Name: Building and Managing Budgets in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®
Uploaded: 2025-04-08T16:30:03.727Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Building and Managing Budgets in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Transcript for "Building and Managing Budgets in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®": Hello, everyone. I want to get you welcome to our building and managing budgets in financial edge NXT today. We're gonna start in just a few minutes, but for those of you who are already connected, welcome. I wanna direct you to the docs and q and a sections while you're waiting here. There's lots of great content in the docs. We've got the slides for today. We've got an FAQ document. We've got links to classes that we're gonna talk about in a little bit. And then we're gonna be using the q and a eventually here today. But as long as you're already here, got a couple extra minutes before we get started, go ahead and check out that docs section. And again, it's got our slides that we're gonna be covering for today that you can download as well as a great FAQ document. So I'm going to go back off camera for a couple minutes, let a few more people get joined, and we'll start in just a few minutes here. Alright. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to those of you who are just joining our webinar for today, FE NXT Building and managing budgets. We are so happy to have you here today. So far, we've got 715 of y'all joining, so we're really glad that you are connected. I'm sure we're gonna have a few more people joining as we get started. So, let me start with a little intro here, then we'll get into a little bit of housekeeping, and then we'll jump into our exciting content for today. So intro for me, I am a senior instructor with Blackbaud University. I've been with Blackbaud University for about five years now. I love it. We're gonna be talking a lot about Blackbaud University today because we offer a ton of training content that we wanna make sure that you can access after class here today. And so a little intro from me, I am based in Austin, Texas. I've been a teacher. I've taught preschool all the way through high school. I like to say sometimes that teaching preschool and high school kind of feel like the same thing on certain days. Some of you might know what I'm talking about. I've also been an education program director. I had a chance to teach overseas. I worked for an education research organization. So I definitely have a huge appreciation for the work that all of you do. I know y'all work very hard, so I'm hoping you're gonna see some helpful information today in our webinar and we're also gonna be able to direct you to additional resources to help you out, with your day to day, work tasks that you have. Little fun facts then, I've had a chance to visit over 20 countries. I love traveling, got a chance to study overseas, and I also love Thai food. I could probably eat it every day if I had the chance. Alright. So with that intro underway, getting a few more people joined. Welcome if you have joined in the last few minutes. Let me do a little bit of housekeeping here. So I wanna let you know that today's session is a webinar with a large audience. Our current count is 829, which means that we are gonna make sure to give a good introduction to a lot of budget functionality today. We're gonna look at a lot of different things, but also this isn't necessary to place them for very specific questions. Now we do have the q and a available for questions. We've got a lot of great Blackbaud people here today to try to answer those questions, but they may also be directing you to other resources, things like our product update briefing that's coming up, things like our health center, things like our training classes. So please feel free to put questions in the chat, but also keep in mind that we are covering current functionality for today. We are not, unfortunately, able to answer any forward facing questions, but we will direct you to that product update briefing. Happy to give you that link, in the q and a. And, also, you can just Google product update briefing, Blackbaud product update briefing. It is a great chance to see what is coming out in FE NXT over the next six months. So, again, today, we are covering currently existing functionality, but we're also gonna be able to direct you to our Blackbaud University classes. Our Blackbaud University classes are a max of 25 people. Can you imagine from 884 here today to just 25 max at our Blackbaud University classes? That's where you can dig into the content. You get a chance to practice the functionality that we're looking at today, as well as answer or ask questions to a live instructor who can answer those questions live in front of you. So please keep all that in mind as we go through our content today. So let's go ahead and jump in here. What we've got planned today, we're gonna look at creating budget scenarios. We're gonna look at editing budgets, finalizing and adjusting budgets, some other budget highlights, and more training options. Now put this into your brain right now because I'm also gonna ask you if you do have questions about future subjects. For example, right now, you are wondering about finalizing and adjusting budgets. Please hold that question until we get there because I might be covering it, which would be fantastic. And then our q and a moderators can focus on some of those other things that are coming through. So this is the content that we are gonna cover today. Also, as I mentioned earlier, if you look in the doc section, you should see the ability to download our slides for today. So that is a great way to be able to go back to some of this content if you miss something somewhere along the way. I like to put a lot of screenshots in my presentation. So even though there's not a live demonstration today, there's a ton of screenshots for you to be able to see what things look like in that presentation. And, also, there will be a recording of this session. So, again, if you miss something, you can use the same thing same link that you used to access today's section to all goodness session to access the recording after the fact. So, again, if you miss something, definitely use that PowerPoint download, use that recording to be able to go back and get some of those question answered or review anything that we touched on today. Alright. Here we go then. Let's look at creating budget scenarios. So with our budget scenarios, if you're not familiar with the term budget scenario, it's basically an instance of your organization's budget for a given fiscal year or maybe a time period if you maybe do a quarterly budget or something like that. Every budget scenario will have a budget scenario ID, which is basically the name or the title of that budget so you can keep everything straight. Is this our final budget? Is this our operating budget? Is this, maybe for a specific department or location or something like that? So when you are creating a budget, you are basically creating a budget scenario, And there's gonna be steps to creating that budget scenario. First, you decide that budget scenario ID. You can select an existing one because you can each use each, scenario ID once per fiscal year. So you might have a final scenario for each fiscal year, or you can always create a new one if you need a new name for a new type of budget. Any of the existing ones will appear in a drop down menu along with an option to add in a new scenario. So you're gonna choose your scenario ID, then you're gonna choose your budget type. Are you doing this for a full fiscal year, or do you want a very specific period range? Now let me pause here really quick. It may be that our docs are loading in a little bit slowly. So if you're not seeing those right away, don't worry. By the end, those docs should be there. So for some reason, you don't have that, hand or you don't have that full docs option, we'll make sure you get it by the end of our session today. Alright. So you're determining your budget type, full fiscal year or period range, and then if you choose fiscal year, which fiscal year? Or if you choose a period range, which period range? Then the best part of this, I think, is that you have the ability to copy from previous scenarios. This can be a really huge time saver to be able to copy from previous budgets that you have created. So let's look at the different options because there are actually four different options to be able to copy from for those previous to be able to copy that information over. So we're gonna see you have the ability to start with a blank budget. You can copy from a previous scenario the budget values, copy from a previous scenario the actuals, or copy from a previous scenario none. We'll talk about what that actually looks like. So first, starting with the blank budget. This would be kind of the most basic thing here. Let me make sure that's coming through. Alright. So when you're setting up your budget scenario, so you can see here on this slide, I've selected my scenario ID, the planning scenario. Then I've selected my budget type, a fiscal year. I selected the fiscal year that I want to create that budget for. So those were those three steps that we had on the previous slide. And then if I wanted to start with a completely blank budget, I would not select the checkbox to copy from a previous scenario. Now you might not do this very often, especially if you wanna be efficient, but it's available if you just wanna start completely from scratch. You can create a new budget scenario, but do not copy from a previous scenario. So that is an option, but maybe something you're gonna do a little bit more commonly is to copy from a previous scenario, and maybe you wanna copy the budget values from a previous scenario. So in this example, again, we are deciding our scenario ID, we're deciding fiscal year or period range, but then we're choosing to copy from a previous scenario. And with this one, what we're going to decide is which previous scenario do we want to copy from. Do we want a copy from last year or the year before? And this might depend on how similar your upcoming budget might be to a past budget. So we're gonna choose to copy our budget values. What that's going to do then is when we create our new budget scenario, we're gonna have all of the account numbers that were in that previous budget and all of the budget values that were in that previous budget. So it gives us a pretty strong place to start from when we are doing that, to be able to copy from that previous scenario and copy in those budget values. Now we're gonna talk about then, of course, we probably want to be able to edit those budget values in different amounts and distributions and things like that, so we will make sure to get to that as well. But this is one way to get at least some information loaded in your budget to start. But that's not the only way to get some previous information loaded into your budget to, to start. You could also copy from a previous scenario, but copy the actuals. So maybe I am looking at creating a budget for next fiscal year, and we're already a few fiscal periods into 2025. So maybe I wanna use those actuals. Maybe I feel like those are a little bit more accurate than our budget numbers from this year. So, again, I'm choosing my scenario ID. I'm choosing fiscal year or fiscal period. I'm copying from a previous scenario, but now instead, I am copying the actuals from whatever fiscal period. Now it could be I wanna copy from last fiscal year, then I could copy over all the actuals. So, again, some of this will depend on what you are copying from. But if I am copying maybe from this fiscal year, well, what I will I wanna do is the rest of the year because I only have three fiscal periods worth of actuals. Well, I could decide, do I want to forecast the budget based on those actuals, or do I wanna copy budget values for the rest of the fiscal year? So we've got lots of ways for you to be able to customize what might get pulled into a new budget scenario based on the information that you already have. Are you starting with nothing? Are you starting with your budget from a previous fiscal year? Are you starting with your actuals from a previous fiscal year? And then what are you gonna do for the rest of your budget scenario? But we do actually have one more, and that is copy from a previous scenario none. Now this none can be a little bit confusing, so let's talk about this for a minute. What we're doing with this is we are copying none of the values, but we are still copying in the account numbers. So maybe if you're thinking, you know, I'm probably gonna be budgeting for the same account numbers that I budgeted for in a previous fiscal year, but we just have a totally different budget this year. Maybe we've expanded, maybe we've split, whatever it might, be. And so I still want the same account numbers, but the budget is gonna be very different, our initial amounts and how we're distributing. So then I could choose to copy none of the budget values, but I'm still bringing over all of the account numbers. So lots of different options here that we have to be able to decide what we want to be able to pull into this budget. So that is creating our budget scenario. So creating the budget scenario is getting our budget record created and deciding what do we wanna start with. Are we starting from scratch with nothing? Are we starting with pulling in a few things, or are we trying to pull in everything? And, again, everything I just showed you, all of those screenshots, that is in the docs section. You can download this, PowerPoint. Now we are now up to 999 participants, so I just wanna remind everybody who came a little bit late and everyone who is already here. Just, again, a little bit of that housekeeping. So first of all, if you came late, welcome. We are glad you're here. All of this session is recorded. So if you missed the first part, don't worry. You can use the same link that you used to access our session today to be able to go back and access the recording, rewatch it, review any of that information. Also, the docs section, as I said, has our PowerPoint, so make sure you check out that docs tab. It looks like there are a lot of questions that are coming through in the q and a that are actually covered in that docs tab. And so any of the content I'm covering today, make sure to get these slides downloaded so you can review it. Make sure to go that to that recording. Also, there are classes offered on a lot of this. Those are in those docs tab as well. And, again, this, presentation has lots of screenshots, so that's a great thing to go back to. Also, quick reminder for anyone who missed it, we are only covering existing functionality. So we are not trying to predict the future. However, we do have something called a product update briefing. You could go to Blackbaud site. You could just Google Blackbaud product update briefing. It is happening in May, so actually in about one month. And that's where we do give forward looking what we are working on, what we're planning to roll out for the next six months. So we won't be answering that at all here today. So if you've got that question, hang on to it, register for that pub. And, also, even if you can't attend that, product update briefing live in person, you can get a recording of it. So, again, any questions that are forward facing, we won't be able to answer those today. Make sure to register for that product update briefing. Alright. So let's move on now to editing our budgets. So we've got the budget scenario created. We've loaded it from past budgets, whatever it might be. Now we need to make sure this accurately reflects whatever we're budgeting for. So on any budget record, up at the top, you've got the edit button. What that does is gonna allow you to load in more accounts, load in single accounts, change distributions, things like that. So let's look at a few of those options. Once you click on the edit button, it is going to change your screen to the edit mode. You can see it looks a little bit different, a little bit the same, and then you've got different ways to now edit this budget. So the first one is maybe you want to load in multiple accounts. Maybe you've added in some new accounts to your chart of accounts since the previous budget. Maybe you've changed some accounts, made some inactive, some active. Maybe you've added on an additional optional segment for a certain depart, a location, or something like that. And so you wanna be able to load in multiple accounts. So for the top in edit mode, you can click on load accounts, and then you can decide which accounts to load in. So you can filter down. So once you click on load accounts, you'll have the ability to add in a filter. Then you could filter by account, fund, custom field, categories, account codes, optional segments. So here in this example, department is our optional segment, and then you can choose which accounts you want to load in. What it's then going to do in your current budget record is load in all of those accounts with a zero total budget. Right? Because there are new accounts, we're added in, we don't have any budget to pull from for this one. So then we'll get to, in a minute, adding in that total budget and being able to distribute that. So we'll be able to add in those accounts. That way, multiple accounts at the same time. You also have the ability to add in individual accounts. So if you're thinking, I just got one account that I need to add in. We've added an extra department or we've just created this new account in our chart of accounts. We can add in just a single account. So we'll add in, gives us a new line, and then we can find that account. So a single account, again, added with a zero budget. We're gonna get to adding in those budget amounts and be able to distribute those different budget amounts as well. Alright. So then let's see here. Once we have these new accounts added in, we then want to be able to distribute these amounts. So, whether it is a new account that we've added in or maybe it's an existing account that was already there, but we wanna change those budget amounts, we can now distribute that across our different fiscal periods. And there are going to be three ways to be able to distribute this that are gonna be helpful depending on that account line, depending on what your organization needs to be able to do. And those three options are to distribute evenly, distribute by percentage, or apply a budget distribution. With distribute evenly, pretty straightforward, splits the total budget amount equally across all fiscal periods. And it doesn't matter what exactly your fiscal year is, if your fiscal year is a calendar year, if it's a school year, if it's something else. Whatever those fiscal periods happen to be, it will split that total total budget equally across those fiscal periods. Or you could distribute by percentage. Maybe you have something that's a little bit customized, you know, if you're a school, perhaps more of your budget is during the school year, less during the summer. You can kind of use percentages. And this, basically, with these percentages, it uses any current percentage of period, budget over the distributed to distributed the sorry. Distribute the updated total budget, which basically means if you already have a distribution that follows a certain percentage, but then you change your total budget amount and you choose to distribute by percentage, it will apply those same percentages. So you don't have to go back in and recalculate the percentage based on the existing the new total budget. So whatever percentages it's already using it is then going to put in those based on those total budgets. Finally, you can apply a budget distribution, which is a custom budget distribution. So if you wanna be able to have, kind of a specific distribution that you can use repeatedly over multiple fiscal years and multiple different situations, you can then, create those custom budgeted templates. And this is something that's in that FAQ document that, hopefully, this is going to be loading in suit if you're not seeing it in those documents yet. And so with this, you can say, alright. For our organization, we need a budget distribution that's quarterly. We want 25% in q one, '20 '5 percent in q four, etcetera. And then you can apply that to any of your budget lines. So, again, depending on the account, depending on what your distributions are, depending on the scenario for your organization, you've got these different ways to distribute that budget. Now a couple tips and tricks for this. When an issue occurs in a cell row, a cell becomes highlighted in red and a warning appears. Hover over the curve of the cursor over the error message for an explanation. You are going to see this if you have changed your total budget, but you have not redistributed that new budget amount. So whether you've increased the budget or decreased the budget, if you have not redistributed, you still have your old distributions in each individual fiscal period, but you've got a new total budget. So it's gonna let you know, wait a second. Your distributions don't match your total budget, and then you can use one of those, distribution methods to be able to redistribute this new total budget amount. Also, a little efficiency tip to offer you here. When you are editing a scenario and you're saying, okay. I've got these new budget amounts. I need to distribute things. You can apply the same distribution to multiple line items. So you can select all the lines that you wish to distribute. Then down on the bottom now, so you're gonna find a little bit different spot. Down in the bottom left, you're gonna click on distribute, and you've got those same three options. So if I'm thinking, alright. I've changed the total budget of these four different account lines, and I don't wanna individually click distribute evenly distribute evenly, I can just select the checkbox next to them and then down in the bottom left, do that distribute evenly to all of those at the same time. Alright. So I'm gonna cover one more piece of editing budgets, and then I'm gonna think I'm gonna pause for a second and see if there are any questions, kinda common questions that have been coming through in the q and a because we are doing great on time. Any common questions that have come through in the q and a, and we'll see if we can get some of those answered here as well, maybe some bonus content for today. Alright. So one more thing to cover before we get to those q and a, and anybody in the q and a team, if you wanna put those through in the chat for me, I can kinda keep track of those and see what I can answer for today. So increase and decrease. This can be another great efficiency tool if you are trying to take an existing budget and maybe, wonderfully increase it. Right? You got a new grant, something like that, or maybe possibly decrease it. You can do that to multiple accounts at the same time. So this is another approach to editing that can maybe be a little bit more efficient because then you don't have to go into each individual account line and increase this salary account and increase this salary account and increase this salary account. So with that increase and decrease, they are gonna function the same way. When you go into that functionality, you can decide, are you going to increase or decrease based on accounts, based on projects, or based on grants? So maybe you're increasing all of the accounts that have to do with a certain or all of the budget lines that have to do with certain projects or grants or accounts. Then you can decide, am I increasing the total budget, or am I just increasing specific period budgets? Maybe it's an example of we have just added on a summer program, and so we need to increase the budget for the periods during the summer. So rather than the whole budget, we're just increasing those summer fiscal periods. And then you get the option of increasing by amount or by percent. So, again, depending on how maybe your funding has changed or something like that, you have the ability to change that amount or that percent. And then you can decide what do we need to filter it down even farther? So we've already maybe focused on accounts, projects, or grants, but maybe it's not all projects that we're trying to increase. Maybe it's just specific projects. So this gives you the ability to increase or decrease based on these different filters, again, trying to help your, budgeting process, editing process be a little bit more efficient. Alright. So I'm gonna pause there, like I said, before we get on to our next unit of finalizing and adjusting and see if there is anything that we might be able to cover here. Can you track budgets using custom fields or transaction codes? So on your actual budget record, there are not custom fields or transaction codes. Those are gonna be specific to your account. So, your accounts have custom fields, project has custom fields. So the other record types are gonna have custom fields. And then transaction codes are used for actually doing the transactions, and you can pull them into reporting income statements and things like that. You can filter things like income statements on those transaction codes, but those are not something that we put into the actual original budget record. So thank you for that question. Can the names of budget scenarios be changed or edited? So once your budget has been created hold on one moment. My screen just went a little bit crazy there. Once you have created your budget, it is, going to be using that scenario ID. So if you needed to have a different scenario ID, you'll have to create a new budget record. So there isn't a way to go into an existing budget scenario and be able to change it to something else. You could maybe make a let me just double check here. I'm kinda looking at my other screen at the same time. So you would be creating a new budget kind of pulling in that same information. And, yes, absolutely. Great question about merging. We are gonna get to that in that kind of other budget highlights. That's where I'm gonna call that out, that, there is the ability to merge budgets as well as that Excel option. So we're gonna look at those in Uniphore. I know that isn't super clear here, but we're gonna look at or discuss both merging and that, Excel add in in that other budget highlights. Alright. I think I also saw come through in the q and a a little bit. Can we budget by I saw some things about projects and things like that. You do have the ability to be able to budget by project. So you can take an account number or account line and say, on that account line, I wanna distribute this amount to this particular project. And then when you're viewing your budgets, you can view by account, you can view by project. So when you are budgeting, you can budget by account, You can budget by project. You can also budget by grant if that's something that your organization needs to budget by, needs to be able to track. And I was just gonna see if one of my screenshots kinda share that here a little bit. A little bit. You can see there's a project ID column in this screenshot. We don't have this particular budget budgeted by project, but you can see there there is that availability, that you can see here on that screenshot. Alright. I think we are doing good. Please keep the questions coming through in the Q and A and, people in the Q and A, like I said, we're doing really good on time so if you want to throw anything through to me, in our internal chat here happy to try to get to some of those other questions as well. But in the meantime, let's move on to finalizing and adjusting budgets. And so with this, this is maybe one of the tools in budgeting that's used a little bit less often, but is an incredibly useful tool. So if you haven't heard of it or you haven't tried it, you're not quite sure what it is, it can be really helpful to keep your data clean. Because who does not love clean data, especially when we're going to report out later on. We wanna make sure we can trust our data as much as possible. So with finalizing our budgets, finalizing a budget locks the budget after it's been approved so that any changes are going to require an adjustment. We're gonna talk about adjustments as well. But, basically, what finalizing does is it says, okay. If anybody wants to make a change to this budget, it is going to be tracked. Because any changes up until this point, if we're just editing the budget, FE NXT is not gonna be tracking those because there's probably gonna be a lot of changes. You do have the ability to add in notes to your budget for any changes you want to be able to track, But FE NXT is gonna say, you're doing a you know, there's a lot of things happening when you're trying to land on your final budget. But once that budget has been approved, maybe you've got a board of directors or board of trustees, they have approved it, this is our working budget moving forward, then we want to go in and finalize that budget to lock it in and require that any changes get tracked. So when you're on your budget record, under the more option, you can choose finalize, and then f e n x t is gonna give you this helpful little pop up. Do you want to finalize your budget? Because you cannot undo the finalizing of budget of a budget. There's no unfinalizing in budgets in f e n x t. So you wanna make sure you are ready for this. Now the good news is you can still make changes, but the process is gonna be a little bit different for making changes. Think of the idea of changing a journal entry after it's been posted or not. You can still make changes. It's just gonna look a little bit different. So kind of a similar idea here where after we finalize the budget, we can make changes. It just that, it's gonna look a little bit different. So let's see what that looks like. Alright. So if we have finalized a budget and then we go in and edit it, we're still gonna have an edit button. But as soon as we click on that edit button, it's going to say, hey. You're about to adjust a finalized budget. What is the reason for the budget adjustment? So it's requiring us to put in a reason and your organization can decide kind of policies and procedures around how much information we wanna put there. And then we will have the ability to edit like normal. So we click on that edit button. It's gonna give us that pop up, and then we'll go through our regular editing process just like we covered in the previous unit where we can add in accounts, we can change the total budgets, we can redistribute, we can do same exact editing processes that we did before, but we had to put in the reven. But then, FE NXT is going to give us a bonus feature here because this has been a finalized budget. It is now going to track any of those adjustments for us. And this is another one of my favorite things with budgeting in FE NXT is that it is going to if it's a finalized budget, up at the top, you're now going to see a little adjustments link. You can click on that adjustments link, and it will show you what changes or adjustments have been made by who. So in this one, I am the culprit of this change and what the change was, the total amount of that change, positive or negative. And then you can even click even further in and see what that adjustment looked like across your fiscal periods. So if I click into that blue link for that change, I'm able to see the original and the adjustment for the total budget and for each of the fiscal periods for any of those accounts that I changed. So this is the huge benefit to finalizing a budget even if it can feel a little bit scary. Finalizing the budget because then FE NXT will track those changes for you, and then you can also report on those changes. That's another thing that's, outlined a little bit more in our FAQ document. There is a budget adjustments report and a budget adjustments journal. Plus, when you run an income statement, you could have a column for original budget and a separate column for adjusted budget and a separate column for the difference between those two budgets. So when you finalize the budget, you get a whole lot more reporting functionality, and, also, you're kind of protecting that original approved budget in the first place. Alright. Let's then pause for a second and see any, questions on that finalizing or adjusting or anything else from the q and a team that you want to? I think what we're gonna do here is I've got one more, unit to cover. Yes. Okay. And let me go back to so somebody had asked the question earlier about can you use transaction codes in a budget, and I wanted to add in a little bit of a clarification. You can use one specific transaction code in budgets if you are using one of your transaction codes for grants. Now the good news at Blackbaud University, we have a whole class on grants in f e n x t, and we're gonna talk about Blackbaud University before we wrap up here and all of our lovely course offerings. But, you can do a budgeting for a transaction code, but only specifically for a transaction code that is linked with grants. So there's also that piece of actually linking it with a grant record, which is all covered in our ninety minute grants class. Alright. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about a few other options. Then I'm gonna spend just a couple minutes. I'm gonna try to jump into a screen share to show you a few of the things here that might be helpful to see kind of a little bit live. I think we should have some sex success with this, and then we'll, go back and kind of make sure we close out with our Blackbaud University classes. Alright. And one more time here, I just wanna call out, keep the questions coming in the q and a. If anybody did join a little bit later, we are only covering existing functionality, not forward facing functionality, but we will try to, answer what we can. And, also, we might be referring you to some of our great Blackbaud University classes. Okay. So let's look at a few other budget highlights here. First of all, merge budgets. We asked about this. Here it is. You can merge multiple budget scenarios into one destination scenario. For example, merging department budgets into one organization budget or locations or different grade levels. Now with merging budgets, they do have to all be in the same fiscal year. I can't merge budgets across multiple fiscal years. It need to be in the same fiscal year. And, also, once you merge budgets, that is a new independent budget. Meaning, if I make any changes to the original scenarios, it's not gonna automatically update the merge scenario. So the merge scenario is now separate from the original ones, which means if I make, changes to the to the original or source budgets, I would then need to remerge and kind of replace or overwrite the merge budget. So absolutely doable, pretty straightforward, but you do have to keep in mind they need to be the same fiscal year. And if any changes are made to the original source budgets, you would want to remerge and overwrite the new budget. Also, there are lots of budget reports that you can run. There's a budget versus actual, budget adjustments journal I mentioned, budget adjustments report, budget distribution reports, plus, of course, in any income statement, you can pull in a column for your budget for that particular time period. Then many of you have been asking about our Microsoft Excel add in, and we do have that is in the FAQs. So make sure you get that FAQ document downloaded, or you can just go to the help center and look it up also. It's a great direct way to go there. There is a way to take your budgets in Excel and get them easily loaded into FENXT. And so you could think of this kind of like importing. It's not exactly importing, but it's that same idea where we've got our data in one place in Excel and we want to get it loaded into FENXT. So you can add budget data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and you click submit and it creates a new budget, you can also use this add in to update an existing one. Now when you get a chance to take our classes, you do get a chance to see this live in action. So, any of these things that you want to get more information on, we cover this in our classes. You get a chance to practice some of it, see live demonstrations of all of it as well. One other thing to cover and then like I said, I'm gonna jump into the database and kind of click through a few of these things as well. You can see different budget views and I kind of alluded to this earlier, but when you're looking at your budget you can view your budgets by accounts or by projects or by grants. You can decide do you want to see dates in the column header? Do you want to include decimals? Do you want to show the column total in the footer? Lots of different ways for you to decide exactly what you want that particular budget record to look like when you are viewing it. Alright. And so let's go I'm gonna go over into, a live demo here just for maybe about five minutes or so. Then we're gonna go through our classes, and then we'll kinda stick around and see if we can get through kind of answer any more of the q and a for those of you that have some more time to stick around here. So let me try my screen share. If oh, I'm gonna undo the slides, I think, and hopefully get this to cooperate. And if anyone in the chat wants to remind me of this process, I don't have to use it in every webinar, and so I might I'm gonna try this, y'all. I'll get you back if for some reason something changes. There we go. That was it. Okay. I'm gonna give that a second to load for y'all. You should be seeing there we go. This is a live view of a date of our sample database with our budgets list. So this is where I'm gonna start out. Now the very first thing, probably many of you are aware of this, but I just wanna make sure everyone knows how to access the help center because everything we talked about today in the q and a, in our FAQs is in the help center. And so up in the top right here, we've got the lovely question mark. And what's really fabulous about this is when you click on it, it's gonna start with the information based on the page that you're on. So I don't have to try to navigate to budget information. It's already all right here, and I can scroll through and view things here. Or I've got this little pop out that can take this information and pull it up full screen for me for all of my budget information. So I've got all of the budget stuff here. I've got budget filters, adding in budgets. We talked about that budget scenarios. Here's that copy and forecasting. So I just saw that come through. Is there a way to forecast budgets in the q and a? Yep. Here it is in the help center. Also, this link here, budget creator Excel add in, this is what many of you are looking for. So there's always gonna be two steps for this. First, you have to enable that budget creator add in. This might need to involve your database administrator. You kinda need permissions to get this going. And then you also need to, get it connected to f e n x So there's kind of two steps. You need to get it in Excel, then you need to get it connected to FE and XT. And then you have the ability to use that to create your budgets in FE and XT. And I think I also saw it come come through in the q and a. We've mentioned it a few times, but this session is recorded. And the way that you access it after the fact is the same link that you use to join the class today. That link will take you to the recording after the fact as well. Plus in the docs section, you've got all of the slides for today, so two great resources to be able to go back to. Now a couple things to point out here just so you can see where they live that we talked about in class, in our today in our webinar today. Here's where you've got your merge scenarios, so right at the top of the budget list. And then you decide your fiscal year. So as I said earlier, you have also have to be from the same fiscal year. Then you can select your scenario IDs and merge them. So that's all in the help center as well, but you find it there in the merge scenarios. And then just a couple more things to pull up here. I'm gonna make sure I've got a budget with some data in it. I'm gonna try this one, see what we get. Nope. Let me try one more here. I feel like our 2020 ones usually have something in them. I'm not having much luck. Let me go back a little bit farther. There we go. So a lot of the features that we looked at today, they are gonna be up across the top of your budget record. Here's the group by. If you wanna group by accounts or projects or grants to see your budget record in a little bit different way. If you wanna filter to look at specific budget records, you've got that. If you want to, copy and forecast, increase, decrease, finalize, lots of great options are embedded in that more. And then one more thing to show you, I'm gonna go into edit mode. And, I said earlier that when you are making changes to your budget, f e n x t is not gonna track them for you until the budget has been finalized. If you want to put in your own notes, there is a column here for this lovely little sticky notes where I can click on that, and I can add in any notes for our team. So if I've made changes to this budget line for a certain reason, increased it or decreased it, FE NXT isn't gonna track that, but I can absolutely put that information in for our team. And then that information, I'm just gonna say change total. You'd probably want more information in there than that. And now got that little sticky note for our whole team to know, hey. There's little note on this budget line. Maybe I should check that out for a little bit more information. Alright. The q and a team here, anything else you think would be helpful based on the questions coming through for me to show live in the database before we talk through our training options? Here's also where we can see grants and projects. Do we have any project budgets here? It doesn't look like it in this one. Okay. I think we are doing pretty good. So I'm gonna go back to the slides here, And we've had a lot of great questions and what is fantastic is that a lot of those questions you can get answered in our Blackbaud University classes. So today we really wanted to give you an introduction, kind of a high level overview to a lot of different things with budgets, but we have a lot of content at Blackbaud University that dives deeper into all of this. So we do have some live instructor led classes, so a full ninety minutes on budgets where you get a chance to see all of this demonstrated. You get a chance to practice a lot of this. You get a chance to see live that a budget, Excel budget add in in action and how that can create budgets for you. And so if you're looking for any of this content, a great place to go is to so the Blackbaud University. And then up at the top, you can search for any kind of topics. Budgets, obviously, would be a great one to search for. And then it is going to, you can also go directly to the f e n x t product catalog, and that is gonna allow you to look at our content in a couple of different ways. Actually, you know what? I am going to show this to you because we have just a minute, and I do wanna make sure that y'all can find what you need to find after the fact. So give me one second. I'll pull that up, and I will actually show this to you because this is really the place where you're gonna get a chance to get all of this locked into your minds, and be able to get some more practice, which is also helpful. So this is the FENXT course page in Blackbaud University, and here's all our live instructor led classes. I can search over here for budgets, and I can register for that budgets class. Or on the right hand side, we also have a bunch of e learnings. These e learnings are all on demand, which means you can access them whenever you want as many times as you want. There is a one hour elearning, so it's a little bit more basic than instructor led class. This one covers budgets in the, database view. Probably don't need that one anymore. And then also some payable settings. Plus up here in the top, we've got some trending topics. Or one more thing to show you here, if you're kind of new to training overall and you're thinking, I want a whole lot more oh, sorry, everyone. I forgot to go back to my screen share. Thank you team for that, and here it is. Sorry. I'm seeing it, but y'all weren't. So let me get back to that course page. So this is, now our Blackbaud course page, And, here's our live instructor led courses. So I can look for budgets. I was talking and y'all were wondering what is she talking about. You can look at our live instructor led courses on budgets there. You can look up the e learnings here. You can go to trending topics up here. Or if you're thinking, I just need to know everything about everything, you can go to the learning paths. If you're more of a data analysis person, more of a general ledger, payables, receivables, administrator, maybe you wear all of these hats. We know at nonprofits, you do usually wear multiple hats. So if you wear multiple hats, you can check those out as well. Alright. So now let me go back to the slides is where we need to be. So in, the doc section, there are two class one of our live instructor led classes and one of those e learnings that we would recommend based on this class here today that you can access. And so the main one we wanna call out is that live instructor led budgets class. This is really where any questions you didn't get answered today, this is the place to go. Sign up for a class. As I said earlier, there's only 20 max of 25 people in a class. So a great place to get questions answered. See all of this again. Get a chance to practice. Get those live instructor led demonstrations. It's ninety minutes. We've got lots of upcoming classes that you can sign up for. Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time today. We are going to stick around in the q and a. There's about ten official minutes left in our session. So we'll stick around in the q and a and try to get back and answer. So if your question hasn't been answered yet, we'll try to continue answering questions for the next ten minutes or so. If you have additional questions that haven't been answered, feel free to stick around, put those in the q and a. But again, if you wanna access a recording of this after the fact, use the same link that you used to join class today. Also, before you leave, get those documents downloaded. You can still access the PowerPoint slides and the, FAQs from that recording as well, but maybe you just want to get taken care of now. Also in those docs, maybe you want to sign up for that budget class right now. Go ahead and click on those links and click on over to that budget class. So thank you very much for your time today and we hope to see you in a class soon.