General Ledger Setup

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.

The General ledger setup The General ledger setup area in Administration is where you define your account structure,  ledger accounts, account and account code mappings, and segment mappings. When you define the structure of the account, you can specify the number of segments, their order, and the length of each. You can then create accounts and map segment values to various data elements throughout the system. area in Administration is where you define your account structure, general ledger accounts, account and account code mappings, and segment mappings. When you define the structure of the account, you can specify the number of segments, their order, and the length of each. You can then create accounts and map segment values to various data elements throughout the system.

After you work with general ledger setup tasks, you will round out your financial structure within Treasury. Here, you will work with banks, bank accounts, deposits, and linking payments to deposits.

We recommend you plan out your account structure before defining it in the system. You must ensure that all account and account code values are mapped to the appropriate general ledger distributions for all the offices within your organization. The structure you define should match your actual general ledger structure. For example, your account structure may be:

Fund - Account Code - Department - Location - Designation

Setting up an account structure and mapping it to your general ledger allows you to integrate Blackbaud software with your general ledger solution.

Note: During implementation, mapping and posting revenue to your general ledger is customized by Blackbaud Professional Services to fit your organization’s needs. This is beneficial to fully leverage the mapping flexibility that exists to all general ledger systems, support all levels of posting exceptions, make sure fundraising transactions correctly translate to journal entries, and make sure the correct output format for your general ledger is provided. Because general ledger mapping is defined by Blackbaud Professional Services, you will most likely refer to the General Ledger Setup chapter or the General Ledger Setup section of the help file to make additions and edits to your mapping environment.

This following sections focus on general ledger setup tasks within Administration. For more information about Treasury tasks, see Treasury Overview. For information about Revenue tasks, see Revenue Records.

To access the General Ledger Setup page, from Administration, select General ledger setup.