Name: Optimizing Your Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®: COA Structure for Success
Uploaded: 2025-09-23T18:30:04.334Z
Duration: 59 min 56 s
Description: Optimizing Your Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®: COA Structure for Success

Transcript for "Optimizing Your Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®: COA Structure for Success": Hello. Thank you all for joining. We will get started in about a minute here, but just wanted to give you guys a quick, quick countdown. So we'll begin starting about a minute. Thank you, guys. Alright. Thank you all for joining today. This is our part of account structure for success, webinar where we are, you know, kind of focusing on optimizing your financial ed NXT. Just as quick introduction, so my name is Orion Petrie. I'm a business analyst here at Blackbaud. Been here about thirteen years, most of that working here, on the the services side. Just a quick, a a few quick housekeeping items. I have thrown that in the chat and, pinned that for you guys to see. But first main point, we get this question a lot, but you will receive a link to the recording for this, by email generally within about twenty four hours. You will be able to download the slides for this as well. It's in PDF form if you click on the doc docs tab on the right side of your screen, you could download that. You can follow along. There the audio for this will be broadcast through your your computer speakers. So if you're having any issues with that, make sure your computer speaker, your computer speakers are on. And then if you do run into any issues, feel free to, you know, refresh your browser for any of those audio issues or or technical issues, and that'll generally fix the issue. For any type of questions that you have, please use the q and a, section where you can submit questions. We've got we've got a handful of, individuals, here for us to help answer some questions today, so we really look forward to your guys' time. Thank you. Alright. So for our agenda, first of all, why this topic? So we're gonna talk through, you know, why this why we're we're focusing on this topic, chart of accounts, talking about account segments, some some chart of account design, you know, ideas, and that's kind of current and future, for those. Talk about some chart of account management. So managing your account structure, data entry controls, those types of things. And then last but not least, we're gonna go into some reporting, talk about, you know, how the the the impact of your your account structure really, you know, affects those reports, look at some examples of some some reporting, kind of talk through, you know, how your your chart of accounts can really make the the reporting a lot easier for you. Alright. So first off, why this topic? So previously, in July, we had a another webinar where we really talked through a lot of, a lot of different pieces, of of really, you know, optimizing your financial edge in XD. In that webinar, we had some q and a, we had some polls, we had a few different pieces, that gave us some insight into, you know, how to kinda move forward with that. First off, we had some some confusion around chart of account segments, you know, kinda what that was, what they were, how they function, those types of things. So we're gonna talk through that first, kinda clear clear that up. And then also, the poll, the poll that we had, showed that at least 46% of the attendees there, manage four more segments, in your in your, account structure. This can be very complex sometimes with with a large number of segments. It can, cause some some potential bloat. So we're gonna talk through that and and talk through, you know, ways of kinda managing that, you know, what options we have for that. Alright. So our chart of accounts. So demystifying our account segments. So first and foremost, what is an account segment? Simply put, an account segment is one part of your entire entire account string or your entire account number. So looking at that example on the right side, so say your, account string, is funds hyphen, account code hyphen location or hyphen department, whatever, you know, whatever it is. Each one of those pieces, so, fund, account code, and location are what we refer to as an account segment. A couple things to to keep in mind with account segments. So there are two required account segments in the system. When you first set up the system, you have to have a fund and you have to have an account code. From there, all of the other segments, that can be used or can be added to the system are optional. You can have up to eight of those, optional segments in the system. But keep in mind, all accounts must use all segments and segment blanks must be consistent across all accounts. So let me kind of explain what I mean by that. So let's use our example on the right side here. So say, for example, we've got fund account code location, but, you know, location only matters on our on our, income statement accounts. We can't set up the system to have fund and account code on just our balance sheet and then location only appear on income statement accounts. That location code would have to exist on every single account in the system. Generally, in situations like that, you might have, you might have a, you know, a a placeholder for that location, maybe a 000 or a 999 or something along those lines, to to, you know, kinda be that placeholder for your your balance sheet accounts. So a couple things to kind of expand on here. So a fund. So what is a fund? It's a self balance instead of accounts. Most commonly, this would reflect your restrictions, but can be used for for other, you know, pieces of information like entities. So for example, you've got multiple entities in the system. Generally speaking, that's going to be a fund. One really good rule with your your funds is if you need to produce a balance sheet, having those having those different balance sheets, be represented by a fund is a great way of of really controlling that. That's not the only way of doing it, but that is that is probably one of the most common ways of of being able to do that. So, for example, using our our entity example, we've got entity a and entity b. We need to have separate balance sheets for each of these. We can very easily do that by by, you know, having different funds for for each one of those entities. And we can filter on the report and say, alright. We're running this for entity a. Let's filter on, you know, fund one. Fund two would be entity b. Account codes, basically, those are gonna determine our type of accounts. So our asset liability, fund balance, revenues, expenses, the those types of accounts. With account codes, they are the only part of your account structure that is required to be numeric. Fund, any optional segment can actually be alphanumeric, but account code does have to be numeric. So keep that in mind. And then optional segments can be used to to further group transactions. In this example here, we've got location. You could use department, call center, or or very common, items. There there's a bunch of different, things that you can use, for your additional segments. Alright. So now that we've got that, how can how can we use that information to to better, you know, to to to better utilize the system, to better utilize our our chart of accounts? So couple things to keep in mind, chart of accounts should should allow for granularity while also being simple. I know that's a very broad statement and a very, it can it's not as easy as it sounds. But in Financial Edge, we've got additional transaction characteristics that we can really utilize, and we'll go into those in in in a little bit more detail here shortly, to to really utilize, our chart of accounts and keep it simple, but allow for granularity. So we can use projects, grants, transaction codes, you know, custom fields or attributes, you know, in the system to to further help us break that information down and and and really get that granular, transactional detail that we need. So we'll talk through that, and kind of, discuss how how that can be helpful. How how do you determine if you've got, you know, quote unquote too many accounts in your system? There's not a there's not a number. I'm not gonna tell you if you are over, you know, a thousand accounts in the system, you've got too many in the system. That's not necessarily the truth. The biggest indicator here would be if you have a large number of accounts that have either no or very little activity. And the reason I say very little activity is because in Financial Edge, for an account number, so something as part of your your chart of accounts, we want that to be a a more permanent fixture. Now it can be something that's a little bit more temporary depending on on the situation, but we want it to be a little bit more of a permanent fixture, in your account structure. So if you've got if you've got an account that you've used one, two, three times in the past, you know, five years, does it make sense for that to be an account? Could that be a project? Could that be a transaction code? Could that be something else in the system, to really be able to account for that information? You know, it it it just kind of allows you to to kind of think through, hey, you know, do I do I need this account in the system? Obviously, accounts that have no no activity in the system, you know, that's that that makes sense. You know, why do we have this account if there's absolutely no activity? We'll we'll kinda go into a little bit more of managing our accounts, but, just as a quick FYI for that, accounts with no activity, they can actually be deleted from the system. They can be removed altogether. But any account in the system that's got any type of activity posted to it can can never be, deleted completely. We can inactivate it, but we can't we can't delete it from the system. So just keep that in mind. Another thing to to kinda keep in mind as well is large number of funds, and additional segments can can lead to chart of account bloat. So, for example, if you've got, you know, ten, fifteen different funds, in the system, Each one of those funds is gonna have to have their their company a company a company and, your chart of accounts to go with it. So we've got, you know, fund one. You're gonna have to have the appropriate accounts, account codes and, you know, any other additional segment, associated with that. You know? If you have something that needs to now hit fund two, same same thing. So that's just going to exponentially increase your your your chart of account. So you really wanna be careful when when adding funds. It needs to be a very deliberate and thought through process. You know, that that is something, you know, just gonna plug myself here. Here in services, it is something that we can definitely help and talk talk through with you. We can help set it up, you know, just kinda go through a different, you know, some different scenarios with that. So that is always an option. But it is also something that you can do on your own as well. It's not something that you have to have, you know, Blackbaud do for you, but it is something that you definitely want to think through all the considerations and make sure that you, you know, what you're doing does make sense. Another thing that I don't think, gets enough weight, is is the naming convention. So having a simple yet extremely effective naming convention can really go a long way, in keep in keeping your your your chart of account clean. A lot of times, you know, you you've got a you've got an account that okay. Yeah. This this is great. I'm a use this account. But then there's something similar but not exactly the same, and you try to think through, okay. Well, you know, let me make another account for this. So it's, you know, you're you're creating more accounts when potentially, you know, you're creating these quote, unquote duplicate accounts Well, potentially, you could have one account that that kind of encompass both of those, and it can be broken out a different way if it doesn't be broken out. So being able to easily find those accounts, you know, through through searching, you know, if they're named, you know, all kinds of, of things that that don't really make sense and aren't really in line, that can cause some issues. Again, we'll kinda go into to some ways of kinda making that a little bit easier as well. But definitely keep that in mind. I know it's a very a very small thing, but it's something that can definitely help, later on down the road. Alright. So managing your your chart of account evolution. So the last slide was really kind of talking about current type things. Thanks to a little bit of future. But, this is really focused on the future. So with your chart of accounts, you really want to plan for scalability and flexibility in your chart of accounts. Just using this here for an example. Say you've got nine departments that you you currently have, and you've got you're like, hey. Let's just I need to add a department account structure, or account segment to my my account structure. Let me go ahead and, you know, let me go ahead and and set this up. If you set that up with one character, because you can choose a number of characters that you you, you set up with your with your, additional segments. You can you can kind of think through some some type of scalability later on down the road. Does it really make sense to just set it up as one one character when we've already at nine and we've only got room for, you know, one more? Probably not. We we probably wanna set that up as two characters and allow for expansion later on down the road. It just makes it a little bit easier. You know, You can also determine, or you can also, lengthen, segments. So while my example there was was focusing on, hey, we've we're gonna set this up with one instead of two. You can set it up as one and expand it to two later on. But that that's also a process that you you really wanna think through. We'll talk about that in detail as well, but definitely something you want to to keep in mind. I'll probably mention this three or four times at least, probably more. In Financial Edge, you can lengthen things, you can make things longer, but you can never make it smaller. Same type of thing with you can add a segment, but you can't remove a segment. So keep that in mind. It needs to be a very intentional change. It needs to be something that you you really, you know, think through and and consider. Avoiding constant, invasive, you know, quote unquote surgery to your your your chart of accounts, by leveraging other features, again, kind of picking on, you know, depart or not department. Sorry. Projects, grants, transaction codes, you know, custom fields. Is there a way that we can utilize those pieces to, to to get the information we need without having to hey. Let let me I need to add another account code in between these two here to to kinda squeeze it in. Is this gonna be a permanent fixture? What does that look like? You know, a lot of times, as I mentioned, if if we're gonna add something to the chart of accounts, it needs to be a little bit more of a permanent fixture. Again, it doesn't mean that you have to use that, you know, forever. But if it's something that's gonna be used for a month, it probably doesn't make sense to create that, as as a new account code. There probably is a better way of of tracking that. So these other, these other features that that we're talking about, so projects, grants, transaction fields, custom fields, so let's kinda define those and talk through those, talk through how those can be beneficial. So projects. Projects in financial edge, NXP can can really represent a, a complete database record. I'll jump forward and then jump back here. So in financial life, you've actually got a project record. There's an actual record in the system that you can go and you can view and you can view the activity, view the budget information. So it gives you a, it it it gives you a more complete picture for things. You can use them to track programs, investments, endowments, membership types, donor revenue designations, actual projects, a bunch of things. So they can really be used for a bunch of things. They are very often used in place of optional, segments in the account string, giving you that extra layer of of detail to be able to report on. For projects, you can require projects on, on one of three options. You can require them on all accounts, on no accounts, or just on your income statement accounts. Require them on income statement accounts is a very common, setup that I see. One thing to keep in mind with that requirement, if you haven't used projects in the past and you're gonna start using them now going forward, we can't set that that requirement up. In your current structure, it would have to be, you know, with a new fund and and going forward, you'd be able to to track it that way. So with those projects, you can you can record budgets on them. That's that's another thing to, you know, to to keep in mind. So if you've got your your budget and it needs to have, you know, a further breakdown outside of just the, you know, the account number, you can further break that down by projects. So grants. Grants are also a dedicated record, but they do, require a they do require, are required to to be linked to a transaction code for the for the detail level of tracking. It does allow you to manage, you know, some security options, some budgeting, some allocations. The biggest difference between grant and projects is it allows you to to use the grant reimbursement process in Financial Edge if you're using, accounts receivable modules. So it allows you to track the the expenses for that, and then it, allows you to, from there, really be able to, you know, produce either charges or individual invoices based on on what's need needed for those grants. Transaction codes. So transaction codes are fields that represent various aspects of, organization's business. Financial Edge allows you to use up to five of those transaction codes. Each of those contained in multiple entries. So think of a transaction code as a header. So for example, we've got a header. Under that header, we can have a huge number of options to choose from. But that's what the, that's what the difference there between, a transaction code and a grant or project is. The transaction code is solely just a solely just a a way of being able to track track that information. There's not a dedicated record for it. It's solely just a, a a field value, in the system. Now with those transaction codes, you can absolutely use those to filter on reports. You can create reports based on those. You can you can build out your, you can build out, your chart organizer based on those. That can get a little messy, a little tricky. So probably not recommended, but you can. So it gives you it gives you a little bit more flexibility, allows you to kinda group group things together, and and and really allows you to to track that information. The last piece is custom fields. So if you use, you know, find if you've been using Financial Edge for a while now, custom fields are just the the rename of attributes and database views. So just keep that in mind. So, for those, you can you can really use those, on any record in Financial Edge. So you can use them on an account record, a project record, transaction level. You can use them as I know we're not talking about it, but, you know, in in payables, you can use it on a vendor or an invoice record. So those custom fields can be used in varying ways across the system. But it allows you to easily categorize and and group, different records or transactions, based on that based on that custom field. So you can use that custom field to, you know a a a great example for using custom fields is on is on the account level. So you can say, hey, you know, these group of accounts are going to be, you know, these are gonna flow into a certain part on on our chart of accounts or, sorry, on our our chart organizer. So you can very easily, you know, use that custom field and define those and group those out in a in a very, quick manner. Alright. So let's jump on over to our chart of account management. So couple of things here. So for for our chart of accounts, so segment length. As I mentioned, segment length can be increased in the system. We can absolutely increase that. We can never decrease it. I know I've said it. I just wanted to emphasize we could never decrease that. So keep that in mind. Once you make that change, it's permanent, and it and it will it will stay in the system going forward. So it can't be undone. Just keep that in mind. When increasing the length, a zero will be added to the end of an account code. And we'll we'll talk to examples here in just a second. End of the account code or to the beginning of an account segment, so your fund or your your optional segment. So for example here, if the account code was 2011, you add you increase the length to, five characters, it's gonna add a zero to the end. So it now becomes 20110. Inversely, for funds and and other account segment pieces, it adds the zero to the beginning. So a fund, 10 would turn into fund zero one zero. Fund 20 would be, you know, zero two zero. Fund zero one would be 001. So just keep that in mind. One thing that you can do with these so once you've increased that length, you do have the ability to go into the system and update some of these pieces. So for example, let's pick on this fund, fund 10. We now increase it to, you know, three characters. It's now fund zero one zero. You do have the ability to go in as long as you've got the rights to be able to edit fund information. You do have, the ability to go in, and now we can we can remember that to fund 100. So going forward, it's going to now this might take a little while because it has to update everything in the system, but we're now referring to it as fund 100. It'll go into the system and update all the previous, accounts and activity from the now zero one zero, previously just one zero, to 100 going forward. So it allows you to to kinda go in and do that. It is a manual process, so so it it can take a little while, you know, to to kind of if you're updating a large number of of, pieces, funds, ideally, we don't have a huge number, so it can be a that could be a pretty quick process. But if you've got, you know, a 100, you know, different departments, that could be something that that, can be a little time consuming. So just keep that in mind. Until the process is complete, so until it has gone through and and finished that lengthening, of the the any segment, it does lock the system down. So no transaction can be entered, viewed, and it it just kind of ensures that others are not actively working in the system and making changes to the system while it's going through that change. Dependent on how much activity you have in the system, this can take a few minutes. So it probably makes the most sense to do this potentially at the end of the day, you know, the very beginning of the day before for people actually in the system or on the weekend, something like that, to to allow the, you know, the least amount of disruption to to users in the system. So add in a segment. So when you add in a segment, again, the same type of thing to keep in mind, permanent change. Once it's been added, you cannot remove it from the system. After adding the segment, the same limitations on changing the segment length apply. So if you added the segment and you added it as only two characters, you can you can increase the length. But again, keep in mind, it it, you know, it's going to append the zero, you know, all those types of things. So to keep in mind to a couple things to keep in mind with your your segment add in. First and foremost, you have to have an appropriate table set up first before you can set the the actual segment up. So that's kind of the first step in in setting it up. So if you go to settings, tables, and fields, look at the tables, tab, then you can select add. And we'll do screen share here in a few, and we'll we'll kinda talk through, we'll we'll take a look at a couple of these, in here. But you'll you'll set up that table. When you do that when you set up that table, make sure that you check the box to include short description. When you do that, that's going to allow you to that that'll allow you to determine what the length of of your, your segment. So with that table, you'll have a short description or a long description. The short description would be what actually displays on an account number. So, again, say you're just adding, a department and you're on department ten. So it's two digits. 10 would be the short description. The the long description would be administration or whatever that specific, that specific, item, represents. Once you've actually added that, you would then go to settings, general ledger, GL setup, account setup, add segment, choose that newly created table, along with a separator. Sorry. There's a typo there. It should be separator, not separate. And a different default value, and description for existing accounts. So once you add the segment to the system, it's going to add that default value to everything in the system. So if you decide that you wanna add, you know, a a new department, it's two digits, you add zero zero, as that default. Every single account in the system is now gonna have a, you know, Dash00 or, you know, whatever you do for this operator, 00 as your as your department. Again, you can make changes. Historically, you can make changes to the individual accounts, but it's probably gonna make most sense to just kinda do a, you know, to to to kind of go go forward, you would use that that new, that new structure. Alright. So I'm going to stop sharing this. And give me just one moment. It's there you go. Sorry. Wasn't finding the what I needed. Alright. So let me share my screen here. Alright. So what we just kinda talked through, gonna kinda show that to you guys real quick. The next few slides in the deck, if you're following along, you download it and you follow along, those are just gonna be kind of placeholders for some things that we'll go through, you know, just so if you go through that deck, you've got a little reminder of what we talked through. But just as an FYI, the those will those will be there. But for the the account segment, add in that, that would exist, like I mentioned, first, you would have to create the table. So you would come to settings, fields and tables. You would choose the tables tab if it's not already chosen, and then you can add a new one. If you haven't been here before, it probably is default to custom field. You just click on tables and add. So as I mentioned, you want to make sure, you know, that include short description is is selected. Otherwise, you're not gonna be able to to use this as a, a part of your your account segment, or as part of your account structure. You would define the length. If you can add values here if you want to, you can add them after the fact as well. But, you can go through and add those values. So we've got, you know, defaults zero zero. Sure. So you can go through and add those as needed, and then you would save, and you would be able to go into, general ledger and and actually add those under account, geo configuration and account segment. You'd be able to add. That's where you'd also be able to increase your your segment. So a couple things in terms of, you know, data entry type, maybe not security, but just kinda some some some data entry tips, and tricks. So as I mentioned before, if an account is no longer being used or it's been, you know, very briefly used and we no longer want it in the system, you can mark it as, you can mark it as inactive. That's not permanently marked as inactive. You can mark it as active again and use it in the future. But we're gonna take a quick look at that. So if we come to general ledger accounts, you know, type in your account number or if it's on this list, perfect. Great. I'm just gonna randomly choose this one. So we've got our 10Dash1310 account. If you edit this, you can also lock it, on the previous screen. But if you edit it, it gives you kind of a a a second option here. So I kinda wanted to talk through that. With this, you would check prevent data entry for this account. That's saying, hey. We're not gonna be able to enter, any transactions to this account. It's gonna give you an error message if you try to do that. But say, for example, you you've already entered some transactions in the system. You've entered all the transactions for this account that you're you're gonna use. They haven't posted yet, but they're in the system. So you can use this second checkbox here, prevent posting after, to allow you to post what already exists in the system. You're not gonna be able to create anything new. But you can say, alright. Anything after, you know, we'll we'll just say 09/3025. Anything after this month, we we we don't want you to be able to post that. So it will allow you to post anything prior to that. So you can save this and then post all your your transactions that you've already created, and you're good to go. Alternatively, you could just post those before you come in here and lock this, and then it's it's locked as well. But it does kinda give you that option to be able to do that. With the, you know, with your, account segment pieces, you do kinda have the ability to to look at a couple different, or with your your GL setup, you've got a a couple different pieces that you can look up, look at here. So if we come to general ledger, GL setup, account setup, so again, this would be where your, account structure is. If you need to add a segment, increase a segment, be very careful. Not everyone should have access to that. Also have your your category definition. But then there's two pieces down here that are probably probably pretty regularly overlooked, and and they can be, they can be super helpful. So the first one here is our invalid segment combinations. So what this does, excuse me. What this does is allows you to set up invalid segment combinations in the system to say, hey. We don't want you to be able to create these these, segments in the system. And you can use you can define a specific account. You can use asterisk. You can use a bunch of different, ways of of kinda defining this. So for example here, this first one. 10 so in this structure, 10 is our fund, this is our account code, and this is our department. So in here, we're saying we do not want you to be able to create an account that has fun 10 and department 20. So you would never be able to create an account that was 10 hyphen, you know, whatever account number, hyphen 20. You would never be able to to create it. It's gonna tell you, nope. Sorry. You can't do that when you try to create it. So it gives you a way of kinda controlling that in the system. It it can also be used in in other ways. So for example, here, so five are in in our setup, anything that starts with a five is an expense account, as you can see up here. We're telling the system, hey, we don't want to be able to use fund ten or sorry, department ten. I apologize. Department ten with any expense account. So anything that starts with a five, we don't want you to be able to do that. Now you can't specifically define, hey, I want you to say not have department ten with expense accounts. So say your expense accounts are, you know, 5,000 through 8999, you would have to come in here and say, you know, asterisk, you know, 610, you know, 710, so on and so forth. So you can you can come in here and and do this, and put these in here and and and go that route. Another thing to kinda keep in mind with this as well, I've I've worked with organizations before that that have determined, hey, we've got a fund that we started using, you know, years and years ago. We no longer wanna use that fund. Can we mark that as inactive? So in Financialize, we can't actually mark the fund as inactive, but we can mark the individual accounts as inactive, and then we can use this invalid segment combination setting to say, you're never allowed to create that again. So say, for example, our fun 10, we no longer are gonna use that. If you, oh, if you put this here, this is saying you're not allowed to create any account that has fun time. That's going to stop, you know, anyone from potentially accidentally creating that account. And now that you've inactivated all your fun time accounts, that that fund is effectively inactive in the system. So it it kinda gives you a way of being able to do that. The other piece in here, is really the the default descriptions. So as I mentioned, it is very important to make sure that you've got, you know, accurate and and and, you know, precise, name ins for for your your chart of accounts, for your individual accounts. And you can control here how when you create a brand new account, what that descript that that description defaults to. So you can say, for example, here, this is the default. If you were to hit restore default, it's going to just say, hey. Just the account string. One thing to keep in mind, it is a 60 character limit for this, so we do wanna be careful. But with this, we can say, hey. We want whenever we create a new account, we want you to bring in, you know, account code, let's say, hyphen department long description. So since we only have 60 characters, we do wanna, you know, rework this. So maybe we do, you know, 40 characters for account code, which would leave 19 for for department long description. So when you create a new account, it's gonna automatically, by default, say account code hyphen department, name. So it gives you a way of kind of setting that up. Once you've set that up, now be very careful here again. I know I've I've said it a couple times with being careful. You do have this option here to update all accounts. So what you can do is if you determine, hey. Yeah. We want all of our accounts to be account code hyphen, department description. This is the link. This is how we want it. You can use this update account, update all accounts to to to very easily do that in the system. So for example here, I'm going to open my accounts in a separate window. Actually, I will not because it is not sharing that. So I might jump over here to accounts. So very easily here, we can see let me just filter on a department. Okay. Let me just filter on our revenues and expenses. Alright. So you can see here all of my accounts right now, four, the, you know, the 4,000 are contributions. There's no no distinction factor here. So if we go back to our GLSA, update all accounts. There's not too many accounts in here, so it's pretty quick. But, in yours, it may take it may take a few moments. So we now jump over to accounts. You'll see before where it was just contributions, contributions none, contributions administration, development, programming. So, you know, outreach and mission, so on and so forth. So it gives you a better description of of what you're looking at. Keep in mind, it's gonna update absolutely everything. So with that option before, zero zero is a department, in the system, which is none. So all of these accounts are gonna be hyphen none. So just keep that in mind. You can update it with imports. You can update it a couple other ways. But, if you use that update all, it does update absolutely every single account in the system. There's no way of of really filtering that and say, hey. I just want you to to update certain accounts. I am going to restore this to my default and update again real quick. Alright. So a couple other pieces of of kinda data entry controls that that we can really use in the system, are are a couple a couple settings on our, project records. So with a project record, we can very easily define what accounts can or cannot be used in that specific project. So if we jump over here to our projects, and I'm just going to open up sure. International outreach here. So international outreach, we've got this set up. We can come in here and edit, And we can say that right now, if you look here at account if you scroll down to the account restriction section, you can see right now it's set to allow on on all accounts. So I can use this project on any single account that I want the system. We can tweak that. So we can say, hey. I want you to allow this on a, you know, a range of accounts or selected accounts. Again, with selected accounts, like the invalid segment combinations, we can use asterisk. So we can say, hey. I want I want to allow this on, you know, just fun 10. You know, all accounts in fun 10. So I can set that up. I can say, I want this only on a specific account. So you can say, you know, I want it only on this this individual account, on here. You can do a mix and match of those. You can create a query. You can create a query of a bunch of different accounts and and and use that. Inversely, you can say what you want it to be restricted from. So say, for example, we're gonna use the same account. I don't want you to be able to use this account on this operating account, this 10Dash1000 account. You're not allowed to use that. Anytime that you try to use this project on that account, it's gonna give you an error message. It's not gonna allow you to to create that transaction. So it gives you control on on, you know, how those projects are used, where they can be used, and and really the the best way of kind of, you know, allowing users to be able to to enter that information, but also be able to make sure it's being entered in the in the correct locations. Another piece, for this, for for kinda data controls is really around some some business rules. So if you go to settings, general ledger, expand business rules, and come down here to journal entry. So there's there's a couple of things in here, you know, that that can definitely be helpful, also in transaction. We'll take a look at that too. But if you're looking at this, you do have the ability here to to kind of, you know, allow journal entries to be created, but they can't be posted until they're approved. We're gonna we're not gonna go into this in in in great detail, but you can't control who or can who cannot, approve batches. So then you can have one set of users enter them, another set of users be able to approve them, and then and then get those posted. Another piece on here that that is pretty important to to keep in mind is this allow multiple or manual journal entries to backlog system default summary accounts. Edit that real quick just to kinda show you the options. So never is what we strongly recommend. Ask each time or always. What that's saying is so for example, my AP summary accounts, in this in this in this setup, my AP summary account is 10Dash2000Dash00. If we've got this set to never, we're not gonna be able to go in and create a manual journal entry to that 10Dash2000 account. The reason we don't wanna be able to do that is because that causes it out of balance. When you create that journal entry, you post to that that AP summary account, that doesn't feed to the payables, section. You'll you'll be out of balance. Payables is not gonna see that, that information, and and you would you would call us out of balance. So you wanna keep an eye on that. Make sure that, you know, you you are updating this business rule. If there are instances where you absolutely have to go in and make a journal entry to that, make sure that you come back in and and update this to never, at the bare minimum, ask each time. So then it's gonna say, hey, are you sure you wanna do this? If you leave it on always, there's gonna very likely be decent amount of balances. So if we jump over here to transaction under business rules as well, There's a there's a couple pieces here. One of them is very similar to to this one here. They allow manual journal entries to a backlog system default summary account. While we're telling that never do not allow a default account to be used or edited edited or used as the primary account in other Blackbaud system, transactions. So this is basically the same as the one in journal entry, except it's now more focused on on your your other, your other system. So, you know, payables, receivables, cash management, fixed assets if you're using that. So it's basically just saying, hey. Don't use your AP summary account as what should be an expense account on your invoices. So it's going to, again, just make your reconciliation, much easier and and really allow you to kinda control, you know, how people are are entering transactions and and using the system. Alright. I am going to stop sharing, jump back to the slides, and then we'll we'll jump back to sharing again one more time. Alright. So reporting. So with with these controls or not really controls. With with the way that you set up your your chart of accounts, it really does impact your reporting. So, ultimately, being able to report on information and being able to to to gather that information, pull that information together in a in a meaningful way is is one of the most important parts of Financial Edge. You can enter information all day, but if you can't get information out to to your, you know, to your board, to your auditors, to, you you know, anyone, you know, that's that's asking for that information, it doesn't do much good. So having your your your account, structure and also transaction characteristics, set up in a manner to be able to get that information, be able to filter on that information, group by that information is is is imperative. You know, you can you can very easily simplify the report and then get a much more, you know, simple report versus a, you know, a much more detailed report depending on the audience that you're you're trying to, trying to to show that information to. Same type of thing with with with, budgeting. You can get a much more granular budget with your with your, with using projects, with using grants. You know, any part of your account string, you can budget by. You can easily group, you know, reports by those account segments. We'll take a look at that here in just a moment. So with with the, the group and, this might be a little bit hard to see. I'll I'll, again, I'll jump over to the reports and talk through that. You've got quite a few options. So here we've got a, a p and l, that we've got built out to to give you, a department for each each column, and then you get a total. So you can you can very easily see across. You can see, hey. Here's my, you know, my services revenue, and then here's my my totals for each department. You can very easily see that across instead of having them each be individual lines. And again, because we've got department as part of the account structure, we can very easily break that out. Sorry. It's not there we go. I was just switching to the other one. We can also, again, picking on department, we can use there's an option here to say, hey, print a separate statement for each, and, again, we'll we'll look at that and and talk through it. Print a separate statement for each, and we can choose departments. So we can very easily run one report, and we can look at each of our individual report, departments on that report as as a different page or multiple pages if it spans multiple pages. One thing to keep in mind with this, the setting can increase report time, because basically, you're telling that, hey, I want you to to to run this report every single time, filtered on an individual department. So if you've got 50 departments, it's gonna have to run 50 times. So keep that in mind. If you've got a large number of departments, you may you might want to, you know, you might want to to filter that. You might wanna even potentially use the, the scheduling so you can schedule that, report to run it at night and send to you or whoever else needs it. So you've got a couple options with that. So I am going to go back to share my screen here, and I will talk through those. Alright. So with reports, so we've got the ability to, as I mentioned, really kinda control and and, you know, manipulate our reports in a meaningful way with with with, these different pieces of of, you know, whether it be the account segment or different transactional pieces. We've really got the ability to kind of get that, get that information built out. So I've got these two two example reports here for, for us to look at. So this first one here is is the report I showed where we've got it, you know, broken out by the account code, on the left side, and then it's the different departments as columns. So when you do that, there's a couple pieces that you wanna look at. So if you go to the sort, the sort section, so this is how you tell the system that, hey, I want you to group things by a certain, account segment or a certain piece of that that that account structure. So this can be used on, you know, balance sheet reports, trial balance reports, obviously, income statement reports because that was what we're looking at. So it gives you a little bit of flexibility. So what you'll wanna do, what it'll probably look like by default would be something like this here where you just have your fund. But what you wanna do is if you edit that, here under action, is the ability to mask. So with that, basically, what that's saying is I don't wanna see if I've got, you know, five accounts that all have different, in this instance, funds, but they're the same account code. I don't want to see, you know, version, you know, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, 50. I just wanna see that rolled up. And, basically, what it does is it turns that it turns that fund into asterisk and and and gives you one line, and we'll we'll talk about that in just a moment, instead of multiple. Now if you have multiple pieces of account of your accounts, your account string, so you've got more than just fund an account code, you also want to do that for your other segments in there. So for example, department, we want to mask our department. So what that's gonna say is, again, we're masking both our fund and department. So what you're gonna get is you're gonna get a, you know, you're you're gonna get a piece that is just that account code. So that individual account code is gonna be one one, item that you're you're looking at there instead of multiple lines on that report. So you'll want it to be set that way. And then on the content, section, that's where you can really control your your different columns that you're looking at. So we just have these very simply labeled department one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. When you create these, you've got the ability to come down here to your filter section and filter what you you want on that that, on that, for that specific column. So, again, if you want this to be that specific department and one specific fund, you can define that. If you want it to be a specific fund instead of a specific department, you can define that for those different columns. So it gives you a lot of flexibility and really allows you to to kind of, you know, dig in there and get a little bit more, information with your reports, and really be able to to kind of look at that in a more meaningful way. When you, you know, if you ever make those edits I'm going to just run that real quick. And while that's running, we'll take a quick look at the the other one that I showed as an example. For our second report here, as I mentioned in the, or as I showed in the the example, we've got this set to create a separate statement for each. So, basically, what this is saying is say, I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna run, I'm a create this this whatever type of report, in this example, it's an income statement, for all my individual, individual departments. So if you look at the, format section here, by default, this is gonna be unchecked. But if you check the box to print a separate statement for each and you say department, it's going to produce a it's gonna produce, basically, a separate page for each one of your departments. I'll I'll run this here quick so we can look at that as well. There's also some other functionality in here that you should definitely take some deep dives. Our Blackbaud University, team has great, great courses on report, and there's, you know, from the most simplistic to to the to to extremely advanced. So make sure you're taking, you know, advantage of those and and and really digging in and and getting a better understanding of of how these reports can function. So we'll take a look here at our first report that we ran. This one is set to be completely summarized. Sorry. I meant to expand that. But you'll see very easily here's my programs and services. Here's, you know, all the individual departments. Here's the totals, all that stuff. And I will rerun that report and expand the, the level that's being run at as well since we have a couple minutes. There we go. And then our second report, sorry. I'm jumping around. But our second report on that report, we just told it to create a separate statement for each of our our departments. So again, here, at the very top, it's gonna list department zero zero. It's gonna list the the short description and the long description. So we got zero zero and none. We go down to it looks like that that one's a couple pages. Zero one, administration. Zero two, development. That's all one page. You know? Three, program services. Four, five, six, seven. So it it it breaks it out into each one of these, you know, into a separate page. You could very easily say, hey. Just give me, you know, on the the main filter, just give me departments four through seven, and you can you can just view those here. So it gives you a a a a little bit more broken down view, of that information, and again, in a in a little bit more meaningful way. Jump back to this report here. As you can see, for this report here, we filtered it on our individual, or I broke it out to to to give us our individual buckets that make up the the total. So for, programs and services, we've got services and events. So those 42, forty and forty two fifty make up that that header. So we've got those broken out. You can see administrative expenses are broken out to these three. So it gives you a little bit more meaningful way of being able to, being able to to to pull that information in, and be able to present that out, as needed. So, just some quick examples of that. You know, there's there's a multitude of of examples to being able to to, pull this information together and and be able to build out those reports. Again, I'm gonna plug our our Blackbaud University team. They'll be able to or they they've got some great courses that that'll really be able to to get you, on your way and and and really, work through that. Alright. So I know that was a lot of information. As I mentioned at the beginning, download the you can download the the documents, or the the, PDF of the, PowerPoint in the doc section here. You'll also get a, a link with a recording to this, via your email that you signed up for in about twenty four hours. And I really hope this was helpful, and I appreciate your guys' time. And everyone have a wonderful day. Thank you.