Limited Cash Accounts and AR Accounts in Billing Management

Shelly White

In Education Edge, we are currently using multiple receivable accounts and bank accounts. However, we are being told that in Billing Management we will only be able to utilize 1 bank account and 1 receivable account. It was suggested we create a clearing accounts. Has any other organizations experienced a similar issue and if so, what is your work around?

Dale Cecil

@Shelly White Only being able to use one cash account in Billing Managment is a big problem. The only “workaround” I know of it to manually change the account numbers before posting from BEM to the GL. Very inefficient and high risk of error due to weak Blackbaud programming. It makes no sense to me that Blackbaud thinks everyone only uses one cash account.

Shelly White

@Dale Cecil can you explain how you manually change the account numbers before posting from BEM to the GL please?

Dale Cecil

@Shelly White
To post, we have to create and download a CSV file. After I download the CSV file and open it in Excel, I change account number and account descriptions as needed before I use the Blackbaud Excel Add-in to import into NXT as journal entry to be posted.

Shelly White

@Dale Cecil are you part of the EAP (Early Adopter Program)? From what we understand the direct post functionality has been released to the EAPs, so we are wondering if you also have this functionality and how it works with your export of a CSV to then update your journal entry to the correct bank accounts?

Dale Cecil

@Shelly White
No, not a part of the Early Adopter Program. How do you post to NXT?

Shelly White

@Dale Cecil we are still in the consulting stages and do not plan to go live in Billing Management for a few months yet. We are still utilizing Blackbaud Student Information System - Student Billing for everything pertaining to our students accounts. We then export the information as a CSV and use journal entry batch creator to upload it into FENXT to the general ledger.

Dale Cecil

@Shelly White

Since we are still downloading a CSV file, we can edit the entry before it goes into NXT. Not sure what will happen when we get the direct post functionality. On one hand, really do not like the extra posting steps we have currently compared to SIS Student Billing but if the direct post functionality means we have to make a whole new journal entry to correct cash entries, not sure that is very helpful either. Bottom line, Blackbaud BEM needs to allow multiple cash accounts.

Dawn Alonso

@Shelly White
I am in the EAP. The system will export the journal entries directly to FENXT, no more having to export to Excel. ? You can make changes to the journal entry before posting in FENXT, the batch will be marked as posted in Billing Management once you post it in FENXT (may take a few moments to see it is Billing Management as it updates.) The nice thing about making the changes in FENXT is that you can type the account name in the account number area and it will pull up the accounts that match what you are typing. Most recently they added the ability to consolidate the cash accounts into one ledger entry. It is done in each posting in Billing Managment before the transfer to FENXT so if it makes sense for one post but not another you are not stuck undoing something.

Hope that helps with what is coming down the road. If you have any other questions, I would be happy to try and help.

And we use a clearing account for all of the credit cards from BBMS, that is actually a thing I may have started, lol. I would be more than happy to explain the process behind it and how I reconcile if anyone is interested.

Dale Cecil

@Dawn Alonso We are not in the EAP and will prefer to post directly without going through Excel. But are saying that you only have one cash line on your journal entry? We have a separate line for each payment which means changing every single payment that goes to a different cash account. If all cash was combined into one line, then sounds like we have to even add lines for the different cash account plus we lose all of the detail in our cash account that we use for balancing to bank, especially for credit card payments. We do not use BEM credit card payments.

Dawn Alonso

@Dale Cecil-We have one line for the cash account and one line for AR for each transaction, you can elect to combine cash accounts entries if you had all of the same entries. Otherwise, all you are doing with direct post is taking out the steps of downloading to and excel spreadsheet and uploading into FENXT.

Did you think about filtering the payments in some way so that you can get only certain payments exported?

Sophia Caldera

@Dale Cecil I agree, BBEM is very inflexible regarding GL codes. I think they designed the program with the assumption that everyone would just use the Blackbaud online portal to make payments, and since that only connects to one bank account that was all that was necessary. Since my school uses seven different bank accounts and two different receivable accounts, this causes a lot of manual correction, with the associated risk of error.

Julia Meseck

Hi everyone! This week we released the ability to override the default cash account when adding payments (add payment by student & payer and adding payments in bulk).

Add payment by student

If you are posting directly to FENXT and choosing to summarize cash entries, the system will sum all payments by account creating one line in the journal entry batch.

Let us know what you think!

Julia

Dale Cecil

@Julia Meseck - so glad to see this addition!!!