The Ledger : FE RE integration

The Ledger Lowdown: Top Questions for December

Jennifer Maroney — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:43:00 GMT

Each month we keep track of the top questions you ask. This FAQs list includes GL, AP, AR, FA, and general FE or non-product specific questions. To see the FAQs broken out by individual module, review The Financial Edge FAQs on our website. Here is the list of the FE questions for December and November.

December

Scheduled queues are not processing: BB221816
How to reset the Supervisor password: BB103119
How to add or edit bank adjustments: BB66590
Bank reconciliation shows out of balance to GL Cash Account or vice versa: BB61184
How to speed data entry using keyboard shortcuts: BB93392
When will the end-of-year update for the Financial Edge be released?: BB28614
How to reverse a posted batch: BB69132

November

How to soft close a fiscal year: BB520479
How to add new table entries: BB5313
How to add or edit bank adjustments: BB66590
How to prepare and import budget spreadsheets: BB100320
How to reprint the bank reconciliation report: BB43199
How to clear transactions electronically: BB357458
Cash Management is not available on one bank account: BB103818

Talk to you soon!

The Accountability Summary

Daniel Dalnekoff — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:12:00 GMT

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 functionality, would love to hear feedback on how your organization uses it.

How can Support help our Clients Integrate RE and FE?

Daniel Dalnekoff — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:18:00 GMT

I just finished spending 2 days at BBU in The Raiser's Edge Essentials I, which I felt was a great way to get some knowledge of another product under my belt to fill in space between the burger and fries I had for lunch. Ultimately though, the goal is to improve Product Support's responsiveness, and ability to support clients who choose to integrate The Financial Edge and The Raiser's Edge.

I still have quite a few more classes to go until I would say I "know" RE, but this project can't get started soon enough. A problem we face in Support is that RE and FE users and Support Analysts have different vocabularies (vocabularii ?). On top of that, because the 2 programs serve such different, but advanced functions in their own purpose it is no suprise that questions come up when working between the 2 products.

So, with the end goal of this project being a way for support to provide better "support" for the integration of FE and RE I would like to tap the knowledge of those integrated users...what hurdles did/does your organization face with integrating these 2 products? From a procedural standpoint, does your accounting staff have nightmares over what the development office is sending to your database? What are the questions you would like to be able to call Support and have someone know the answer to when it comes to your integration?

The floor then ladies and gents, is all yours...