Marie Kondo-ing Your Database

Will Wellman

I’ve slowly been upgrading the “chill zone” in my basement. I got a new couch and a coffee table within the last few months, and this weekend I decided it was time to upgrade the TV set. The set I chose is 65 inches, has 4k resolution, and the picture on this beast is awesome!

However, installing a new TV comes with its own set of challenges—the biggest of which is re-cabling the various video and audio cables that need to be plugged into it. For most of my life, I’ve always just haphazardly plugged cables in anywhere they would fit. This always leads to many unknowns, though. Is the cable box plugged into HDMI 1 or 4? Why doesn’t my gaming system have any audio output? Do I still need to put things on channel 3 for them to work? (OK, maybe that last one hasn’t been an issue for 20 years, but you get my point.)


This time, I decided to get organized and be sure that my efforts would, in the famous words of Marie Kondo, “spark joy”. So I took all the cables down and color-coded them with brightly colored tape. Green tape for the TV set, red tape for the audio/video cables for the gaming system, and so on. Heck, I even wrote myself a reminder of those color choices and their intended ports and I taped it to the back of the TV. Then I tagged all of those cables, and by doing so I will save myself a lot of time whenever I replace this TV or move it to a different room. Now that sparked joy!

Wouldn’t it be great if Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT had its own version of colored tape? Spoiler: It does!
In Financial Edge NXT, custom fields are your version of color-coded cabling tape. Tagging records with the appropriate (as defined by your organization) custom fields will save you tons of time navigating, reporting, and filtering through your database.

Interested in learning more? Our new course, Financial Edge NXT: Feature Focus - Custom Fields, shows you how to use valuable shortcut tools to get your database in good order. Now that’s sure to spark joy. Marie Kondo would be proud.

This class is included in your Learn More and Learn Everything training subscriptions. Not yet a subscriber? Find out how a Blackbaud Learn^® subscription can help you get the most out of your software.