The Accountability Summary

I know some time has passed since my last post, but I am going to get back into posting and wanted to make my triumphant return with a piece of functionality linking The Raiser's Edge and The Financial Edge together.  The Accountability Summary goes beyond the posting of gifts to General Ledger, and gives us some information that is instantly available in The Raiser's Edge.

 The Accountability Summary tool allows you to quickly gather and report to a constituent in The Raiser's Edge what exactly their donations are going to.  The way we do this is through account attributes and projects in The Financial Edge.  To summarize:

Accounts are assigned an account attribute in General Ledger that is used for tracking this (the attribute type needs to be a table value)

In The Raiser's Edge, the account attribute is defined to be used for the Accountability Summary in Configuration.

On the Fund record in The Raiser's Edge, the project is defined, and when gifts are posted into General Ledger this project must be present when the General Ledger batch is posted.

Invoices in Accounts Payable that are using funding from a gift/donor we are tracking are expensed to an account using that same project and Accountability Summary attribute entry.

 Once all of this activity has been posted in General Ledger, users in The Raiser's Edge can easily open an individual gift record and view the accountability summary to see where this money went.  There are some different output and formatting options as well.  So, what does this mean for the Business Office?  I think it means we may have some setup to do!  Seriously though, this could serve as a great tool that Development Office staff can use rather than asking you to produce several different reports and do a bit of research in The Financial Edge to determine how a gift was spent.

If anyone is interested in more detail, or with assistance using this feel free to review the Knowledgebase solution BB148089 or contact me.  If anyone has any comments on this, or if you are already using this functionalit, would love to hear feedback on how your organization uses it.