General Ledger Setup: The Big Picture

Your financial structure is the backbone to your organization's revenue efforts. Careful planning and implementation of your financial structure ensures consistent and accurate data entry.

Preparation for your financial structure exists in two key areas: Administration and Treasury.

From the General Ledger Setup page in Administration, you work with account systems and configure settings, such as payment posting options. On the General ledger setup page for an account system, you specify information such as GL (general ledger) accounts, segments, and transaction mappings. Using these tools, you can create general ledger distributions for transactions that will later be entered in the program. In addition, you also need to set up bank and bank account information, create deposits, and link payments to deposits in Treasury.

After you set up both areas, your financial structure allows those in your organization to successfully enter transactions, such as pledge and recurring gift payments. You can then post these transactions to your external general ledger. External (sometimes referred to as third party) signifies that your general ledger exists outside of the program. When you post, a post file is created that includes information about each transaction. You can then import that post file into your external general ledger (such as Intuit Quickbooks®, for example).

If your organization already uses Financial Edge NXT, you can integrate it with Blackbaud CRM. This integration allows the two systems to be synchronized for fiscal years, accounts, and projects. It also increases efficiency by allowing users to post gifts directly from Blackbaud CRM into an open journal entry batch in Financial Edge NXT. When you synchronize funds from Financial Edge NXT to designations in Blackbaud CRM, you are also able to see financial data from Financial Edge NXT from that designation record.