Name: Save Valuable Time with Action Hubs in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®
Uploaded: 2026-09-16T16:00:44.507Z
Duration: 29 min 44 s
Description: Save Valuable Time with Action Hubs in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Transcript for "Save Valuable Time with Action Hubs in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®": Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you're joining us from today. We'd like to welcome you all to our session, save valuable time with Action Hunts in Financial Edge NXT. And, I'm just gonna give, at a minute, to for the attendees to stabilize the ones that are joining us, and we will be right with you. So, yes, tell us where you're from this morning. I'm in Texas. I'm in the desert, and I'm getting a lot of rain today. So I'm very, very happy about that because that's not very common. Although it is in the month of August, but, anyway, happy to happy to read you all this morning and, hope you're having a a great day so far. Okay. Alright. I think we're we're stabilizing with the the numbers here. So I'll go ahead and get started since we this is a thirty minute, presentation. So we don't have too much wiggle room. So, again, welcome. Like I said, today, you are joining us for for a quick webinar called, save valuable time with Action Hubs and Financial Edge. This is being brought to you on your browser and, of course, some some housekeeping that we wanna go over. You're gonna receive a recording of this, in case you miss any of it or you would like to to share with somebody in about twenty four to forty eight hours. You can download the slides, on the the document tab that, right those of you that are, on the chat, right next to it, you're gonna see a docs, option, and you should be able to see today's slide there. And then we have a q and a slide on I'm sorry, tab next to next to docs. And we have a great team behind the scenes right now that are ready to answer your questions. So they'll be happy to to do that. Please direct them in the q and a in the chat. It's likely that they're not gonna be able to to see them, so go to q and a for that. So audio for this webinar is broadcasted through your computer speakers. Maybe you have any issues with that, refreshing your browser helps, or let's go ahead and check those audio settings. And, yeah, I already set about the q and a. If you need to adjust your settings, use the cogwheel, to do that. But with that, again, I just wanna welcome you today. My name is Elizabeth Quintero. You I also go by I more go by by Liz, and I'm with the fun FE NXT Functional Experts. I've probably met some of you. We could do we do some calls, with customers and talking about some of the functionality of our modules. But, today, we're gonna be talking about, I think it's an exciting topic, these action hubs that are gonna that are designed to help our customers, have information at their fingertips, literally. It's information that we consider extremely relevant, that you won't have to be searching for. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. So what are action hubs in f e n x t? They're designed to help users focus on work that needs attention without having to navigate through multiple areas of the system. Right? So let's just talk about, if, you know, you're new to the system, something important like fiscal years. Right? Maybe, some of you are trying to figure out what's open, what's closed, or, you know, how to go back to a certain period. You know, you'd have to look some of that information up on where to go. You'd have to go to settings. Now we have some of these, new items will make it easier for you to go directly to that. Maybe certain accounts or periods that need to, you know, be looked at some areas. We're bringing that right up to you instead of having you have to go run a report. We're bringing that to the spotlight. So rather than acting as a traditional dashboard, Action Hubs surface prioritize tasks. So things that we all look for. Right? Alerts, approvals, exceptions, key financial signals in one place. I'm an accountant by profession. So in my previous life, I, was an accountant for nonprofits. And so I would go in the morning and, try to look at some of the main things. Like, for example, the bank balance. Where I would look at things that needed to be approved, things that needed to be posted, every day. And so I would have to go to different areas. And so we're hoping that with Action Hubs, it kinda brings it all together for you. And the beauty of it is that you have a say in how to customize those views. So just a quick introduction here. They're intended to surface items that need attention like I'm talking about. They highlight key financial signals and insights, reduce time searching through modules. They connect users directly to the related workflow or record and help finance teams prioritize and complete work more efficiently. So, again, bringing things to the surface so they don't fall, between the cracks. I why do they matter? Right? It identifies work that needs attention, displays role relevant tasks, insights, and next steps. So it not only like, it says, it's not just the dashboard. Like, here is the information. No. It's action based. So you get a a a hyperlink that actually takes you to the correct area that you need to go to to save you some time and some frustration. Right? Especially if you're new to f e n x t, it's it's it's a challenge, right, to try to find where everything is, and and that's with any software. Right? You you don't know where things are. So if this can take you to the right place, you're like, you know what? I'm gonna go to the overview to the hub and see. Action Hubs is synonymous with overview, so I'll be showing you exactly where to find, these action hubs that I'm talking about. Consumers spend less time searching across FE and XT and, sorry, customers. And you create more capacity for financial stewardship and decision making. Okay. So nothing like a a real life example. Right? So let me go ahead and start, sharing my screen so that I can give you you give me one second here. Alright. Okay. So we're in the Financial Edge home screen for our internal sample database here. And let's start talking about the home page first, because we are gonna go into action hugs. But this in itself is is an action hub because this is something that you can customize. So here you can see that I've got several different, blocks here that I can customize to show information that's important to me. So, I happen to look at these queries a lot for example, and so I'm going to put them here as my favorites. That's a quick example of of something that you can definitely customize. So, this one is at the top of my list, but, of course, I have multiple options that I can select. So if the payment status, for, my payment runs, for example, if I'm using payment assistant, and I wanted that first, I can always move these tiles around. Right? I can just drag and drop and get that changed the order. I think one of the most important ones for me is the chart health advisor. So I can move that up and bring this down in priority. So again, you have a say in which how what order you wanna display this. So you can say we have you can see that we have a lot of options here, at the homepage. And so you can make this and compress this, smaller and kinda just make it to fit the way that it works best for you. So here we have all kinds of information including, certain, reports here. We've got bank accounts. We've got so so the home screen kind of brings it all together. The closing assistant. And all of these are scattered through the different modules, which I'll show you where to go. But I did wanna show you that basic, component that you can decide how you want your homepage to look. You know, what is was priority to you? What is the first thing that you look at when you come in? So if you wanted to, do this, you can go to customize page. And so you can select basically here what tiles are you gonna wanna see. And so you have, a lot of information here. You can select by all tiles, and then I've selected them all. And so they're all showing up there, but you don't necessarily have to do that. If you don't want it to be that busy, you can certainly have a say in what you wanna show. So maybe you just wanna do, you know, your bank accounts, maybe your, favorite queries and any updates. And so you can just unselect all and and pick the ones that you want there. So So just wanted to give you a quick taste of of kinda what we're talking about today. With queries, for those of you that are, interested in in queries and having them readily available to you rather than having to go over here, you do have to, favorite them first. So if there's some queries that you do rely on, you would have to go to your queries menu, which is found over here under analysis. And we would go to query, and you would find the the one that you the ones that you consider favorites and the system will place them there for you. So let's just say that I wanted to include my, my monthly analysis here as one of my favorites. Because I've already instructed my on my homepage that I wanna display certain queries from my general ledger. There, it will put them there. So if I jump over to my page here and I go back to my home screen, because I told the system here in the settings that I wanted, queries from my general ledger to show up there, it'll display my favorites. Let me show you how I did that here. So show on home page. It's, general ledger and general ledger. I'm sorry. General treasury. So those are the two that I'm interested in having display. So anything that I wanna do as far as favorites, I just pick them, and it'll automatically update. And so here, it'll even take you there. You know how it took you straight to analysis. But here, if you wanna favorite a query directly from here, because you're like, you know what? That's a good one that I wanna be able to pick directly from my screen. We can, go straight to query from here and do exactly what I did earlier. So there's, one component. So, again, this is mine has everything, but you don't necessarily have to have to do that. Okay. So for the next section, we're gonna jump over into our general ledger. I think this is a really important one and one that we're very excited to share with you. We've got the overview here. So we wanna make sure we go and, review some of these areas. So first of all, I've got, a block here that tells me what needs attention. So I've got an out of balance batch. Again, like I mentioned earlier, it's not just about telling me what's going on. I can I can actually go to this batch? So if I click on it, it's gonna take me exactly to that journal entry batch that needs attention. And so it'll take me right to it. I can pull it up and figure out, what the problem is. Right? So that's one example of of how action hubs are helpful. I'm just gonna use my back button, and it should take me right back to where we were. And then I've got a 150 previous fiscal periods open. Not proud of that, but, it it it it works as a good example. Right? So if I was interested in taking care of those open periods, that's a lot of periods open, I can go to it and it will take me there just as an example. So it'll take me directly to that area that normally I would have to go to settings first, then go to general ledger, find fiscal years. But in this particular case, it took me directly to it. So one big big thing there. Alright. Chart Health Advisors, some of you, kept that at the home page, and maybe some of you have already been looking at it. I know, if I've met with any of you with a health check, I've brought this up, and I think it's it's a great thing because I, had to kinda tell customers like, hey. If you are interested in finding out, you know, your chart health, chart accounts, chart of accounts health status, you'd probably have to go in there and and do a quick assessment unless I did it for you where we go in there and basically display the total number of accounts you have versus the number of active accounts you have. And that would tell us a lot. Right? Because, kinda focusing on this point, why did we have this as a thing? Why the ChartHealthAdvisor? Well, because having that open too many open accounts causes some problems. Right? First of all, error prone. Right? It it opens up the possibility of more accounts, more errors, right, available. There might be two accounts that have similar names. Maybe, you know, a previous, controller maybe created an account for transportation, and you don't really wanna use the transportation account. You'd rather use travel or you'd rather use fuel, you know, get you, like, very specific and they didn't or the other way around. And so you'll have duplicate accounts. And so this will just come out and tell you before we'd have to go in there and do a filter, do all accounts, and then select active accounts, and then go through all the ones, that were, that hadn't had too much activity. So you'd have to run a general ledger report and see which accounts really hadn't had activity in the last couple of years, and then you'd have to go in there and, inactivate to get, like, to get rid of them. Right? To to put them away for a while because that also drains your system as far as data capacity. So it's a great idea. It's a great, recommendation that we always give customers. Let's try to keep your your, chart of accounts lean. Use only the accounts that are relevant. Right? Especially if you work, obviously, with fund accounting. There might be a fund that's pretty dormant right now because it's just not, being used. And so with it comes hundreds, maybe, you know, thousands of accounts that are completely dormant right now. So it's a really good idea to inactivate them. And so this the beauty of this is rather than having to do all that work, we bring the information right to you in a nice little, grade here. This one isn't it is okay. It's an 83 out of a 100. Right? So it's considered healthy. You start getting in the seventies, it'll start turning yellow on you. And then, of course, anything lower, it'll start going into the red, and it'll say it's it's not, too healthy. And so it'll give us a a health score. It'll give us a finding. So here, it's just coming out and telling me, hey. You have 622 dormant accounts that are ready for locking. That's great. So it's just coming out and telling me. I have 205 accounts that I've never used. And then, we've got a transaction code here that is, 24 values that have never been used. So then we we start to think, okay. So do we really need to have them? Let's go ahead and inactivate. So this is kinda just the summary, but if we go over to view all findings, you'll be able to see, everything else. And I'm just jumping back. Alright. Here. Alright. So on the usage, it'll give me a lot more information. Maybe a lot more than, well, we ever knew was possible. Right? So it'll talk about our funds, our accounts, our account codes, our departments. And so this will give you a really good idea, especially if you again, I keep saying if you're new to the org. I meet with a lot of you that are brand new to the org. Figure out, why did, you know, why do we have all these departments? Why do we have and so this will give you a lot of good statistical information. You can come back and say, okay, guys, do we really need to have all this? Can we clean some of this up? And so if you do decide to make a change like that, the great news is that you have these finding links that you can just go to. So if I'm interested in, maybe looking at some projects that I've never used, I can click on it. It'll take me right to this area, and I can say, you know what? I definitely think that we can, get rid of 455, 467, because I've I mean, there's no there's no need to have these. And it'll go ahead and do them inactive for me right then and there. So, yeah, we held we held a a few webinars based that we talked a lot about this, about the chart organ about the chart account. You say chart organizer. I mean, chart of accounts health. And we didn't have this back then when we when we gave that webinar. So, we had to kinda give you instructions on how to go and find that information yourself. And so this is a great tool. So anyway, for any I use the example of projects, but same thing if I go to accounts, same things if I go to anything else that it's bringing up to my attention, grant values. So again, big, big benefit of closing up your accounts. It really helps with the overall, you know, performance of the system. Not as much as fiscal years, which we'll also get to, but it is something that will, definitely help. So let's jump back over to our overview to our action hub, and let's go back to that topic. Fiscal years is another area that we talked about extensively during some of our webinars. And so this is one that now we can just go to. Right? Also, if you've been in a health check with me, we give you a list of accounts and and we, tell you exactly how many are open, how many are closed. Well, now here, we can go directly to this area. So if I wanted to see my open fiscal years, I can just go to that. And so if I click on this 18, it's gonna take me right there, and I'll be able to look at them and decide, like, yeah, maybe some of these do need to go from open to, to closed. Now, since we're in the area, I just wanna clarify. A year may show open, for those of you that do have a question on that. If I go to edit here, like, let's go to 2018. Yes. It's wide open. And I wanna just double check to see if that status changed, because some of these are let me just go back. Yep. They're completely open. So I was under the impression that some of them were soft close, but, it looks like they're all wide open. So that's not good. If if I was talking to a customer right now, I'd said we need to, soft close these periods, immediately. They're just, you know, opening up for for asking for trouble. Right? Somebody could post to these older periods, and so we definitely don't wanna do that. And so if you wanna just, if you're not prepared to permanently close your years, which is you're gonna find that here under close, then, we, would recommend immediately that these get soft close. So what I'm doing here now is considered a soft close. And so this is just gonna prevent data entry into your periods, and that is just great practice. That's something that you definitely wanna do for pretty much any year that is not the current year that you're working on. We recommend that you, you know, close those periods up. Now remember that a soft close, what I'm doing right now, I can just like I'm closing it, I can go back and reopen those periods. So if you did need to go back and revisit a certain year, you can always go back and do that at any time and take care of that. Okay. So this will bring your eyes right to the problem, and it will allow you to take care of some of that, information. We also have a closing assistant that we also wanna talk about. We've got the periods that will kind of relate to, what we just talked about. Right? So we wanna process this the the transactions for all subledgers before we close these periods. And so having said that, it will give you that information right here and there. So it will tell us payables has one unposted has one unposted transaction, and it will give me the rest of the modules, kinda like the status. So receivables fixed assets. So it looks like we don't have, too much of a problem here except for payables. So if I did wanna close that period, I would have to, go in there and post first. And so this will save you a lot of problems because, again, going back to other times that we've discussed this about reconciling subledgers to general ledger, number one problem is unposted transactions. How can we find those? Will you have to run reports, filter by not yet posted, and that'll give you the information. Guess what? With the closing assistant, it'll kinda just tell you this is what's not posted yet. So you'll be able to see that right away without having to go search for it through reports. And then, if you did need to go to certain reports, then we've got a link that'll take you right to it. Right? So if you're kind of in that mode, like, hey. Let's figure out what what we haven't posted yet, and you do need to run a report, this would be a great way, to take you to that shortcut. Okay. So that's the, general ledger, hub or action hub or overview. And so, hopefully, you all can and can, get great use out of it. You will be able to move these around as well if you'd rather, you know, move these out, you know, in a certain way. Absolutely. And then you've got some related links here, and recently accessed records. So that should also help. And then great news, the general ledger settings are right there for you. So a nice convenience. So a nice home page for your general ledger, without you having to search. Same thing. We're gonna take you over to the treasury. Treasury has its own overview. This one's a little bit, simpler. It doesn't have as many, you know, moving parts as the general ledger one, but we do have a the bank account, home screen. So this will give you your current balance per the register and your online balance. For those of you that do have the, bank feeds going, this will give you that information straight out, and then it will give you the last time it was updated and the last time it was reconciled. Again, not good. That's that's a long time. So, again, this is just a a sample database. So definitely, I need to catch up on those reconciliations. And then, this is where, when when you first open it up, you are not gonna have any banks there. You actually have to tell the system what banks you wanna include there. So I'm gonna go ahead. You can have up to five. So I'm gonna add another one here, and I'm gonna select it from my list. And I'm gonna select my operating account, and I'm gonna save that. And it'll bring that right up to my screen. Same thing for credit cards. For those of you that do have credit cards, in your system, connected here, I selected the Bank of America one. I've got my current balance, online balance. Again, this is per the register. This is accounting for transactions that have been, recorded already, transactions. And then this is the online balance. So if I wanna connect more I mean, sorry, display more, I can just go here and select from my list. Alright. So that would be the treasury bar. Again, related links, settings, treasury settings, recently accessed records. And lastly, payables, also a very valuable, overview page. We can have some really good shortcuts here. First of all, let's take a look at our needs attention bar, which is always here at the top. We've got, six invoices to pay. And so we can select them here by just go to the arrow or to hit click on that on that, hyperlink. It will take me to directly where I had kind of initiated this, payment run for operating account. And when I go in here, I've got all my selections, And you can see that it'll give me take me straight there to the to what needs to be paid. I excuse me. I did the back and it took me back to treasury. Let me just jump back to payables here. And then we do have another area that we need to look at. We've got we've got to review five payment runs. So this is for those of you that are using payment assistant. If you are the person that needs, to approve these payment runs, it will give you that here. I've got a rejected payment run. So these are all, pretty much all related to, payment. So this is something that needs attention right away. Let's see. We've got the payment by status. So, again, the the number of payments. I've got all my bank bank accounts here and, again, related to payment payment assistance. So, because this is a sample database, all of the payment runs that we've done through payment assistant are all awaiting funds. So no real money there. So we've got our related links and then what we recently accessed. If I go over here to my new, it'll take me directly to action items, going to do a brand new a new invoice, a new vendor, etcetera. So this will give you some, some information there that will be helpful. And if I go directly to payments, yeah. So this is all mainly related to payment assistant. For those of you, this will take me to my payment assistant run. So, okay. Let me just look at this here. Yeah. Okay. So just to summarize, that went by fast. Go go to our home page and customizing. I did forget to mention, of course, the the updates. You can move them off to the side, but, don't fail to read them. A lot of new features being released right now. So when when you have a minute, just look through through these updates because they are very helpful. Just 08:31. We've got some things in in, limited availability. Soon to come, I'm sure we'll be doing a webinar soon on, a subledger reconciliation, some some tools that are gonna help out with that. And, document intelligence. Right? It's here. It's not coming. It's here. And so we're excited to to share some of those enhancements, with you that are gonna help your process along. So, for any of you that that joined late, just, here in the home page, remember that you can customize, and this is you're in the driver's seat when it comes to that. Okay. So I'm gonna stop sharing here. I believe that, those are all the the slides that, we have. I'm just gonna run here through. Alright. Okay. So, yeah, to summarize again, please go to your overview. Get that customized the way that you wanna see it, what information matters to you. One of the things that we mentioned in the slides was that it's, role based. Right? So there might be things that are not that relevant to you because you're not in charge of closing fiscal years or anything. That doesn't mean that there aren't some valuable queries that you wanna have at your fingertips or some valuable reports. And so that will definitely save you time. So, alright. So, anyway, if there's any issues with you not seeing some of these certain things, please, let let, let our customer support know, and we'll help you out. I saw a couple of comments there. But, I think I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up. I think, we're a little bit, we're just on time. We're a little bit early. So we're gonna I'm gonna leave this session open till the the end of the hour, so that you can put in, more questions through q and a if there's some that maybe the team hasn't gotten to or if you think of something right now towards the end of the of the conversation. But thank you so so much for being here. We really appreciate you taking the time to invest in in this and learn, as much as you can. We're here to help. So please reach out and let us know, any other questions that you have. So have a great rest of your day, and we will see you soon. Thank you.