Setting up an endowment

Jennifer Johnson
Jennifer Johnson
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® General Discussions
We have our first donation to setup an endowment and I would like to hear how others set this up in FE. Is it best to setup as an additional fund or part of the GL account? We do have the Project, Grants and Endowment module but I cannot find anything specific to endowments in the software or on the knowledgebase. Thank you in advance for your help.

Comments

  • Thomas Walker
    Thomas Walker Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Hi Jennifer,

    Happy to chat if you'd like

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

    Aloha,


    We have 75 endowments (we are basically similar to a Community
    Foundation).


    Each of our endowments has 3 projects. One for contributions, one
    for grants, and one for principal. Investment entries go into
    principal, then an amount is transferred from the investment to the
    grants project.


    I’m sure there are other ways to do this as well.




    Sannyasin Siddhanathaswami


  • Nicholas Murphy
    Nicholas Murphy
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
    Jennifer,


    We use one project for an endowment. We then use our different funds to manage principal, earnings, and disbursements. The principal goes into our permanently restricted fund, then earnings are recorded in our temporarily restricted fund. Finally, when disbursements are made they are expensed through unrestricted funds, and the earnings that are paying for that disbursements are released from the temporarily restricted fund to the unrestricted to cover the disbursement.
  • Angela Tuttle
    Angela Tuttle
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 January 2026 Monthly Challenge Name Dropper
    We use one project for the endowment and one project for the spendable income. We use different account codes and funds for earnings, gifts, cash, corpus/historic cost, etc.


    Gifts go into Permanently Restricted Endowment Projects (credit gifts, debit cash) and when funds are invested we credit cash, debit corpus. Monthly earnings are recorded through Perm Restricted Endowment Projects and once a year the spendable is pulled off the endowment and placed in the Temp Restricted or Unrestricted project.

Categories