Financial Edge Integration with Raiser's Edge

As I mentioned in my last post, I have the least amount of experience with Financial Edge (FE). I have a limited background in accounting, having worked at an accounting firm. I helped build financial statements and schedules, but was not an accountant.

I do work very closely with the person who his our Director of Finance, with the auditors and our outside accounting help. We recently (last year) moved to the accrual system. What a change in our thought process. Can I just say now that personally I'm not fond of pledges. Really, realizing that pledges count for revenue when they are made has challenged all of us and created new reporting challenges.

We produce monthly statements in FE: a summary and detail treasurer's report (income statement), a statement of functional expense, a income statement by project. We manage our budget through FE - that's another story - preparing for our budget import each year is a robust challenge. Recently, I was asked for another income statement that grouped the revenue in different categories. More on that when we talk about the VCO.

We integrate FE with the Raiser's Edge (RE). This is wonderful! The integration between RE and FE is a beautiful process. We've set some basic processess associated with the integration:

• Import payment details: currently Sphere does not include payment details in the download. We run an export from RE and use a somewhat automated process to import the payment details into the Sphere gifts.


• Pre-posting process: the db coordinator runs the pre-post in RE to match to a custom report that balances to a tape that is run for that days mail and to the downloads for that mail date. The db coordinator works in the IT group. This is a first look at all the gift data to assure that we will be posting over all of that day's mail with the appropriate payment info.


• Pre-post by finance: the finance specialist does an additional pre-post. This balances to the commitment reports for all batches for the daily mail. Then she posts to FE.


• In FE, the gifts come in as a journal batch. The Finance Director then reviews the batch. She can see funds, appeals, gl accounts, etc. She also has all the documentation, the custom report and the commit reports. When she is satisfied, she posts the journal batches into FE. All reports are put together as backup documentation.

This is really a great integration. The connection between FE and RE is the project/fund. This connection is configured in RE. As I mentioned earlier, in our company Finance controls the fund in RE. In that fund, Finance configures the links to the General Ledger in Fe.

Next post, we'll move on the RE/BBNC integration.