We've been looking at F9 - a great reporting tool used with Excel and Financial Edge. We've had a couple of demos and we're pretty much sold. As usual, it costs - what doesn't?
The application is basically an add-on to Excel. The cool thing - you don't use an FE license when you access reports from Excel. The uncool thing - it's licensed per desktop user.
Here's how it works. You basically set up your financial reports in Excel. You reference data in FE. You can easily set up a report using the Wizard. Changing the report is as easy as changing a date in a field or filtering on a set of date - say fund, account, etc.
Another really cool thing- F9 understand certain terminology. If you have a worksheet set up with all the months of the year except December including rows of data, you can just type December in the column heading and copy the data to that column from your November column. All fields are updated with December data when you press F9. You can use terminoly like month name, period name, budget, etc. Really helpful.
How do I plan to use this tool (hoping I get it that is) - all my financial statements for the year will be set up once and my exec director and finance director will just push F9 to see any changes. Yes, that means if I post in a journal entry in FE and they hit f9 in their Excel report, they will instantly get the latest figures. That is just a start - we plan to do a lot more analysis using F9.
I'm really excited about this product and wanted to share the excitement with you. If we get it, I'll post how it goes. I'm attempting the install and training myself using the User Guide. Gotta cut costs if we can.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Shift in Focus - We're going Virtual
Sorry for the long delay in posting. No excuse other than lots to do and lots of fun after work hours.
A couple of things happening that I hope to share in the future. We're going virtual - Lord help me. I am not schooled in anything vmware. We've contracted with some great consultants - Lantium - and we're upgrading our network to an a vmware environment. Along with that, of course, we will be moving all of our Blackbaud applications to this environment.
Fortunately, I'm replacing the majority of my servers so we'll be live until we do database move. That gives me some feeling of calm. I wish I had more time to learn more about the environment, but then again who has more time.
We're also examining our Community of Hope site. Currently, we use BBNC and team fundraiser to set up an area on our website where a constituent can build an honor/memorial page or event page for fundraising. http://www.alsphiladelphia.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=503. We had a custom part built to allow for searching across the "teams" by honoree or the page owner.
Team fundraiser links to one fund in RE. We want to be able to allow our constituents to choose one of three funds when they set up a page and still be able to search across all the pages. As I've mentioned before, we are linked to Financial Edge. We want the fund in RE to be the correct fund when it is posted to FE. Yet, if we change the fund in RE on the gift to a fund other than the one linked to the team fundraiser, the gift won't show up on the page. That's the problem - I'll post more as we work toward our solution.
We're also working with e-receipting for our online donations. We have different options in BBNC and in Sphere. In BBNC, we can easily produce a pdf acknowledgement/receipt for any donation. The gift is marked receipted when it comes in through the plugin. However, that functionality isn't there for an event. We have to use the thank you as the receipt. The problem here is that we can't do this for every event - especially those that have consideration/benefits involved. So how does the person who downloads the registration into RE using the plugin know if that person has been thanked/receipted?
In Sphere, we use the online thank you as the receipt. This works, but we then have to globally update the gifts to show that they are receipted and acknowledged or we have to do that in batch. We get thousands of gifts so we don't want to do that in batch.
Well, I'm off to figure out some solutions. This is what makes it fun!
A couple of things happening that I hope to share in the future. We're going virtual - Lord help me. I am not schooled in anything vmware. We've contracted with some great consultants - Lantium - and we're upgrading our network to an a vmware environment. Along with that, of course, we will be moving all of our Blackbaud applications to this environment.
Fortunately, I'm replacing the majority of my servers so we'll be live until we do database move. That gives me some feeling of calm. I wish I had more time to learn more about the environment, but then again who has more time.
We're also examining our Community of Hope site. Currently, we use BBNC and team fundraiser to set up an area on our website where a constituent can build an honor/memorial page or event page for fundraising. http://www.alsphiladelphia.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=503. We had a custom part built to allow for searching across the "teams" by honoree or the page owner.
Team fundraiser links to one fund in RE. We want to be able to allow our constituents to choose one of three funds when they set up a page and still be able to search across all the pages. As I've mentioned before, we are linked to Financial Edge. We want the fund in RE to be the correct fund when it is posted to FE. Yet, if we change the fund in RE on the gift to a fund other than the one linked to the team fundraiser, the gift won't show up on the page. That's the problem - I'll post more as we work toward our solution.
We're also working with e-receipting for our online donations. We have different options in BBNC and in Sphere. In BBNC, we can easily produce a pdf acknowledgement/receipt for any donation. The gift is marked receipted when it comes in through the plugin. However, that functionality isn't there for an event. We have to use the thank you as the receipt. The problem here is that we can't do this for every event - especially those that have consideration/benefits involved. So how does the person who downloads the registration into RE using the plugin know if that person has been thanked/receipted?
In Sphere, we use the online thank you as the receipt. This works, but we then have to globally update the gifts to show that they are receipted and acknowledged or we have to do that in batch. We get thousands of gifts so we don't want to do that in batch.
Well, I'm off to figure out some solutions. This is what makes it fun!
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