Business Rules for General Ledger

Business rules help you customize standard procedures and requirements to suit your organization. Business rules affect all users and are usually defined by the system administrator.

Note: Changes made to General ledger Business rules do not always take effect immediately. If you encounter this, we recommend you give the system time to apply the changes.

With General business rules, you can exclude inactive accounts from searches and queries, and you can specify whether or not to allow distributions that equal less than 100 percent of the distribution amount. When defining default distributions, you can select one of the following options:

  • Allow distribution to equal less than 100%

  • Allow distribution to equal less than 100% but give warning

  • Do not allow distribution to be less than 100%

When defining fund business rules, consider the following:

  • Do you want to automatically generate new fund IDs when you add new funds?

  • Do you want to allow editing of class restrictions on fund records? If you choose to not allow editing, the Statement of cash flows and Working capital schedule fields will not appear when you add or edit an account.

  • How do you want to refer to your funds? You can enter custom names.

  • How do you want to refer to fund balance accounts? You can select “Net Assets Account”, “Fund Balance Account”, or “Retained Earnings Account”.

When defining Project business rules, consider the following:

  • Do you want to automatically generate new project IDs when you add new projects? If so, what number do you want to start with?

  • Do you want to prevent data entry in the project ID field? Preventing data entry can help avoid duplicate project IDs.

  • How do you want to refer to your projects? You can enter custom names.

  • Do you want to automatically check for duplicates? The duplicate search is useful in preventing duplicate projects.

  • Do you want to enforce account restrictions? With this business rule, you can select to enforce project account restrictions on all transactions, or only when processing an indirect cost allocation.

  • Do you want to allow project budget amounts to be set for selected project types?

When defining Budget management business rules, consider what you want to happen when account budget amounts increase and/or decrease.

When account budget amount increases, you have two options:

  • Don't change project and Grant distributions

  • Increase project and grant proportionately

When account budget amount decreases, you have three options:

  • Decrease budget to zero before decreasing the project and grant

  • Decrease project and grant proportionately

  • Decrease project and grant to zero before decreasing the budget

When defining Journal entry business rules, consider the following:

  • Do you want to require journal entry batches to be approved before they can be posted?

  • Do you want to allow automatic creation of interfund entries in journal entry?

  • Do you want to allow journal entries to cash accounts without adjusting the bank register?

  • Do you want to allow manual journal entries to Blackbaud System default summary accounts?

  • Do you want to allow journal codes to be used during manual journal entry?

When defining Transaction business rules, consider the following:

  • Do you want to allow zero amount ($0 or 0%) transactions to be posted?

  • Do you want to allow post dates to be different than transaction dates in the other Blackbaud systems?

  • Do you want to allow journal codes to be edited when posting from other Blackbaud systems?

  • Do you want to allow a default account to be edited or used as primary account in other Blackbaud systems?

  • How do you want to refer to reversing transactions? You can enter default text.

  • Do you want to allow editing of posted transaction attributes?

When defining Chart organizer business rules, consider the following:

  • Do you want to automatically generate new template IDs when you add a new template? If so, what number do you want to start with?

  • Do you want to allow advanced filters when defining account detail lines?

When defining Grant business rules, consider the following:

  • Do you want to automatically generate new grant IDs when you add new grants? If so, what number do you want to start with?

  • Do you want to prevent data entry in the grant ID field? Preventing data entry can help avoid duplicate grant IDs.

  • How do you want to refer to grants? You can enter custom names.

  • Do you want to automatically check for duplicates? The duplicate search is useful in preventing duplicate grants.