How and Why Did We Come Up With Transaction Control Business Rules?

Charles Soderlund — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:26:00 GMT

Here in Financial Edge support, one of our biggest challenges is helping our clients reconcile their databases. This topic puts us in what you could call a gray area of our scope of support. The scope of support basically outlines what we can and can’t help you with. Traditionally, our response is very much geared to giving you the right reports to run and letting you knock it out. However, if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve inherited the books from a previous bookkeeper, you will understand that from the outside looking in, this is quite a daunting and time consuming task, especially if you have no idea what happened in the past.

That being said, we also realize that no software is perfect and that not all issues that can contribute to reconciliation issues stem from poor accounting practices or data entry. So how can your support representative prove that the reason that you are not able to balance your ledgers is something that you did or a software issue without reconciling the database with you? That is our dilemma, because our Support culture dictates that we do everything to help a client in need. So to try to help pry our Financial Edge support staff and you reconcilers out there out from in between that rock and hard place, we have introduced several new Transaction Controls in Financial Edge 7.77 that, once you have balanced your books, will greatly help you keep them that way with minimal effort on your part.

These features were mostly suggestions that you gave to us over the years that Financial Edge and its predecessor Accounting for Nonprofits have been in the field. A cross-departmental task force here at Blackbaud got together to see how we could improve the transaction entry and management processes to avoid some of the common pitfalls that cause reconciliation issues.

First, we made a list of the most commonly encountered situations that can make a sub-module out of balance to the General Ledger. Once we had the list, we ranked them in order of how hard it is to identify and correct these issues. The task force’s next step was to come up with solutions for as many of those scenarios that we could. In terms of solutions, we tried to take a proactive approach and provide features that would prevent you from creating these discrepancies going forward. Basically, we have provided options that dial back some of the flexibility of transaction entry so that there is less chance for transactions to be entered inconsistently causing unexpected differences in your control accounts. Like Uncle Ben said in Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Well, we are helping you to exercise that responsibility and/or take some that power away from your end-users.

Keep in mind that these new rules will not magically make your books balance, but they will provide a way for you to control transactions going into system, so that all users are forced to enter data consistently. Here is a link to a previous post that covers the new rules: New Transaction Business Rules. Also, check out Knowledgebase solution BB499077.

Please let us know what you think!

Happy Reconciling!

Sr. Product Support Lead, The Financial Edge

The Ledger : suggestions

How and Why Did We Come Up With Transaction Control Business Rules?