Monthly Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge Reconciliation

Crystal Chouinard

As we say goodbye to FY 2015-16 and start to get settled into FYI 2016-17 I would really love to hear how all you wonderful folks handle reconciliation between RE and FE. This is our second year of having the systems integrated and we are still struggling with finding the balance between efficient and effective. We have always done it line by line monthly. This year I tried to implement a spreadsheet with vlookups but that still had some issues. I appreciate you all and hope you are having a wonderful Monday. Thank you!

Kate Hudson

Hi Crystal,


I am now responsible for this at my org. After the close of the month I run two reports: one in RE and one set up for me in FE. I run the Account Distribution Report in RE located under Financial Reports, and in FE reports, the Controller set up a report for me with all of the accounts I need, and I just update the period. I have to do a lot of formatting to the ADR out of RE - I export it as an Excel Workbook (Data Only), sort by fund, then subtotal the credit amount by the change in fund.


I simply compare the totals on an excel worksheet. I go line by line only if there is a discrepency. There are generally discrepencies in December and January as we are closed from before Christmas until after the New Year, and in June and July when our fiscal year closes and the new ones begins. I have a delta column and a reasons column to show why these occured for auditing purposes. 


If a discrepency happens because a refund was issued for an event, or say a donor called and wanted to change where their donation went, and it was updated in RE but not FE, or was changed in FE in a different period, I note it and request the journal entry from our finance staff. I like to use the FE batch numbers in my notations.

Crystal Chouinard:

As we say goodbye to FY 2015-16 and start to get settled into FYI 2016-17 I would really love to hear how all you wonderful folks handle reconciliation between RE and FE. This is our second year of having the systems integrated and we are still struggling with finding the balance between efficient and effective. We have always done it line by line monthly. This year I tried to implement a spreadsheet with vlookups but that still had some issues. I appreciate you all and hope you are having a wonderful Monday. Thank you!

 

 

 

Adam Davenport

Our organization is having the same difficulty reconciling Raiser's Edge with Financial Edge at the end of each month as well as year-end. I have attempted to find a commonality between the numbers that are not matching up but have yet to find the "Rosetta stone." I would be interested to get input from anyone who is successfully balancing RE and FE.

Joan Bell

Geni Klagstad

10:13 AM (4 hours ago)

to me

Huh - interesting!  There's no magic answer - I
think over time we have learned all the typical mistakes that we
make, so that when there are errors, we can find them really
quickly.

One of the biggest ones used to be around adjusted gifts, but
now when those happen we note them for future reference.  And
some of our biggest problems, as you know, have come from snafus on
GSA's side.  Those are usually easy to find out about and
difficult to solve!  Otherwise small errors like incorrect
account numbers, journal references, dates, etc are pretty easy to
spot if you are looking specifically for them.

Finally, I double check every batch, in two different ways
before I post them on the FE side.  If there is something
suspicious, I give them back to you before I post.

Also it helps to be compulsive about finding every penny - not
so efficient perhaps, but certainly accurate.

G

Gina Smith 2

Adam Davenport:

Our organization is having the same difficulty reconciling Raiser's Edge with Financial Edge at the end of each month as well as year-end. I have attempted to find a commonality between the numbers that are not matching up but have yet to find the "Rosetta stone." I would be interested to get input from anyone who is successfully balancing RE and FE.

I work with 2 different organizations - one is integrated b/w RE and FE, and one is not.  When I got to the "non-integrated" company, they had lots of issues with reconciling FE and RE.  I set up the "not integrated" client with the RE "fund" field to exactly match the FE account numbers just like they would if the systems were integrated.  We changed all the fund numbers going forward and marked former fund numbers as inactive eventually.  It did cause some issues when we started doing comparative fund reporting in RE in the next couple of years, but the benefits very much outweighed the issues with the comparison.  Once we did this, I could run monthly reports  (Financial, Gift Detail, and Summary) based on the fund (and even set up one of these for our finance office to use for monthly reconciling).  I run these reconcile reports each month and compare to an FE monthly report by the same account numbers.  If we have issues, then I take the "detail" portion of the report to research and find our inconsistencies.  The system isn't 'perfect, and I agree with Joan's thought (paraphrased) that you sort of start intuitively knowing where to look for the inconsistencies when they come up.  But using the "fund" field makes the matching up sooooooo helpful!!  The finance office personell was very grateful - especially when it came time to report out to the Board and Development/Finance Committees.