Name: Streamlining Invoice Entry with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®
Uploaded: 2025-07-01T16:30:56.443Z
Duration: 46 min 39 s
Description: Streamlining Invoice Entry with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Transcript for "Streamlining Invoice Entry with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®": Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar streamlining invoice entry in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT. My name is Tanika Jordan, and I'm a senior principal instructor in Blackbaud University. And I'm so excited to walk you through ways to streamline your invoice process, avoid some common pitfalls, and make the most of Financial Edge NXT. Let me share just a little bit about myself. As I mentioned, I'm a Blackbaud University instructor, and my home base is in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm an AmeriCorps alum and an educator. And my two guilty pleasures are the two b's, Broadway and Beyonce. And if you're curious, I do have cowboy carter tickets. Before we dive in, let's do just a little bit of housekeeping. The audio for your webinar is being broadcast to your computer speakers. So if you experience any technical or audio issues, please refresh your browser. We will send you a link of the recording after the session by email, and you can find resources on the docs tab on the right side of your screen. To use the q and a, submit your questions through the q and a piece, and use the cogwheel below to adjust your settings. I wanna thank you for joining today. I see that we've got a lot of folks here. We got a sizable audience. And please be mindful that because of this sizable audience, detailed product questions cannot be answered with the attention they deserve. Although I will be conducting a couple of demos, this webinar is not meant to be a training session. Instead, it is meant to give you an overview. Please consider taking a Blackbaud University class where you will be in a smaller size session and have hands on practice. In today's session, we're gonna cover invoice workflows, methods of entry, some efficiencies, some common errors to involve to avoid as well. And just as a reminder again, you'll receive a recording link after the session. Let's go ahead and dive in. Before we get tactical, let's look at the big picture. In Financial Edge NXT, the invoice process follows a consistent path with four main steps. Invoice creation is where it all begins. Invoice details are captured and entered into the system. Accuracy here is critical as it sets the foundation for the rest of the process. Once entered, the invoice must be reviewed and approved. And this is really best practice, and it's really an optional step. This step ensures compliance with internal policies and confirms that the invoice is valid. After the approval process, the invoice is posted to Financial Edge NXT, and this records the liability and prepares the invoice for payment. This ensures that financial stay up to date. And then finally, the invoice is paid according to the agreed upon terms. This completes the cycle and maintains good relationships with your vendors. Each of these steps plays a vital role and ensures a smooth, accurate, and compliant AP process. And understanding the flow helps you see where your team fits and how to spot any bottlenecks. Next is our roles piece. Let's take a moment to talk about these key roles. Understanding who does what helps to clarify their responsibilities and keeps the workflow moving. First, we have our accounts payable clerk, or this could be your staff member who enters in the invoices within Financial Edge NXT. This role is responsible for verifying vendor information. They're responsible for coding the invoice correctly and also for attaching documentation and initiating the workflow. Next, that invoice might be routed to an approver. This could be, a department manager or a budget owner, and their job is to review and approve the invoice for accuracy. Once the invoice is approved, the finance or the accounting team then steps in to post the invoice and process payment. They also manage reconciliation, and month on and reporting as well. And then you also have your auditors or your program managers who may review the invoices for compliance. Some additional roles that you also might have at your organization are invoice requesters, and you also might see, your procurement staff being a part of this process as well. Now that we've taken a look and we've talked about invoice entry, rather invoice workflow, let's talk about invoice entry. And invoice entry is where most of your users spend their most the most of their time. Our first method of entering an invoice is manually. And we can enter this invoice from the invoices page. We can also enter in an invoice from the vendor as well. What you'll wanna do is search for an invoice first before creating a new one, and then you'll click add to add a standard invoice. When you're adding that standard invoice, you'll enter in general information for the invoice such as your vendor, your invoice number, your post status, and your approval status. And if the vendor doesn't already exist in the database, you can always add a new one on the fly. Next, you'll wanna enter in your general ledger distribution and payment information. Now the general ledger coding can automatically default from the vendor record. What you'll wanna do, though, is you'll wanna confirm that the coding, such as your project or your class or your transaction codes, depending upon the setup of your database, you wanna confirm that those are accurate. But, again, these are defaults. You can always up these defaults update these defaults if needed. And then on your invoice, you can track ten ninety nine information as well. So you can track the ten ninety nine box numbers. This is gonna state where the amounts were earned. Under the attachments, you can also add attachments to the invoice by moving a file into the drag file here or by browsing for a file. So you could add in a link for a picture, a blog post, or even a YouTube video, or in a cloud storage account as well. Now that we've gone through the process of taking a look at the manual way of putting in an an invoice, let's actually do it. So we'll demo a standard invoice. To enter in a invoice, we'll wanna go into the payable section of Financial Edge NXT. And within payables, we'll go to invoices. What I could have also done is I could have also added an invoice from the main page as well. We'll go to that invoices list. And in the invoices list, we'll wanna search for the invoice first to just make sure that invoice isn't already in the system. Not seeing the invoice, I'll go ahead and add it. And we'll give that a moment to load. It's here that we can search for our vendor. So notice again too, if the vendor was not already there, I could have added that vendor on the fly by just clicking the new option. We'll go ahead and put in our vendor number rather our invoice number, and we can add in our invoice date. We'll say this invoice is for today. Our due date information will automatically populate based on the vendor defaults. That vendor could also have a term, specifically when we are to pay that invoice. And then we'll put in the invoice amount. So we'll say this is a $100 for our flowers. Next, you'll see our invoice status. And the way that we currently have our database set up is that our invoices need to be approved, so we'll leave this as a pending invoice. What's nice about the way that this invoice creation process works is that in addition, there are some vendor defaults that will automatically default for me with the debit account, the expense account that we need to hit for this invoice. But it's a default, so that means that I can always update it. What you see here will depend upon the way that your database is structured. So for example, your organization might be using projects or using transaction codes, and you'll see those options based on how your database is set. What I can also complete and fill in is the payment method. How are we gonna pay this vendor from what particular bank account are we using, what payment address are we using as well. That information automatically defaults from the vendor record. What I could also do too is if we're gonna pay this vendor, maybe we're gonna make two payments on, this particular invoice, we can always to edit the schedule for the invoice. And finally, I can put in any discounts. If we had a credit memo that we needed to apply, I could apply that as well. And then if I want had any collateral that I needed to attach to this invoice, I could attach that information at the very bottom. And then I would just go ahead and save the invoice. So, again, one way of creating our invoice, again, by manually creating the invoice in the system. Yeah. And through the import process, import essentially helps us to reduce the manual data entry. It helps us to improve our efficiency and also enhance accuracy. Now with import, we can use or import other types of records besides invoices. We could import, for example, vendors as well. Now depending on your user permissions, you can access the import process under general ledger, receivables, payables, treasury, and also fixed assets. If we want to import invoices, the first thing that we'll need to do is to prepare our data. This step happens outside of the database, and we can import using a CSV file or a TXT file as well. And we can create an import file with the data that needs to be imported. The example that you're seeing on screen, here is a CSV file. And each row will represent a single invoice with each column being a data field in Financial Edge NXT. Now different fields are gonna be required when you're importing invoices because you may have a single distribution versus multiple distributions. And we wanna work smarter and not harder. So to work smarter and not harder, we're gonna download a sample file from knowledge base on the Blackbaud website to use as a starting point. We can also add any other invoice fields to that spreadsheet as needed. So, again, that's our first step. Our second step is to then prepare the import parameter file. This includes selecting the type of import that we wanna do, determining whether we're gonna import new records or whether we're updating existing records, meaning updating an existing invoice or importing a new invoice. Before running the import, we'll also want to mark the checkbox to validate the data only, before we run the import. Because what we want to do is we wanna check for exceptions. Now on the fields tab of the import parameter, we will map our fields. Mapping our fields is the process of matching fields contained in an import file to the Financial Edge NXT equivalent. It's it's very important to map your fields correctly because we wanna prevent, any exceptions. We wanna ensure that the information that we're importing imports into the correct fields on the record. We'll also use extensions when multiple characteristics exist for the item that we're importing, such as when we're importing invoices that have multiple distributions. The program is going to automatically assign an extension to the field beginning with zero zero and in can increase to 99. And we can also manually assign extensions in the extension column. Once we have mapped our fields, our next step is to then validate our file. Now once we've validated, we're gonna review the report that's going to generate for any exceptions. We'll take a look at that report. If the report is clean, then what we'll do is we'll unmark the checkbox to validate the data only. We'll save the file. We'll return back to this screen, and then we'll run the import. So let's do a little demonstration of what this process looks like in the database. So to import, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go over to payables, and then we're gonna go to import. As I mentioned before, we can import different kinds of records. We can import vendors. We can import, accounts. If we needed to import a different type of record, we would go into the menu for that particular payables. So to import, what we'll do to start out with and let's say, for example, that I've already downloaded, my file from the knowledge base. I've already got that set. I'm gonna go ahead and click the add option, and then I'm gonna select the type of import that I wanna use. So I'm gonna do an invoice import, and we'll give that just a moment to load. And then I'm gonna name my import. We'll say that this is our webinar invoice import. We can provide it with a description, and we can also decide, hey. Do I like my colleagues enough to allow them to run this import or even allow them to modify it? So I'll make those selections here. We're gonna keep this import, just for me. I'll go ahead and click next. That's gonna take me to this parameter section. And in the parameter, I'm then deciding, am I importing new invoices, or am I updating existing invoices? Those are my two options here. And then remember I mentioned that I wanna validate the import first. So I'm gonna mark this checkbox to validate. The other thing that I wanna do is I wanna associate or upload the file that I'm gonna use for the import process. So I'll go ahead and attach that file. What will eventually happen is that what Financial Edge NXT will do is Financial Edge NXT will rename it so that it has a unique name for the import file. In order to import, invoices, the vendors already have to exist in the system. So I in my file, I have to tell the system how it needs to identify the vendor. I want it to identify the vendor not by the vendor import ID, but by the vendor ID instead. And then I'll click next. On this fields tab, my goal is to map the fields. So I wanna map the fields from my spreadsheet to the fields that are in financial edge NXT. So I wanna map them. And the fields that you're noticing that are highlighted that are bolded, those are the fields that are required. And to map them, I'm just simply going to click on the field. So I just wanted to make sure that I have the specific import field that I need highlighted along with under my available fields. So I want my invoice number, the description, my invoice amount, my date and my due date, my post date, as well as my post status. And in this particular file, I have multiple distributions. So I'll not only want my invoice amount, but I'm also going to want the specific distributions for my invoice as well. So that involves going into this invoice distribution. And in the invoice distribution, selecting the amount, selecting the debit account. And as I mentioned, we're gonna have multiple distributions. I'm gonna be distributing this based on multiple product projects. So I also want to select the specific under the debit transaction distribution, selecting my project, and then selecting the debit transaction distribution fields as well. So so under my debit transaction distribution, I want my amount. And what you'll notice is that because I have multiple distributions, it's gonna be multiple prop projects. These fields are going to repeat. So I'm going to want to again select the invoice distribution amount, the debit account number because it's gonna be for a different project, select the project ID as well as the distribution amount for that debit. Remember how I mentioned that when you have multiple distributions, you have extensions. So when those fields repeat, your extensions, you want you to use your extensions from zero zero all the way up to 99, especially if, for example, you're going to have, multiple distributions for your invoice. Maybe you're gonna have more than two or three distributions for an invoice. What I'm gonna do, I wanna show you what happens when it doesn't quite work the way that we want it to work. So I'm gonna save the setup. Remember, my goal is to validate this. I'm gonna save the setup. And what you'll notice is that we have our import file out here. When I click on the little ellipsis, this is where I'm gonna validate. In that validation process, it's checking to see whether there are gonna be any exceptions in this import process. So I'm gonna deliberately have an exception. And fingers crossed, it will not work. So we'll go ahead and take a look at the report. And notice that there is an exception, and you might be wondering, well, why was there an exception, Tanika? If I scroll through the report itself, and in the report, it's showing me the criteria of how I set up the import file. It's also showing me how it was mapped. And in addition, it shows me the particular exception. And the exception occurred because the total percent distributed must equal 100%. What this is essentially saying to me is that when I mapped the fields, I mapped them with extensions. Because I have multiple distributions, it was seeing that distribution as one rather than seeing it as two separate distributions. What I now need to do, I'm gonna close this out, what I now need to do is go back into the parameter and modify it. Couple of things I wanna point out as well, And we'll give that a moment to load. And I know that when you are doing, your importing invoices, you most likely will have distributions that are more than just one, one expense account, for example. One thing that it's done is it automatically adjusted the name of the file because the file has to be unique each time. And then if I go into fields, I'm gonna update the distribution. So in that these exceptions, the first four rows are all gonna be mapped to zero zero. And then the following four rows, I wanna map to zero one so that it knows specifically that this project should have this distribution amount. So we'll go ahead and update this, change this from zero zero to zero one. And now let's save the file again, and let's run it again. Let's try it again. So I'll go ahead and save it, and then we'll validate it one more time. Fingers crossed this time, we'll get a clean validation. View our report. Voila. We got a good validation. Now that we've gotten a clean validation, it shows records process not showing any exceptions. I can go ahead and close this out. And how I now can run the process, I have to go back to the, the import that I created. I'm gonna go back and go into it, and I'm gonna unmark this checkbox to validate the data only. I'll go ahead and click next. And then once the save button is enabled, we'll go ahead and save it. Now once that's saved and I go back to the little ellipsis, I now have the option of being able to run the import. So I'll go ahead and run this. We'll go ahead and view the import, view the report, and it was imported. So we got a a great import. So let's go ahead and take a quick look. Take a quick look at the invoice. So notice my sample invoice does have the same invoice number as the invoice number that I created earlier, but we go ahead and take a look at the invoice. You'll notice that if I go into the distributions, this is where I can see that we had multiple distributions here. So I had multiple projects. And we had, in this example, we had a thousand dollars going to project, or going to account number 01547000, and then we had a thousand dollars going to account number 547001. But we were able to just using the import process, import an invoice, with multiple distributions. And, again, as I mentioned before, to work smarter and not harder, we can always do this, with the sample file that you can get from the knowledge base. Now that is not the only way that we can get invoices in. That is just one of two ways that we've looked at so far. Let's look at another way to get invoices within the system. Another way that we can get invoices in the system, and this is the the last method we'll look at, is through the expense management process. Now before, organizations were using expense management. An employee would make a purchase. They then have to attach their receipt to a paper form. They'd submit it to their supervisor for approval. Their supervisor would approve it and then send it over to accounting. Now that process if you're using expense management, now that process happens electronically within the system. So from the my invoice request tile, the requester submits the invoice. And when they submit the invoice, they submit it with the appropriate coding. The request is then routed to the approver, and they will approve it from the my approval style. And then once they approve the invoice, it then become rather the invoice request, it then becomes an invoice in the system. That takes the work from the accounting staff having to do all of the coding. They get a nice completed invoice that they can then pay and post. So so far, we've talked about invoice workflow. We've looked at invoice entry methods. I know that you're interested now in figuring out, like, how can you be as efficient as possible with invoices? Well, let's take a look at the first way. So one of the ways in which you can be more efficient with invoice entry is to copy an existing invoice. Now when you're adding a new invoice for the vendor, the vendor's last three invoices are gonna display on the right side after you enter in their name. And if the invoice that you need doesn't display, you can always search for the invoice at the bottom of the copy previous invoice frame. This is a a great time saver. Another efficiency, is using a recurring invoice. Now a recurring invoice is a template that you create and use to generate regular invoice records according to a schedule. With recurring invoices, you streamline the billing process for regular, predictable transactions, and it's gonna save you time and also improve your accuracy. By setting up a recurring invoice, you can automate the generation of invoices for items that you, use quite frequently, like your monthly rent or your subscription services or any other recurring expense. This eliminates the need to manually create the same invoice repeatedly. Now another way in which you can be as efficient as possible is adding vendor defaults to a vendor. You can add those defaults in. Those defaults will populate into an invoice, including the vendor's address, payment method, and any other predefined distribution. And we saw this, we saw how this made invoice entry a little bit easier earlier when we were entering in an invoice. So you'll definitely want to set up your vendor defaults, so that can streamline the in invoice entry process. Now another way to really make yourself as efficient as possible is through what we call distribution sets. These distribution sets in Financial Edge NXT are a way to streamline the process of creating and applying distributions to your invoices. So these sets, they act as templates, and they're gonna save you time and reduce errors when distributing invoice amounts across multiple either accounts or projects or other cost centers. What they're gonna do is they're gonna simplify the process of applying complex distributions. And you can build these distributions that's manually, so you can build them in the general ledger settings. Or if you do have some complex distributions, you can always use the distribution set creator Excel add in. And that Excel add in, can be found in the Microsoft Office Store. And you can use this to enter in data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which you can then submit as a new distribution set to Financial Edge NXT. This integration enables a flexible data entry in bulk, and it's gonna save you time, especially when you're entering in similar data. Now so far, we've talked about some of these different efficiencies. And I know that as you're thinking about all of these efficiencies, you're also probably wondering, is there a way for me to, when I am working in financial edge NXT, to be efficient with data entry. And I wanna give you just a few tips, that you can use. And even though Financial Edge NXT is browser based, there are still some navigation and data entry tips that you can take advantage of. And there are a couple of these that I actually really, really like. I like the one where I can multitask. I know that I'm not the only person that loves multitasking. So I like the one that I'm able to multitask, and I also like being able to, do a search on a page. Let me show you just a couple of these. So I mentioned I like multitasking. So let's take a look at the invoices list. And I don't know about you. Sometimes what I would want to do, when I'm looking at the invoices list, I might wanna look at more than one invoice at a time. So one thing that you can do is you can use the control key and hold down your control key, click the click, and that will allow you to bring up a separate window. And I might be looking at more than one invoice. So, again, notice that I can go from one invoice to another just by holding down my control key and clicking my mouse on my computer. It allows me to open, in a new tab for multitasking. Now another thing that I like to do, when it comes to building invoices and let's say I'm putting in an invoice. Let's say we're doing an invoice for Amazon. In a browser, tab is your friend, so we can always tab to our next row. And I noticed that when I tab through, I didn't put in my invoice number. I can always hold down my shift key and use the tab key to go backwards. So shift tab and add in my invoice number. Again, I'm gonna tab through. When I'm putting in my invoice date, I could type in the number for the date. So let's say it's the third versus the first. I could type that in, or I can tab over to my select date. Hit enter on my keyboard. That will allow me to bring up the calendar, and then I can select the specific date. I can tap through or tap and hit the enter key. We'll put in a $100. We'll say that we are ordering some books from Amazon. Again, simply tabbing through. Now let's say, for example, that I'm looking for something specific on this page. I can always hold down my control key and the f key. That will allow me to do a find on the page. So I'm using my browser's find function to quickly locate a word on the page. So, for example, I'm looking for books. This is going to highlight the description. This is also going to highlight the account number for my debit account. So a couple of different, options and things that you can do just to make your life a little bit easier when you're navigating within, Financial Edge NXT and you're looking at some of those potential data entry tips. I hope you've seen some tips so far that you're thinking, I can use that. Now let's take a look as we finalize. Let's take a look at some of those common errors that we wanna avoid. So what are some things that we wanna avoid doing, within Financial Edge NXT? So I know that we all are human. You know, things happen. And when we're doing invoice entry, there's always that possibility that we might select the wrong vendor. And when that happens, what do we do when we selected the wrong vendor and we've entered in an invoice on the wrong vendor's information? To correct an invoice that was accidentally entered under the wrong vendor, we'll need to delete the incorrect invoice and add a new invoice for the correct vendor. There isn't a specific way that we can directly change the vendor on an invoice. What you'll want to also do is look at the status of that invoice. If, for example, the invoice is unpaid, we can delete the incorrect invoice. If the invoice has been paid, then we'll want to void the check that paid the incorrect invoice. We can post the reversal to the general ledger if the payment was already posted. And then we go through the process of then deleting the incorrect invoice and then recreate it. Now what happens if, let's say, for example, you, have an invoice, but you put in the wrong invoice date? And the wrong invoice date could affect the payment timing in our financial reporting. So to correct that, what we wanna do is we want to, adjust the invoice. That involves reversing the incorrect entry and creating a new one with the correct date. Now sometimes it also depends on, like, what the status of the invoice is. If, for example, I put in the wrong invoice date, but I've not posted the invoice. I can always just edit the invoice. But if, for example, that invoice, has been posted, I want to make that adjustment to the invoice. What about if you've entered in an invoice and you've put in the wrong coding for the invoice? You know, I put in the wrong account number or the the wrong department or the wrong project. And that might misstate our financials and could complicate our audits and our budget tracking. So how do we correct a situation like that? So to correct the wrong coding for an invoice, the method that we're gonna use for this really depends on whether the invoice has been posted and or is paid. So just for example, if an invoice is unpaid and posted, we would make an adjustment. What I would suggest that you do, because the scenarios can be different based on whether that invoice is, either paid or posted, I would suggest taking a look at the knowledge base to look at the specific scenario that you might find yourself in. And then finally, what about if we have, a duplicate invoice? And you saw that I did have a duplicate invoice in the system. Well, Financial Edge NXT does have, business rules that help you to avoid, duplicates. Specifically avoiding a duplicate for, a for the same vendor. Like, I don't wanna have an invoice. Like, we already put that invoice in. I don't want to to pay that invoice twice. So your organization can set up your business rules so that you can avoid that possibility. You can set it up based on what you want to look for when you're looking for duplicate. So, for example, do I want it to look for for a duplicate amount? Do I want it to also look for a duplicate invoice number? So you can set those options up so that you can avoid those hassles. But the big thing that you can do to avoid these kinds of common errors is a best practice, and that best practice is approving invoices. If your organization has that approval process set up within Financial Edge NXT, this is gonna help you avoid some of those common errors. So you'll wanna institute invoice approval. It helps you to maintain financial control and accuracy. And, of course, we wanna avoid some of those human errors by having a second set of eyes on that invoice through the approval process. I hope this webinar has given you some things to really think about, and I hope this webinar has really wet your appetite to learn a little bit more about Financial Edge NXT and to little to learn a little bit more about invoices and how you can streamline the process of entering them. If you are looking for hands on training for Financial Edge NXT or invoices, I invite you to explore our curriculum in Blackbaud U Campus. You can use the search bar to search for a specific con for specific content. There's a particular type of, topic that you're looking for. You can search using the search bar, or you can use the product catalog to browse options by learning path. And to register for a class, just simply click on the course from the catalog list or from the learning path and select enroll. Again, I hope that what you've learned so far has really wet your appetite, and you're thinking, I wanna learn a little bit more about the process of expense management. I wanna learn a little bit more about the process of putting in those recurring invoices. I wanna learn how to, you know, actually put in a standard invoice. And we do have some fantastic instructors and some fantastic classes that are available. To learn more about the subject, you can always take our invoicing one zero one class, one zero two, or invoice request class. Thanks again for joining us. We've covered a lot today. Don't worry, though. We're gonna send up send out a follow-up email with the recording. Again, I hope that you're walking away with some practical ideas on streamlining your invoice entry. Have a great day, and happy invoicing. Thanks a lot, everybody, for attending.