Chart Health Advisor: A Smarter Way to Keep Your Chart of Accounts Audit Ready

Eli Dutcher

Every nonprofit finance team knows the quiet drag of a cluttered chart of accounts. Reports run slower. Transactions land in the wrong place. Audit prep stretches longer than it should. The source of that friction is hard to see from inside the system, so it goes unaddressed until it becomes a real problem. That is the gap Chart Health Advisor was built to close, and it is now rolling out inside Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®.  

What Chart Health Advisor Does 

Chart Health Advisor is included in Financial Edge NXT, not as a separate tool or paid consulting project, and it gives you four things in one place: 

1. A single health score from zero to 100, visible from your home page or General Ledger menu 
2. Full transparency into how your chart is structured across segments, projects, and transaction codes 
3. Findings organized by severity and type, so you know where to focus 
4. The ability to lock, inactivate, or delete records directly, with the score updating in real time 

Reading Your Score 

The score falls into three bands:  

1. Healthy (80 to 100) means stay you can in maintenance mode 
2. Moderate (60 to 79) calls for one to three hours of focused cleanup, usually starting with dormant account codes 
3. At Risk (59 and below) needs a targeted plan built with your finance team, 

What Drives the Score 

The score is based on how much unused, inactive, or underused structure exists in your chart of accounts. The largest driver is never used records, which make up about one third of the score. These are accounts, projects, or other records that have existed since setup but have never been used. For unused/never-used records, activity is evaluated across the entire lifetime of the environment, making them the clearest cleanup opportunity. 

Dormant accounts, also heavily weighted, are accounts with no general ledger activity and a zero balance over the past 12 months. This usually means you should review for inactivation or removal. Low usage records, those with fewer than five general ledger transactions in the past year, make up about 20 percent of the score and help identify areas that may be creating unnecessary complexity. Inactive segments round out the score by showing where parts of the chart structure are no longer supporting current reporting or transaction needs. 

How to Use the Score 

Start by reviewing the findings behind your score so you can see which categories are creating the most clutter or risk. Focus first on the largest opportunities, such as never used records, dormant accounts, or low usage items, rather than trying to clean up everything at once. From there, you can act directly inside Chart Health Advisor by locking, inactivating, or deleting records. Bulk actions are capped at 20 records at a time and sorted by longest unused first, which helps keep cleanup manageable and intentional. 

Treat this as an ongoing maintenance habit, not a one-time project. Refresh your score monthly, involve the right members of your finance team before locking or inactivating records, and confirm permissions with your solution admin so the right people are ready to take action when the tool is available. 

Availability and What Is Coming Next 

Chart Health Advisor is rolling out in waves, with full availability by the end of July 2026. When it is enabled, it will appear as a tile on your admin home page and in the General Ledger menu. There is nothing to install and nothing to turn on. 

Future updates will expand what finance teams can analyze and act on, including segment effectiveness scoring, custom thresholds, export functionality for larger cleanup projects, deeper structural analysis, and AI-driven anomaly detection. Customers can expect updates roughly every four weeks. 

The Bottom Line 

A healthy chart of accounts is not a vanity metric. It is the foundation of faster reporting, cleaner transactions, and lower audit risk. Chart Health Advisor gives finance teams the visibility, prioritization, and progress they need, right inside the system they already use.