Name: Best Practices for Annual Reports and Fiscal Year-End in Altru
Uploaded: 2025-05-28T19:30:06.556Z
Duration: 30 min 40 s
Description: Best Practices for Annual Reports and Fiscal Year-End in Altru

Transcript for "Best Practices for Annual Reports and Fiscal Year-End in Altru": Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here. We're gonna get started in just a moment. Our numbers are still climbing. I'm so excited to have you all here. But while you're here waiting for me to get started, you may have noticed I just wrote something in the chat. I would love for you to go in the chat, tell me about yourself, say hi, introduce yourself, tell me where you're from, what your organization does, the name of your cat, whatever you wanna share. You know, tell me what your favorite kind of pie is, minus apple pie. If you wanna send me one, I'd appreciate it. Hi. There's Shannon. She's from Alaska. Hey, Kathleen. Hi, Denise. I know you. Oh, everyone's chiming in now. I love it. I love it. I even saw some cat names in there. Of course, that was you, Jeff. Jeff works with us. I see two people from Alaska in here. What time is it in Alaska? Isn't it, like, morning? Ham and Lambert, great names for dogs, Laurie. It's ten in the morning in Alaska. Well, I hope you guys have your coffee. Hi, Ryan. From also in Alaska. A dog named McLovin. Great name. Hi, Karen. Oh my gosh. Daphne. Oh my gosh. She's in Italy on vacation. It's a you shouldn't be here on vacation. Oh my. I'm gonna say that my dog's name is Olive, and she's a rescue. And people always ask me what kind of breed she is, and I say that she's a full blown American mutt because she is just all kinds of breeds. And, as I said earlier, my favorite pie is apple. You can, send it to me at Blackbaud. I accept all forms of bribery in the forms of pastry. So I'm gonna get going pretty quickly because people are here and I love it, and I wanna talk to you guys about stuff. So thank you again for joining us on this installment of our webinar series. Today, we're gonna talk about some best practices for your annual reports, your fiscal year end, which for some of you are coming up. So that's exciting, and I would love to, help you guys with that. Blackbaud is here to help. I'm a success manager. It's what I'm here to do. So if I'm your success manager and I can help you, please reach out. If you don't know who your success manager is and you need to get a hold of them, you can talk to support and let us know in here. But we're here to help and so we'll get going. So without further ado, wanted to share a picture of me in case you can't see me. My name is Evan. I live up in Maine where it's beautiful right now, although we had a rainy cold weekend. And I am a lover of all things outdoors, consumer of pies. I have a 21 year old, son and a nine year old dog. And we love it up here in Maine, and we're looking forward to a wonderful summer. So what is the purpose, right, of your fiscal year review? It's important every year to look back and see what you've done. You have a responsibility to share with your constituents and your stakeholders what transpired this past year, and you want to make everyone aware of both your successes and your hardships. An informed community is better situated to help you succeed next year. Also, you won't be able to set your goals for the next year, and that's gonna depend on what you see from this past year. So here are some of our best practices for your fiscal end year. It's tough on the finance team also. So if you're part of the finance team, make sure everyone is gonna do their very best to be patient with you as you get ready for this time of year. Okay? You're gonna look to close those books promptly as fast as you can, ensure all transactions are recorded. Reconcile your accounts, banks, credit cards, grants. Make sure everything is taken care of before the next year started off, and review budget versus actuals. Be prepared to show where you went over and where you came in under and your expect why are these expectations that way? And prepare for your audit or your financial review and make sure you are prepared to answer for anything that's in your books. By the way, I just wanna let you guys know that the chat is the best place to ask questions for me. I'll be trying to look at it, but also my buddy, Jeff, Rosita are gonna be watching that. So if they can answer your question, they will do their very best. But if not, we can get back to you later. The other thing that we're talking about today is your annual report. It's important for your organization to have an annual report that attracts donors, inspires confidence in your leadership, and demonstrates transparency. While perhaps not as demanding as some of the other reporting duties you might have come across, the annual report is a chance to focus on telling an engaging financial impact story. So take some time and really think about what you wanna do this year. There's a lot of information to share and to go over before you're ready to make an annual report. So here are some highlights. Make sure you have impact highlights, stories, metrics, testimonials. Make sure to include program and services overviews. In other words, what did you offer this year? A financial summary, obviously, your fiscal and year. Think about your revenue, your expenses, assets, and liabilities, and a future outlook. You should sit down and make sure you have a strategic goal and plans. So when you're making your year end report, strategic communication covers all the facets of an organization. So do your best and let us help you if we can. Don't forget, you wanna know your audience. Readers of the annual reports are gonna be diverse in their familiarity with the the financials and the financial reporting of your organization. So plan on how to make this information you present make sense with as many aids as needed. And remember that you're not gonna be with everyone when they look over your report. Stakeholders aren't financial professionals and know what the board is expecting based on the prior years. Don't forget to consider the level of detail to be helpful to your audience. Does anyone have any questions so far? So how can Altru and our merchant services help you guys? The reports available in the Black Merchant Services web portal help you keep track of activity within your account, reconcile disbursements to your bank, and compare transactions in Altru over certain periods of time. Combine these with the reports made in Altru, and you can have a clear picture of your financial information for a year. Altru comes loaded with these reports to help you see your data in lots of different ways. And with queries, you can cut create custom information in the way it's outputted. And as I mentioned before, the Blackbaud Merchant Services solution has reports to help you collect information to help. While there isn't necessarily comparison reports, Daphne, in there, you can pull up the information and do comparisons fairly easily, especially if you wanna put them in an Excel file. And I'll go over that a little bit later. But the quick answer is it's very easy to create a query or a report on last year's information and then export that in as a CSV file to Excel and then create another report on this year so that you have the comparative data. I can, a lot of people have done done that in the past. It's a great way to report your success this year based on last year's. It's a great question, and I appreciate you putting it in there because it lets me help everybody else. Really quickly, I just wanna talk about end of fiscal year. Right? For many organizations, it does not align with the calendar year. In this instance, we use this term to speak about the period for financial reporting and budgeting. It can end and begin at any time you desire because it works with your organizations. K? If you don't know how to do this, in Altru, you can actually create a setting for fiscal year. By creating this setting, this allows reporting to be done on a fiscal year status. K? So you go to administration, you go to fiscal year end, and specify the final month of your fiscal year to be used in calculations for reports and other instances. And its default is set to December, but once you've changed it, it'll stay every time. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about some of the reporting that you might wanna consider to put together for those end of year numbers. The first thing you'll need to ask yourself is what information will help you get the best analysis of this year's success and where you fell short. Listen to your board and your staff and look back at last year's analysis to start gathering this information, but don't be afraid to add in new information that you didn't share last year based on what you've heard as feedback. Here's some things to think about. What was your income? How many events did you do, and what made them successful? How many or how much did you take in for donations? How many visitors did you have? How much revenue did that generate? How many new members did you get this year? How many members renewed? All of these things that I've just brought up can be reported on or query in an Altru database. There are many pre made reports in Altru that can give you some of the information you're looking to see. Many of these are located under the revenue tab, the membership tab, the event tab, or the sales tab in your reports area. You can also go to the analysis tab where you'll see a breakdown of a bunch of reports just like this. They're really the same reports. It's just multiple ways to find them. And this list is just some of the reports available that you can give valuable insight about what you've accomplished this year. Take a look at this report breakdown and think about using these reports to get multiple ways of looking at your past and future successes. The ultra pre bill reports are a good way to easily and quickly pull information in a consistent format with no possible cleanups. There are multiple ways to find these reports. This is an example of the appeal performance report up there. You'll see you can find it by going to marketing and communications, reports, appeal performance, or analysis, reports, appeal reports. Queries are something else that are in there, and they give you more control over the information you conclude, and they can be formatted according to your own preferences. The total revenue and payments report. You've probably all heard of this. It's the most powerful and most used report that we have. You can choose to display transactions by specific users and sources such as daily sales and advanced sales. For example, if you only wanna see sales made by John Smith from the daily sales, you can select John Smith as the user, daily sales as the source. However, if you filter the report by user, revenue, and online transactions, they will not appear in the report since these type of transactions don't have users. To view revenue for a specific range of dates, select specific date in the date field and enter that range. You can also select to include taxes, security deposits, or future pledge revenue that has been committed but not received. Katie, that's a great question. She asked, are appeal performance reports not entirely accurate because they don't include sales orders that may be attached to the appeal? Well, it depends because sales orders can be attached to an appeal depending on how you've done it. But if there's no way if there's nothing that's attached to them, then that could be an issue. However, depending on what the sales order did, and there's a chance for it to go both way. But, again, that is true because appeal performances are typically associated with donations. All true queries. Everybody's favorite thing to do is mess around in all true with the queries and see all the different things they can get. They're much more malleable than the reports that are prebuilt and they can be exported into Excel for quick interpretation or manipulation. And there are multiple source views to give you many options of what kind of data you can examine. In the photo, you can see that the most commonly used is appearing right there, but make sure that when you're doing your queries, you think about what your source view should be. Most commonly this time of year, we're gonna be doing revenue queries, but you may be looking at sales order queries or constituent queries to get a better look at a different side of data. So changing that source changes what you have the ability to see and how it will come out. As I mentioned, revenue queries. They're the most common type used for end of year reporting, especially the fiscal reasons. There's hundreds of potential outputs to give you a very detailed picture of your yearly income. However, trying to put all the information you want to gather into one query can lead to confusing results. We recommend building several specific queries and putting the information together to create a whole picture throughout your year. That means if I wanna see all the revenue associated with various different things, it might be easier to create a specific revenue query for sales orders, a specific revenue query for an appeal, a specific revenue query for memberships, then have all that different data dumped out into an Excel sheet and then they can be merged together to be compared to each other. If you try to do it all in the same query, you will get your data, but you'll get a lot of data and it can sometimes be a bit confusing to look at. This is the total for a specific designation. In other words, if you wanna do a revenue query to get all the gifts tied to a specific designation, this is an example of how you would do this. This image is taken from a knowledge base article that goes over the steps on how to do that. That knowledge base article is in the docs section. Up in the right corner, next to the chat, I have put a lot of docs for you guys to look at. Please make sure you are taking the time to go up in there, click on some of those, and save them. There's a lot of fantastic resources in there, and I wanna make sure you get a chance to use them. Again, they're in the upper right next to the word chat, the word docs. Some of you have already asked questions in the chat, but I wanted to pause for a second and see if there's any other questions at this point. Great question. You can access the recording later. Yes. The recording will be sent to you, via a link saying thank you for coming, and you'll be able to check it all out and share it with your friends, brag about me, you know, all that good stuff. I do wanna talk to you briefly about another thing that you might find useful to helping you guys get your end of year done. Blackbaud has a subscription to something called advisory plus. And if you wanna know what an advisory plus subscription is, just write reach out in the chat and say, I'm interested in hearing more about advisory plus. But, basically, it's a personalized one to one consulting designed to help you achieve your organization specific goals. We provide tailored guidance using your data, focusing on your team and your organizational objectives, and we leverage deep experience and product expertise to integrate best practices, improve adoption, stream like processes like end of year, and overcome challenges that your organization has. If that's something you're interested in, you can let me know in the chat, and I will have somebody reach out to talk to you and your organization about it. But it is a fantastic process, and a lot of people that have taken advantage of it are seeing some real great results with it. So think about it and, again, let us know if it's something you'd be interested in. But the key key components are this hands on discussions, process and solution assessments, policies and procedure guidance, regular guidance like, schedule per year, outcome tracks that we do, and prescriptive sessions. So it's a lot of different ways that we can help you. And speaking of people who wanna help you, my friend Daphne, she's in there and she's talking. And she says a helpful way to pick your queries is to frame your report as a story. Where your characters, the donor patrons? What did they do, the programs and events? Where are they successful, the revenues? The outcome projections for next year is your backstory and your previous year. I love a good metaphor, and that was a great one. Thank you so much. You guys helping each other is the best thing that Blackbaud has to offer. You wanted to look at the previous slide again or get more review of queries, and I appreciate that. Like I said, this previous slide was actually from one of the docs that I shared and it had this picture on it. It came from the doc. The particular doc is the one about, query on total giving for a, designation. So if you go and look at that, you will be able to get it. But also in the doc section, I shared a thing about, let me see, the Ultra Webinar Series. And if you go to the Ultra Webinar Series, you will see that there are some wonderful things about making queries, and about how to utilize them. So please take advantage of that. It's a great resource. But also, if there's something else you're trying to query and you haven't been successful, reach out to your customer success manager and let us know. We'll be happy to help you. And I appreciate you asking about that in the in the chat. So again, advisory plus is something I really recommend for people that are looking to get some organizational help, especially if this is something that you're doing for the first time, when this is your first years with Altru and you're looking to do a better job of doing a customer story, your annual report, or your fiscal year end. So let me know if that's something you'd be interested in. Speaking of things that you might be interested in, maybe you'd like to work closer with us here at Blackbaud. Because if you're passionate about making a difference or eager to share your success stories with us, you can become a Blackbaud champion. By joining us, you have the opportunity to write a blog or story about how you achieved your goals or made a significant impact in your community. Your experience can inspire potential customers who are eager to hear from real Blackbaud users just like you. As a champion too, you have the chance to provide valuable feedback to Blackbaud teams, participate in our professional development, and much more. So if this sounds like something that you or somebody in your organization would like to be a part of, just reach out in the chat, say, I would like to be interested in that or like to know more, and I can have somebody reach out to you and talk about potentially getting you involved. I love sharing customer stories in my presentations. I love talking about all the good work you guys are doing. And when you guys get mentioned here, you're setting yourself up amongst your peers to be noticed so that you can share all the good works you're doing. It also puts you out amongst your peers so so they can see all the good work that you are potentially doing too. So let me know, and we'll discuss how you can get involved, and we can make your voice heard. These are the different ways that we engage with Blackbaud So the champions, like I said, the reference program, another one, and the spotlight of your success. So, like, if you're interested in any of those, let me know. This is a list for you to look at of all the resources that are in the doc section. Wanna make sure that you guys see all of these. You might not be able to click on the current screen, but everything that you see there is available in the document section. So make sure that you get a chance to go over there and pull it out out. A lot of these are Blackbaud created material just for this kind of stuff, and they're really helpful. So please make sure that you're utilizing all the resources you have so that you can have a great end of fiscal year and then you can put on a great annual report. And, speaking of other resources, I wanna mention the other resources that are always available to you guys. Blackbaud University is listed as one of our best things right here. It's a curriculum. We have real world applications. You can get results through it. You can really learn how to use your system. If you don't have a subscription to Blackbaud University or you're interested in learning more about taking classes, please reach out in the chat and I can do something to help you guys get that going. Customer support, I hope you've utilized it before. It's available for everybody and it's here to help you guys and we are training people more and more with all the new things that are happening to keep them up to date with things so they could be here to help you. We're also all constantly updating our knowledge base. We're documentation, thousands of real time published solutions to help you guys use things. And, of course, my favorite resource and hopefully yours, the Blackbaud community. It's a place to connect, share best practices, and support the organizations who change the world. You should reach out to them anytime you're struggling or you think you're doing something for the first time because there's probably somebody in there who's gone through the same thing as you and can help you. Also, people are constantly finding new ways to use the systems to their advantage, and they're sharing that in there as well. It's a great learning opportunity. So make sure you're using the Blackbaud community. I'm also gonna launch a survey. This survey, it takes, like, two minutes. If you can fill this out, I would really appreciate it. The survey helps us design future things like this. So I would like to know your opinion. You can be as harsh as you want. It doesn't bother me. But you can also let me know if there's something else you wanna hear more about. I think in that survey, you can even talk about being a Blackbaud champion or a reference. But let us know how things are going. Let us know how you thought today's session went. I really appreciate your input. I appreciate everyone's time today. I really appreciate you guys sharing your insights in the chat and sharing with me your stories about your pets and about where you're from. If there's anything else you'd like to say in the chat, it's still open, and we're still listening, and we would really appreciate anything else you have to share. But I do appreciate you guys coming by. My name is Evan, and I've been here to help, and I'll still be here to help tomorrow. You said the nonprofit resources from the last screen. Are you talking about this screen right here? For example, if you wanna reach the Blackbaud community, from inside, Altru, she she says back one more. Okay. These resources right here, if you go to the docs section, Daphne, which is up in the chat area, that's where you'll find it. You're very welcome. Thank you, Jeff, for sharing that. That's true. Remember, all these docs will be available to you when you get the recording. Thank you all so much for joining today. It's been lovely talking to you. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day, a lovely end of the week, and you enjoy the last few days of May. Take care.