Any organization using the projects feature in Blackbaud’s Financial Edge software is familiar with the standard Financial Edge NXT Project Activity Report and its importance. The Project Activity Report gives users with responsibility for one or more projects, visibility into financial transactions related to their project(s) over some period of time.
The standard Financial Edge Project Activity Report built into Blackbaud's Financial Edge NXT is pretty limited. It includes columns for the project ID, project description, transaction description, and a transaction date. But the report does not even specify whether the date listed is the posting date or the actual transaction date, and there’s no place for the dollar amount of the transaction. There is also an opening balance and an ending balance for the period.
All Reporting Xpress reports can be customized to each customer’s requirements, but most stick to a pretty standard improved format for the project activity report. The two biggest improvements that most users prefer are the inclusion of the Batch ID on the report and a second date column so that users can see actual transaction dates and posting dates separately. Deepening on what a user is researching, they may care more about one date than the other.
We have had a CFO once state: “Including the Batch ID on that report was a game changer for me.” Many others concur since. Without the Batch ID, many people will run two reports and put them side by side on their desk. When they get to a transaction they would like to research further, they go to the second report to find the Batch ID for lookup.
Some organizations choose to use “Transaction Codes” and Reporting Xpress can include these on custom versions of the Project Activity Report.
These reports can also be produced in any format. The most common formats are Excel, PDF, or Word.
These improved project activity reports can be implemented as a report template on a reporting-as-a-service platform such as Reporting Xpress and applied across as many projects as you have. Once automated, reports can be updated at any frequency. Most organizations choose daily updates so project owners always have access to current information.
The automated project activity reports for Financial Edge NXT projects can be automatically and securely stored and distributed through Reporting Xpress' secure portal, via automated email distribution, or pushed down into Microsoft Teams channels.
Most organizations that automate improved reports for Financial Edge NXT project reporting, also automated 2-3 other report templates so users have full visibility into their projects. These include a project attribute or project information report, summary roll-up project activity reports by location, department, college, etc., and about half of our implementations include project-level income statements. We will be unboxing each of these and highlighting some of the most common improvements that we see in future posts, as well as a more in-depth look at the general use case for automating Financial Edge NXT project reporting.
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