Reconciling subledger to GL - accounts payable

Monique Carter
Monique Carter
Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® General Discussions

I don't see any info on how to reconcile the GL to the subledger AP, can anyone give guidance on this?

Comments

  • Jann McKenzie
    Jann McKenzie
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Monique Carter If you are careful posting AP, balancing should be fairly easy. Invoice date should always equal post date. And if it doesn't balance to begin with, look at Voids and possibly unapplied credit memos. Just run an AP Open Item report as of the period you are trying to balance and compare to GL.

  • Susan Trippe
    Susan Trippe
    Kudos 4 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    @Monique Carter
    I wish you luck! I've never been able to get them to tie. The multiple dates that FE uses makes it impossible to figure out why you're out of balance. I can't let our invoice dates and post dates always be the same, if I want accurate invoice dates in the system. Invoices arrive late many times, and often we have closed the period in which the invoice date falls. I would love to figure it out, but I don't have the luxury of time needed to track all the dates.

  • Roberta A. Gilbert
    Roberta A. Gilbert
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 4 Financial Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge Name Dropper

    @Jann McKenzie
    We often use post dates which are different from invoice dates, to better reflect when an expense was incurred, versus billed. To reconcile AP to the GL, we run both an AP Aging and a GL listing by post date. We have to do this for our audit anyway, but we try to do it either monthly or quarterly throughout the year, as time allows. As long as you do not permit JEs to hit your AP account, they should reconcile easily. (*Instead of making adjustments by JE, go into the AP system and adjust the vendor invoice.)

    Yes, things to look out for are voided checks with the wrong void dates, payments using check dates that are earlier than the invoice post dates they are paying, or transactions not posted. Hope that helps.

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

    @Monique Carter
    Here is a KB that collects the basics and has a link to the full guide :

    How to reconcile to the General Ledger

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Roberta A Gilbert, I'm noticing that when an AP invoice adjustment is made across funds, that FENXT doesn't seem to automatically add the correct Due To / Due From interfund entries that it typically does when you originally create an invoice across funds. This is causing my AP subledger to be out of balance. Is this a setting I have wrong somewhere or do interfund entries need to be manually added when an invoice adjustment is made across funds?

  • Roberta A. Gilbert
    Roberta A. Gilbert
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 4 Financial Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge Name Dropper

    @Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Good question. Kevin Brazell's link is really useful but it doesn't address entries made across funds (unless I missed it). I'm not sure what kind of adjustments you're making in AP that would cross funds. Expenses coming from restricted funds are supposed to have their amounts released from restriction first, before expensing and paying. That way, your expense and payment are both coming from unrestricted funds which were previously released in a Journal Entry which doesn't touch AP at all. That JE will contain the balancing line items you need.

    This is something that our auditors insisted on a few years ago, and it resolves the issue of having a (for example) restricted expense matched with an unrestricted AP account, or unrestricted bank account in the same entry. As a result, there are no restricted expenses directly in our AP subledger, so no balancing entries are required. (Does that help?)

    One other thing I would add to that link: Don't try to reconcile entries which aren't posted yet. Create a query to root out any unposted AP entries before you reconcile, and post them first (or delete/edit them if they're no good) before running an AP Aging or GL report.

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