Name: End-of-Year Success: Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® Strategies to Close with Confidence
Uploaded: 2025-10-02T16:30:49.621Z
Duration: 12 min 48 s
Description: End-of-Year Success: Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® Strategies to Close with Confidence

Transcript for "End-of-Year Success: Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® Strategies to Close with Confidence": Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is Steven Churchill, and I'm a customer success manager here at Blackbaud. The team and I are so excited to have you join us today for end of year success session and greatly appreciate you making time to spend with us. While informal, our goal today is to deliver a prescriptive session filled with tips, tricks, and best practices for closing your year with confidence within Financial Edge NXT. Before we kick things off though, I would like to go over some quick housekeeping items. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers, so hopefully you're all able to hear me currently. If you do encounter any audio or technical issues, such as the slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. If for whatever reason that does not fix the issue, we do have to recommend that you leave and log back in to today's session. Please use the q and a or chat to submit any questions. We do have a great team in the background ready and able to answer any questions about today's content. And next to q and a, you'll also see a document section. Please click on that to access the links and resources we have that you may want to access throughout and after the presentation to save for future reference. Using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space, you can adjust any settings. And finally, you can also use the tabs on the top of the event space to see today's agenda and meet your speakers. With that, let's go ahead and hop in to closing your year. Let's start with a high level view at closing the books. Since that ties into everything else, for closing, you'll want to review, reconcile, and verify all financial transactions and subsidiary ledgers. Use both the temporary soft close and permanent hard close options to lock fiscal years as appropriate, but make sure to run the pre close fiscal year report to catch any errors before finalizing those processes. You'll also need to work with support to disconnect users to run any exclusive processes in Blackbaud hosting services or the Azure environments. You can refer to the Financial Edge end of year guide PDF for general ledger exclusive processes, but these include running end of year reports, closing and summarizing those fiscal years, and purging any old fiscal years as necessary. With the end of the year, that also means tax season is right around the corner. So we have to touch on ten ninety nine processing and tax compliance. We'll make sure to touch on this a bit more in-depth in future sessions, but you utilizing the Atrix wizard and financial edge NXT's accounts payable section will allow you to generate and file ten ninety nine forms. This process helps you ensure vendor records are accurate and any IRS deadlines are met. If you do need to order tax forms to print yourself, you can do so via blackbotforms.com or by ordering them directly from the IRS. Interview also means it's time for audit preparation. You could organize financial data and generate audit ready reports, things like the trial balance, income statement, and balance sheet, all through Financial Edge NXT's canned reporting functionality. Make sure though you do refresh audit report configurations to reflect current fiscal year data and review your internal controls and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Let's turn towards the coming year for just a moment. A new year means a new budget. One of everyone's favorite things, I'm sure. So in creating the budget within FENXT, make sure to create those budgets manually or import them via either the import functionality in Blackbaud's Financial Edge NXT or by using that great Excel budget creator add in, which again is a free add in. You can also take advantage of the system's forecast feature to project future cash needs based on any historical trends you have at your organization. Financial Edge NXT also allows for building budgets by fund, department, or project, and you can use any historical data for planning of those budget purposes. Another best practice that we recommend here at Blackbaud is to optimize your fiscal years. This process summarizes transaction data for older fiscal years to improve report speed. And before optimizing your fiscal years, make sure to ensure all transactions are posted before optimization and note that unposted transactions will not be reported after optimization is completed. Before you do close any fiscal year, we do also recommend to make sure all appropriate adjustments have been entered, whether that's through the bank, the general ledger, and posted. Compare your fund balances to ensure they view as appropriate, and always do a check if you're net surplus or net deficit just to make sure everything is aligned. I do also wanna take a moment to plug expense management as use of this module allows for streamlining of credit card and invoice submissions, enablement of credit card fees and approvals, and simplification of your reconciliation and audit trails. For those of you utilizing expense management, we do recommend a yearly review of the expense management settings and data. Coming into the home stretch here, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the importance of financial reporting for boards and stakeholders. The Financial Edge NXT helps prepare clear accurate reports for leadership and board review with reports that allow for the inclusion of net revenue analysis for events and fundraising efforts. Make sure you're taking advantage not only of the CAN system reports, but also the report schedule functionality as well as dashboards in the analysis section to allow for easier reporting to these key stakeholders, as well as some design functionality within the dashboards as well. The last recommendation is a review of your internal controls and fraud prevention. We're sure you do this on a regular basis anyway, but do take advantage of the security permissions within the Financial Edge NXT and implement approval workflows and monitor financial transactions where available. Whether that's in expense management, payment assistant, or elsewhere in the system, using those approval flows does help ensure security and compliance. As a very best practice, we do recommend doing a regular view of the security settings and audit trails for any potential vulnerabilities. Alright. Now I know that was a very quick sort of high level review of those tips and best practices, but we do hope everyone found them helpful. Before we move on, please do make sure to fill out the survey that I am launching now. We can't thank you enough for making time in what is already a very busy day in the nonprofit space to come to today's session, and would greatly appreciate hearing from you on how we can make these sessions even better and even more valuable for you moving forward. On that note, I did just wanna call out some resources again. These should all be in the document section, but they include things like the checklist for a smooth fiscal year end, a great knowledge base article kind of detailing more in-depth the steps we just walked through today, and some on demand webinars covering things like the October tax season that again is right around the corner. As we wrap up with the prepared slides, I do want to take a moment to call out our black bot advocacy options, like our champions and reference programs. Customers who participate in the reference program are agreeing to share their Blackbaud experience directly with peers, usually through a phone conversation. You're matched with prospects through a one on one process to ensure that the products, organization size, and industry are as close to fit as possible. Blackbaud Champions is our customer advocacy program where customers can receive priority information from Blackbaud, network with POs, and opt in to challenges that interest them. Examples of these champions challenges include participating in product discoveries, being part of exciting campaigns like Master Brand, engaging with Blackbaud content on our social channels, and participating in reference calls. Whereas references are managed on a one on one basis, information is sent to Blackbaud Champions through a one to many format using our champions hub. Through Through that hub, we can also target specific content and challenges by vertical, geographical location, professional level, and more. Both references and champions are awarded for their time with incentives such as training discounts, gift cards, and charitable donations. We do also allow for cut sharing of customer stories, so that's another great option. And if you are interested in any of those options, please just let us know in the chat, and we'll make sure to have the appropriate team reach out to you directly. Thank you so much for any of you who are interested. And as a friendly reminder, please don't forget the awesome resources available to all Blackbaud users, including Blackbaud University, customer support, the Blackbaud community, and our knowledge base. We do hope you all know of those already and find them valuable, but we always like to make sure we call them out in these sessions. So that is everything we have prepared. I know, again, it was somewhat quick. It was a prescriptive session just straight to the point here. But please, if you have any questions, feel free to throw those in the q and a. We are more than happy to answer those. And please make sure as well that you were answering the survey. Like I mentioned, that survey helps us make sure these sessions just continue to get better and better and make valuable use of your time. So I will give it a moment for questions to come in. Again, thank you all so much for making the time to meet with us today. We greatly appreciate it and hope you found the information that I Alright, everyone. It doesn't look like any questions are really coming in. We do appreciate you again making the time to come today's session. In the chat, one of our great team members has also mentioned to a call out for the product update briefings that are coming soon. So please definitely make sure we are registering for those. I do appreciate you dropping those in the chat. For those of you who do not know, the product update briefings are something we hold twice a year where we talk about where we were at the last product update briefing with the product, where we are now, and where we're going. They are great road map sessions. And if you aren't available to attend live, please still register because we do send recordings of those sessions to everyone who registers. Definitely a great thing to just keep an eye out for. And again, thank you so much for coming. With that, we are going to end a bit early today. But if you do have any questions on any of today's content, please don't hesitate to reach out to your customer success manager, and they can make sure to loop us in and we can get you all the help you need from there. Thank you all so much again for coming, and have a wonderful rest of your day.