Budget Management
If you have the optional module Budget
Management, the following change
was made in The Financial Edge 7.75.
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The
Financial Edge 7.75 release gives you the ability to budget for a range of periods that do not
have to follow fiscal years. For example, you can enter an 18 month
budget for a project starting in period 4 of your fiscal year and
ending in period 9 of your next fiscal year. The period range budget does not have to start in period 1 or
end in period 12. For more information, see the Budget chapter of
the
Records Guide for
General Ledger.
Projects and Grants
If you have the optional module Projects and Grants, the following changes
were made in The Financial Edge 7.75.
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We added additional fields to the project record. These new fields and
corresponding report filters may be used to report on information
previously handled using project attributes. The new fields are
Division, Department, and Location. For more information about these
fields, see the Projects chapter
of the
Records Guide for
General Ledger.
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The
Financial Edge also gives you the ability to create budgets
for grants. We have made changes to
the Budget tabs of the account and project records, and added a
Budget tab to the grant record. Grant record budgets allow total
expense budgeting. For more information on these changes, see the
Records Guide for
General Ledger.
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We added a new Grant business rule. Using the
new Allow total budget amounts to be set for selected grant types
business rule, you can select the grant types for which you want to
use grant total budgeting, instead of account based budgeting. This
business rule affects how the Budget tab displays on the grant record.
For more
information about Grant business rules, see the
Configuration
Guide for General Ledger.
Budget Tools
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We added a
new Budget Tool to Budget Management. You can use the new
Increase/Decrease Grant budget to increase and decrease multiple
grant budgets by an amount or percent, making the budgeting process
more efficient and flexible. For more information, see the Budget chapter of the
Records Guide for
General Ledger.
Budget Reporting
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To accommodate
grant budgeting and period range budgeting, some options and
terminology changed on each of the three Budget reports in
General Ledger. For more information, see the Budget
Reports chapter of the
Reports Guide for General Ledger.
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In General Ledger,
we have added a new Grant report, which is available
if you have Projects and Grants. The Grant Budget vs. Actual
Report shows budget information and the actual activity of selected
grants and accounts. You can use this report to compare actual and
budgeted revenue and expenses for a grant. This report can be in a
summary or detail format. For more information, see the Grant
Reports chapter of the
Reports Guide for General Ledger.
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In addition, we
have enhanced the Project Budget vs. Actual Report to show either
project budgets with account detail or the project total expense
budget. For more information, see the Project Reports chapter of the
Reports Guide for General Ledger.
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On the Project Financial Statements Report, you can
now specify a transaction code to use as a secondary level of
detail in the report.
For more
information, see the Project Reports chapter of the
Reports Guide
for General Ledger.
BAI Format
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A new file type is available when clearing
transactions electronically from your bank. In addition to the
*.qif, *.qbo, *.ofx, and *.qfx formats, you can now use a Bai.txt
file. For more information, see the Cash Management Tasks chapter of
the
Banks Guide.
Payroll Enhancements
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Based upon your
suggestions, we added
two new reports to Payroll. The Compensation and
Deductions Register lists employee
earnings, benefits, deductions, and tax amounts for paid or unpaid
calculations over a specified period of time. You can format the
report in summary or detail. The Employee Directory provides a list
of employees and includes biographical information such as
department, address, telephone number, or birthday. For more information, see the
Reports Guide for Payroll.
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With this release, label and
envelope functionality has been added to Payroll. You
can now create labels and envelopes for your employees within Payroll. For more information, see the Labels, Label
Truncation Reports, and Envelopes chapters of the
Mail Guide.
Student Billing Enhancements
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You can now create billing cycles in
Configuration to group transactions and activity by date ranges for
filtering transactions in reports and statements. For example, you
can create reports and statements that are broken down or summarized
by billing cycles to provide parents with information about their
transactions for a particular academic year. For more information,
see the
Configuration Guide for Student Billing.
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In Configuration, you can now create application
restrictions that determine which transactions payments, credits,
advance deposits, and financial aid apply to. For more information,
see the
Configuration Guide for Student Billing
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To make automatic payment applications easier for
payer-centric billing systems, we added the Distribute payments [ ]
option to General Business Rules in Configuration so you can select the
default method for distributing unapplied payments. You can select to
apply payments proportionally based on the balance, evenly across
students only, or evenly across all records. The program uses this
option along with settings from the Payers tab on records to determine
which charges the payment applies to by default. We also added the
Transactions For column to the grid on the Student Billing Detail tab of
payments and the Applied To tab of credits so you can more easily
specify whose charges the payment or credit should be distributed to.
The new Balance column displays the current balance for the record
selected in the Transactions For column. You can use the new Columns
button to hide the Reduces the Balance Of column to make the grid appear
more like the one in the 6.x version of Student Billing.
The Distribute
payments [ ] option does not apply to existing payment applications made
before upgrading to 7.75, only those applications made after upgrading.
Existing payments will display
in the Transactions For
column after upgrading. If you use student-centric billing, these
changes do not apply and will not affect your current applications
process. For more information about the payment applications
process, see the Payment and Credit Applications chapter of the
Configuration Guide for Student Billing.
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We added a new field in Student Billing
Configuration
to help speed data entry when adding payments. Using the new Default
payment method field, you can select a default payment method for
new deposit records. Your selection appears automatically on the
deposit record when you create a new deposit, as well as any
payments associated with that deposit record. For more information,
see the
Configuration Guide for Student Billing.
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When adding EFT bank account information for
students, individuals, and organizations, you can now enter the bank
account owner’s name in the new Account holder field. For example,
if a student’s payments are drawn from a parent’s account, enter the
parent’s name. For more information, see the Students, Individuals,
and Organizations chapters of the
Records Guide for Student
Billing.
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Two account balances appear in the status bar for student,
individual, and organization records. The Balance field
displays the same calculated value as the Total Account Balance
field on the Activity tab when the View fields are set to
“Activity” and “Owned by or Assigned to”. If you mark Show
account balance with scheduled activity for students, individuals
and organizations in Records Options, the Balance with
scheduled activity field displays the same calculated value as
the Total field on the Activity tab when the View
fields are set to “Scheduled Activity” and “Owned by or Assigned
to”. The account balances update automatically when an associated
charge, credit, payment, line item, return, or refund record is
added, changed, or deleted. For more information, see the
Records
Guide for Student Billing. If you are upgrading from an earlier
version of Student Billing, you will need to run the
Update Cached Record Balances utility on the Plug-Ins page to
calculate the current balances. For more information, see the
Plug-ins chapter of the
Administration Guide for The Financial
Edge.
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The Add
Transactions to a Group process (from an open charge, credit, advanced
deposit, or financial aid record, select Transaction, Add this
to a Group of Records) has improved. If you mark Preview records before
<transactions> are added, the Preview Records screen appears. On this screen you
can select which records from the query you want to add the transaction
to. After processing, you can click Review to view the
Review Added and Exceptions screen. For more information, see the
Records Guide for Student Billing.
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In Records, on the Bio 1 tab of a student
record, you can add hold codes that restrict students from
performing certain tasks until they complete a responsibility. When
you put students on hold, you encourage them to complete their
responsibilities. For more information about hold codes, see the
Configuration Guide for Student Billing.
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For college billing systems, you can now
create deferred payment plans in Configuration for students who need
to pay their balance in increments. Payment plans can include most
of the student’s fees, such as housing and meal plans, lab and
computer fees, as well as the setup fee for the payment plan and any
late payment charges. For more information, see the
Configuration
Guide for Student Billing.
Once you create the payment plans in
Configuration, you can assign them to student records. For more
information, see the Students chapter of the
Records Guide for
Student Billing.
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For college billing systems, we have added
the 1098T form. You can use the 1098T form for reporting to the IRS
and students the
amount of qualified tuition and related expenses, and fees billed or paid
during the calendar year. This form helps
students determine whether they are eligible to claim an Education
Tax Credit on their individual income tax returns. For more
information, see the Forms chapter of the
Mail Guide
for The Financial Edge.
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For college billing
systems, in Records, on the Bio 2 tab of a student record, you can view
a student's expected graduation date. The expected graduation date can
assist you when you report financial aid information. For more
information, see the Students chapter of the
Records
Guide for Student Billing.
The Financial Edge User Guides
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The Financial Edge user guides are
no longer installed on your workstation. However, you can still
access the guides from the User Guides page within the program, as
well as the Blackbaud website. If you experience problems accessing
the guides, create a case on the Blackbaud Customer Support
Case Central website.
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