Keeping track of individual funds within a pooled endowment

Lisa Brooks

For those of you with endowment funds:

We use Blackbaud’s Financial Edge and Raisers Edge, and this stand-alone program called EAS, which was designed by a board member of ours years ago but desperately needs to be replaced.  We use this to issue reports to donors about what is available for them to use from their endowed funds, depending on our spending rate etc. 

 

How do you keep track of how much is available and unused in any individual fund (which is part of the pooled endowment fund) in terms of interest, dividends etc, at any given time?  What do you actually send to donors?  And how do you keep track of different spending policies for various grants. (e.g. Title V).  We have the Financial Edge allocation module, but have been using this stand-alone tool (EAS) just for those calculations.  We are now looking for something that is more current.  What do you use?  Can you e-mail us a sample report that you send to donors?  Any help would be so appreciated.

Lisa

 Lbrooks@glendale.edu

 

Marc Seleman

Lisa:



I don't know if this will address everything you are asking, but FE Allocation module is designed specifically to handle all of those allocation calculations of dividends/interest/gains/losses/fees.



If configured properly FE can keep track of the individual fund balances within the Net Asset accounts so that you know at any given time how much each donor designated fund has available.  It takes into account the "starting balance", any additions to the fund through donations or allocation transactions, and any dispursements.  This assumes you are using some method in FE to track the funds such as project codes.



You can then do one of two things for your reporting to donors.  You can export that info from FE, and merge it into whatever reporting document you want.  Or you can utilize the "accountability summary" functionality that can send FE activity to the Fund record in RE.



Let me know if you need additional information.



Marc

Blackbaud Financail Systems Consultant

Lisa Brooks

Hi Marc,

This is very helpful.  May we contact you (probably not for a few weeks because we are in the midst of an audit) to discuss further?  I am assuming there is some kind of interface we can write to work with the FE Allocation module.  We do have that module, by the way.

Lisa

 

Marc Seleman

I'd be happy to chat with you when you are ready. My email is marc.seleman@blackbaud.com.



Let me know when you are available and we can set up a quick phone call.