Setting up endowments as projects

Lauren Cayer
Lauren Cayer
Second Anniversary Participant Loyalty Badge
in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® General Discussions

Hi - I am looking to add each of our endowment funds to FE to manage the investments. I understand they can be added as Projects but I have not done this before. Does any one have any experience with this? Do you add each individual fund as it's own Project? Or is the Endowment the Project with the funds listed separately.? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

Comments

  • Sannyasin Siddhanathaswami
    Sannyasin Siddhanathaswami
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Aloha @Lauren Cayer !

    We keep each endowment fund in 3 projects. We number each project so it's obvious what it is.

    “xx” below is the external endowment number we post on our website.

    1. Contributions (project number: 30xx1)
    2. Grants (project number: 30xx8)
    3. Investments (project number: 30xx9)

    We then have various custom fields for each type of project, so we can do reports for just that group of projects.

    Hopefully that helps a bit.

  • Kylea Johnson
    Kylea Johnson
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Lauren Cayer

    We use two different projects for each endowment. Like Sannyasin we number them so it's obvious which is which.

    For us, a project beginning with a 3xxx is permanently restricted and holds corpus and gains and might be called the Kylea Johnson Endowment. Then, that endowment also has a project starting with a 4xxx for the spendable gains where we distribute 4% of the 5-year rolling average that can be spent for scholarships or other use determined by the donor. This might be called the Kylea Johnson Endowed Scholarship.

  • Kevin Brazell
    Kevin Brazell Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Lauren Cayer
    I would recommend making 1 project per fund. If you commingle multiple funds into a single project with no other separator, then trying to parse that out later on reports would be extremely difficult if not impossible. Also notice, on the projects, there are other separator fields you can use for filtering on reports ( particularly General Ledger Reports)quickly like Projet Types, so you could have a project restriction type(s) listed there and use that on Income Statements / Balance sheets to filter them quickly.

  • Jennifer Benson
    Jennifer Benson
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Lauren Cayer We have all of our funds set up as sperate projects! Balckbaud set us up this way. Very simple to use. I run project cash balance all the time and GL reporting is great. I am honestly now sure why all of Blackbaud is set up this way.

    5537558804c8d75f29fba2527159d5b8-huge-im


  • Duane Bozarth
    Duane Bozarth
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Boomerang (2024)

    @Jennifer Benson
    We're brand new to FE NXT and struggling to get opening balances associated with projects – we have created one project for each endowed or other designated fund with an account for corpus, realized/unrealized gains.

    The problem we have is on opening balance if the Project business rule is set to “Require" then the asset accounts that are a pool of many donor funds (aka “projects”), using a “NA Unassigned” project so that the JE can be imported ends up with that “project” holding all the assets when loading the opening balance.

    Trying to then assign an opening balance to each project/account via a JE against the net assets ends up with the accounts but the projects dashboard doesn't recognize those real projects at all.

    Do you have any insight on how Blackbaud set this up--our implementation consultants have been of no help in resolving this and I cannot find a thing in training or Knowledgebase about setting up…

    Any help appreciated.

    Duane Bozarth, VP SCCC Foundation

    Seward County (KS) Community College

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