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!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
RE/BBNC Integration
It's been a crazy time for me - selling a house, moving, sick for 3 weeks, etc etc. Anyway, I'd like to talk some about the integration between Raiser's Edge and Net Community. We implemented RE awhile ago. We moved from a Microsoft Access database to RE. It was a really smooth implementation due in great part to a wonderful technician at Blackbaud. She spent a great amount of time learning about the structure of the Access db and working with me to map out the conversion.
We brought in BBNC about 2 1/2 years ago. We host all of our applications in house. We moved form an hosted website for content management and Net Solutions to BBNC. For the most part it went well - team fundraising was a whole 'nother situation though. More on that another time.
Raiser's Edge is our key application - it's our view of all those linked to our organization. Over the years, we have had to change procedures and policies, but I can say that the initial choices we made have held strong.
A few notes on what was important to us:
The integration for RE/FE is set up in RE. In Config/General Ledger, you make that connection to the server. In each fund, the Gift type is linked to the GL distribution. The fund links directly with the project in FE. Our finance department initiates setting up new funds. They set up the project code in FE and I set up the fund in RE. Then our finance lead puts in the GL distribution.
Each gift is marked Not Posted by default. This means the data hasn't been sent to FE. All of our gifts get posted to FE. If changes need to be made to the gift after it has been posted, we have to do an adjustment. This adjustment is then posted to FE. If we need to remove a gift, we don't delete it- we reduce it to $0 and post it to FE. This way we can note in the gift why it was reduced to $0.
I'll go into more detail on the actual posting process in the next blog. Integrating RE and FE brought lots of benefits:
Next I'll go through the actual process of posting.
A little happy dance for our Phillies -
We brought in BBNC about 2 1/2 years ago. We host all of our applications in house. We moved form an hosted website for content management and Net Solutions to BBNC. For the most part it went well - team fundraising was a whole 'nother situation though. More on that another time.
Raiser's Edge is our key application - it's our view of all those linked to our organization. Over the years, we have had to change procedures and policies, but I can say that the initial choices we made have held strong.
A few notes on what was important to us:
- Campaigns, Funds and Appeals: you really need to have a good strategy here. We followed BB's description of what these mean and it works for us. Campaigns are that big umbrella- the overall look at your fundraising. Funds belong to your financial department, especially if you integrate with FE. Appeals are the ask - we have an appeal for every type of donation/gift that we get. We set up new campaigns, Funds and Appeals each year. Every gift gets and appeal. In the appeal, we have linked to a default campaign and fund most of the time. Sometimes an appeal can get gifts for different funds. For instance, our Unsolicited Appeal. This is used for gifts that come in with no indication of a defined "ask". The donor often indicates a fund - research, in-home care, etc.
- Talk to each other!!! When you set up RE for the first time, you should have had a lot of discussion with all the departments. A database does you no good if the people who use it don't get the info they need.
- Set up procedures and policies and document them.
- Keep your security as tight as your company allows. In another blog I'll talk about our security and processes. Most of our staff only has view rights for most things.
- Listen to Finance when they tell you they need all those funds. I made the mistake of trying to convince finance to put the money in "consolidated buckets". That didn't last long. Soon I realized that I had led them down the wrong road. After spending some time with the financial statements and budget in FE, I see that the Finance department knows the view of the funds that they have to show to the people who make decisions. We have lots of funds and that works for us. So my motto now is "the fund belongs to Finance".
The integration for RE/FE is set up in RE. In Config/General Ledger, you make that connection to the server. In each fund, the Gift type is linked to the GL distribution. The fund links directly with the project in FE. Our finance department initiates setting up new funds. They set up the project code in FE and I set up the fund in RE. Then our finance lead puts in the GL distribution.
Each gift is marked Not Posted by default. This means the data hasn't been sent to FE. All of our gifts get posted to FE. If changes need to be made to the gift after it has been posted, we have to do an adjustment. This adjustment is then posted to FE. If we need to remove a gift, we don't delete it- we reduce it to $0 and post it to FE. This way we can note in the gift why it was reduced to $0.
I'll go into more detail on the actual posting process in the next blog. Integrating RE and FE brought lots of benefits:
- we don't do double data entry
- we have fewer mistakes
- we have a great audit trail
- we can drill down from FE right into RE
- our reporting is consistent across applications
- we have a similar interface on our products
- one vendor for questions
- we have a great set of checks and balances as gifts are moved through the systems
Next I'll go through the actual process of posting.
A little happy dance for our Phillies -
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