coming in or if you have, like, cross functional teams and they start looking at the system, if they don't understand it, right, you can use that documentation to help support and guide, you know, like, new onboarding new users, right, like I've said, or, know, new team members. So you you wanna make sure that you're applying it consistently and making sure that we are coding transactions correctly. So in terms of how often should you be really doing this, this is an activity that you can do on a quarterly basis after your system has been initially set up. Take a look at that, you know, when when you do it as a quarterly review, so when you establish a cycle again, it makes the task a little bit lighter. It's a little bit more sustainable, right, because we're not saying, like, well, review it every month. Just do it quarterly. But once you've gone through that initial cleanup, then the subsequent ones becomes a little bit easier. So what's gonna help with, you know, that cleanup? So here is you know, I wanna highlight, you know, a tool that's, again, available now for you to use for the with this process. So one thing that I wanted to highlight in here is query. With query, you can tell the system that I want to query a set of accounts. So in this example that I have on up on the screen, I have two criteria. Right? Because my intention is to look for accounts that hasn't been used, and I'm gonna go ahead mark it as inactive. So I'll go through and create a query with a criteria of net activity equals zero between, let's say, 12/01/2023 to 12/3123, or if you're, like, a 06/30 fiscal year and then, you know, 07/01/2022 to 06/3023. Right? And then the other criteria would be the ending balance to be zero. So, you know, maybe it doesn't have activity, but there is a balance. Right? So you don't want to deactivate an account that has a balance. So that's why your criteria is twofold, net activity and ending balance. So zero over a period of time and ending balance zero as of a specific date. Right? When you run the query, you're gonna get to the results of that query, and Financial Edge actually allows you to open the record directly from the results list, and that helps with you know, maybe you need to do, like, a another review or an analysis and, you know, it really helps make the cleanup faster. So there is, like, an an arrow pointing up and down to allow you to navigate to the different, you know, results. Alright. So then let's move on to best practice number four. So this one is really a focused review and just understand your fund setup. Right? So what are your actions in here? Just, you know, you'll open your fund configuration. And for some of you, maybe you have renamed this in your business rules. So maybe you say, like, what do you mean fund? So this is generally the first segment in your chart of accounts. Sometimes people have called this restrictions. Restrictions. Right? Right? And some sometimes people have called this company. But most of the time, this still would have been called fund. In your fund configuration, you're gonna find five different things that are very important to note. One is the net asset account. Second one is interfund accounts. Right? So there may be multiple. Then there's two checkboxes. It's called closing and balancing. Right? And those are just columns in that fund setup. So those are rules. And then there's an area called transaction requirements. So activity in Financial Edge NXT would close to at least one net asset account. So when you open your fund, you're missing that account. That's an issue because it doesn't have that container that holds the roll forward balance from year over year. So that's a big issue if it's missing. Financial Edge NXT can also track net asset balance for multiple dimensions or characteristics. So when you open your fund and you see something that has an asterisk or it's a masked value of the net asset balance, So that means that you're config you're configured to hold multiple net asset account balances. So you'll wanna be mindful with this setup because when you add a new segment, right, like a new segment value, you need to make sure to add the equivalent net asset account if you're using, like, you know, preserve detail during closing on a segment. And then any interfund account find in the fund record would only be used to automatically create balancing transactions only in journal entries. Subledger interfunds, they are configured differently, so it's it's a different setup. And then when you're viewing that, you know, fund record preserve detail during closing, like I've said, FE would keep track of at least one net asset. Right? But there is a method by which you can see the allocation of that net asset balance to the different identifiers. Like, you know, this would be things like projects or class. Right? So it, you know, it determines if that specific characteristic is gonna carry over forward year after year. Then the required to balance, it just means that, you know, do you want a balance sheet for that specific, you know, that specific data element? And then there's, you know, requirement transaction requirements. So are you requiring, let's say, project on all transactions or only income statement? But here's a warning. All of these things that, you know, I'm discussing about, just look at it. Don't make changes to your fund settings until you're absolutely certain of the consequence. You know, some of these changes are effectively stepped down. Once you've stepped down the requirement, you cannot reverse it. So and when I say step down, you know, for example, if you change transaction requirements that projects are required for income statement, you just say, oh, well, I'm getting this error message. I'm gonna just change it to do not require. You're gonna go back to that mod and change it again to income statement. Right? So be very careful. If you are making change in here, make sure you understand what it's gonna do. And, again, the reason why you're wanting to understand this fund setup is, let's say someone said, oh, well, I have to use a you know, an Excel spreadsheet to carry over my net asset. Well, that is really something that we would have been unnecessary. And if you're having to do that, then it may have something to do with a fund setup. Alright. So the next one that I wanted to talk about is, you know, with best practice number five. Let's make sure you are utilizing the system features for to be able to implement segregation of duties. Right? So one, you know, it really is gonna come down to defining like, utilizing security, really, it it helps reduce your audit risk. It helps prevent accidental or, you know, sometimes deliberate changes to the system and, you know, that that impact would be carried down the road. When you're configuring security roles, Financial Edge NXT allows you granular permissions, and you want to set that up and assign it with users, which is really user security. Right? So first, you define the security roles. There's very granular permissions on assigning the rights to each role. And then when you have a new user, you use that role and apply it to that user, assign it to that user. So this has really come down to not everyone should be an admin. Right? So you wanna be able to make sure that you've got that segregation of duties in place. You can also use what's called record level security. So this is really enhancing control of the system. So we have four types of records that you can assign record level security. We have accounts, then projects, banks, and, of course, signature. So and then there's there's also, of course, an option for you to just assign view only. So when you're giving someone view only rights, you're reducing the chances of any accidental changes or edits or updates to the data. K. So let me give you an example of what, you know, a good segregation of due to implementation would be. Right? So when you're looking at, you know, this role, right, you're gonna find that there's view, add, edit. So as a practical example, take a look at the one that says journal entry. There is a little, you know, area in there that I've highlighted that says prevent the approval self approval of batches. So even if, you know, like, you're a team of two in in in in in in this system. Right? You can still implement it by saying that, okay. Well, I can create, validate, and post my entry, but let's take away the self approval so that then when auditors are in, you can say, okay. Well, she creates the journal entry. I review it. If I create the journal entry, she reviews it. Right? So, that would be a good way to be able to segregate, you know, to to separate. Right? Entry, approval, and then posting. There's also you know, I also wanted to highlight accounts payable and, of course, bank per permissions. So you don't want to have this one person to be managing vendor records, creating invoices, running you know, creating payments, and also performing bank rec. Right? So in this print screen, you know, you're gonna see that you can also implement implement some controls, especially with voids and purge off transactions. So we also have data control on what's called personal data information. So that would apply to your vendor tax ID number because some of your vendors would have, you know, their Social Security numbers out there. Right? There's also some bank accounts and EFT data if you're using the system to generate EFT file. By implementing, like, these role controls in the system, you can have it be built in checks and balances in the system, and, you know, it's not managed informally. It's not like, okay. Well, you know, I'll do the bank rec. I'll do this, this, and that. You do this. But by implementing into the system, you can prove that there are checks in place in in the system. So beyond this five best practices, there's really you know, I wanted to kind of, like, review in here that, additionally, these are some of the other items that we want for you to to look at. One, documentation. Right? I already talked about that, alluded to it with month end close. But also include who's gonna be responsible for opening and closing periods and making sure that opening and closing of periods and years are supported by security. Right? So make sure you use that. Workflow. So make sure you update your policy and procedures for, you know, like, standard processing and execution, approval, who's gonna be doing the voids, who's gonna be doing the reversal, and also any other edge cases. Business rule, this is really one of those things where sometimes there may be items in the systems or you're reconciling in the system and you're not understanding, like, where what what happened there. There are business rules that are not supposed to be turned on or should be turned on when you are in production or when you're in a live environment. So case in point in here that I want to highlight is what's called do not post. Well, there is a purpose to using a do not post, but not in the live environment where someone can say, I'm not gonna post this because that means that you have transaction in your subledger that may not appear in the general ledger because it's marked as do not post. Right? So I wanted to highlight that too. And then there are some, you know, areas out there with business rules. You're gonna find that there are recommended settings, like journal entry to prevent journal entry to control accounts. Right? Those are things that you can enable in the system. So make sure to review those business rules and apply the recommended settings. Okay. So I have I'm gonna go through a few questions that came in. So there's one like, the the simpler simpler one is, like, what's the cleanest way to post a Bledger activity to the GL and verify that nothing is missing? The answer to this one is in your posting parameter. Right? There every time you post, there is an area out there that allows you to filter. So make sure you're not using any of those filters just so that then you can scoop out all of those transactions from the subledger and get it posted to the GL. The other question that I have in here is how do I run and reconcile AR aging versus AR AR control, and what are the common causes of the differences? Well, this answer would apply to both AP and AR. So first, there are two different dates. There's transaction date and the GL post date. Right? So there's one. Then second, there is a post status. So I alluded to do not post. Right? So make sure that there's post not posted and posted. Right? So that post status. And then the third one would really be application of credits. So if you have a credit memo that needs to be applied to an invoice, make sure that that's done. And then the fourth one that really would be where you're finding things are maybe, you know, not reconciling would be what's called the definition or, like, the report definition or the report filters or parameters. So when you're running your subledger report, do not use the transaction date because you're trying to compare it to the GL. So instead, use the GL post date. Don't use both. So just pick one, which is the GL post date because you're trying to reference out to the GL. See. I have an another question in here. How can I schedule key reports and make them, you know, faster and more usable? So just go to the report list page. There's three dots, ellipses out there, and it will open the context menu, and you can just use edit schedule. And then you can define your cadence or your scheduled frequency. Monthly journal entries. Okay. So how do you manage that? So you've got different ways to be able to, you you know, work through your monthly entries. The simplest and easiest way is called, you know, copy batch. So when you copy a batch, FE NXT allows you to just override the date. Right? So you can copy it, and you can even override the journal reference. So I think we had, like, webinar that covered that. But even if you're not able to find it, you know, you should be able to find, like, the help, documentation to use copy batch. And change the date when you copy batch. Right? And you can override the journal entry so that the new batch would have fresh information. You can also use a recurring. So now we have, like, recurring batches out there in Financial Edge NXT. So outside of those two simple ones, then you can use Excel add in. So if you have a data source, you could want to copy and paste, you know, find and replace, do whatever. Excel is probably your friend. Use Excel add in for journal entry. And if you feel that, well, that's still not enough or maybe you have, like, a lot of data that you're loading, then you can use import of transactions. And then the last one, how do you wanna start you know, how to start BankRec if you haven't used it before? So if you're not using Financial Edge for BankRec, then, you know, it's really an a missed opportunity for you to utilize the system for what you know, one of the capabilities that that's available to you. But the very first thing that you really need to start BankRack in Financial Edge is make sure you have a clean list of outstanding transactions. And once you have that, then there's a way to initialize bank reconciliation in the system. And, you know, once you have your first one in, then you basically can, like I've said, maximize, utilize the use of Financial Edge. Alright. So I I don't think we have a whole lot more time, so I'm gonna go ahead and put it on to Eli and close that up. Yes. Thank you so much, Laura. That was incredible. I know I learned some things. And, again, I've been doing this for for many, many years. I'm excited to go back to this. So, really just wanted to leave you all maybe here with a couple actions to take away. So take a few minutes, reflect on what you all saw, identify at least one to two areas where small changes could really make a meaningful impact. Right? So prioritize action over perfection. These practices work best when they just simply become routine, and that's really what we want to start to work on. So remember, you don't need to solve these problems or these challenges alone. The tools and resources, the team's already in place to support you, we have it. So we want to make sure that you all are taking advantage of it. We do wanna go ahead and leave you with one more poll here. This is gonna be a opportunity to pick a topic that you all would like to see covered in a subsequent webinar. So if you don't mind going ahead and taking a moment just to answer and selecting at least one of these four options here to help guide us as we move forward. Great. Looks like we're gonna be speaking on some financial statements and GL reporting here. Love it. Alright. So. I am gonna go ahead and I am going to move forward into some resources as well because, again, we do wanna leave you all with some wonderful resources heading forward. So one of the most common questions we get at the end of a session like this is, where do I go next? Who should I talk to? Right? So everything we cover today, it is supported by existing resources that you all can use on demand. I also wanna encourage you all to contribute continue on with this series. Right? We'll invite you to some further meetings that take even these areas into more depth and really help you all, again, further those actions that you're taking. Blackbaud Community, the knowledge base, they're a great place to build consistency across your team. And, of course, Blackbaud University offers structured learning paths, both instructor led and on demand, depending on your team's preferences. So if you're looking for guidance that goes beyond just how to content, your customer account team is gonna be able to help you align the right resources based off of your goals and priorities. So all of these links are included in the downloadable deck. You do not need to capture them now. You will have them later as well. But I also wanted to highlight a few additional resources here at the very bottom of this deck. Again, they are links that you can collect on. And then maybe more importantly right here, what's at your fingertips? So this slide is really about momentum. Financial Edge NXT, the resource center you'll see is just a one stop shop for all product updates, trending topics, short practical learning content. And then if your schedule is tight, there's bite sized training options that make it easier to learn without committing to long sessions. So look at those learning paths. They're really nice when you're training staff, if you all need to standardize knowledge across your team. And then we also encourage you all to think about adoption. Something that happens over time, it's not gonna happen all at once. We do encourage teams to think about how you can tackle things again over time. The goal really is steady progress. And then for those of you all that really like very specific task based guidance, we also include direct links into some some supporting articles and training. You'll see on this slide, again, those direct links. Some of those that I really wanna call out are those best best practice best practices guide. Excuse me. Really linking month close checklist and then, again, best practices for accounting into your, particular team. Go ahead and take a look at these. Again, don't look at absorbing them all in one sitting. This will take time. But, again, we do wanna make sure that you all have what you need. So, again, take just a few minutes today to reflect on what you saw. Identify one or two of these areas where, again, small changes could make a meaningful impact. And remember, you do not need to solve all these challenges alone. The tools and resources and teams are already in place here to support you. So, again, thank you all so much for spending the time with us. We will see you here again soon.