From Capture to Reconciliation: Building a More Connected Future for Nonprofit Finance

The Next Chapter of Finance Automation is About More than Efficiency 

By David Farah, VP and General Manager of Financial Products at Blackbaud

At Blackbaud, we’re building a more connected approach to finance operations in Financial Edge NXT®, helping organizations reduce manual work, improve visibility, and create more capacity for strategic decision-making. Recent announcements we made at bbcon 2026 including Payment Assistant™ powered by BILL, Document Intelligence, Deposit Connect™, and our vision for an Accounts Payable Agent are all part of that journey.

Together, these innovations reflect where we believe finance automation is heading. The opportunity is no longer simply to make individual tasks faster. It’s to connect workflows across invoice intake, payment, reconciliation, and reporting, so information moves more efficiently and finance teams can focus their expertise where it creates the greatest value.

That matters because nonprofit finance teams are being asked to do more than ever before. Expectations for reporting, transparency, and stewardship continue to rise, while resources often remain constrained. In many organizations, disconnected processes and manual handoffs still stand between teams and the visibility they need.

The next chapter of finance automation is about closing those gaps.

Bringing Best-in-Class Payments Into the Financial Workflow

The recent launch of Payment Assistant powered by BILL is an important milestone in our connected-finance strategy.

Through this new partnership, BILL’s business payments network and payment-processing capabilities are being embedded directly into the Financial Edge NXT accounts payable workflow. This will help organizations manage the journey from invoice and approval through payment and reconciliation within a connected experience.

With Payment Assistant powered by BILL, finance teams gain expanded vendor payment options, simplified vendor enrollment, faster payment delivery, real-time payment visibility, and streamlined reconciliation, while maintaining the controls and approval processes they rely on.

Those capabilities address a significant source of friction for finance teams. Vendor onboarding, payment execution, status tracking, and reconciliation can require people to move among multiple systems, manually connect information, and spend time confirming what happened after a payment was initiated.

By bringing these activities into a more connected workflow, we can help organizations spend less time managing payment logistics and more time focused on financial stewardship and mission impact.

The partnership also represents something larger about the future of nonprofit financial management. Organizations shouldn’t have to choose between technology built specifically for nonprofit and education finance, and access to best-in-class financial services.

By combining Blackbaud’s expertise with BILL’s payment network and payment-processing capabilities, we’re creating a more seamless experience from transaction intake through reconciliation.

Capture: Reducing Manual Work at the Start of the Process

Document Intelligence brings AI-powered automation to the point where invoices and expense documents enter the financial workflow.

It extracts key information from those documents and generates draft records for review, allowing finance teams to focus on oversight and decision-making while maintaining the controls they depend on. As these capabilities expand across Expense Management and payables workflows, organizations can create a more consistent experience from the moment financial information enters the system.

That is important because invoice processing remains one of the most time-consuming activities for many finance departments. Before an invoice can move forward, teams may need to extract, enter, and validate its information manually. Each of those steps takes time and introduces another opportunity for delay.

Document Intelligence helps reduce that effort at the beginning of the process, creating a stronger foundation for the approvals, payments, and reconciliation activities that follow.

Connecting Financial Activity Across Systems

Deposit Connect brings fundraising, payments, and financial management together in one connected workflow.

It automatically brings gift, fee, and disbursement information together across Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud Integrated Payments, and Financial Edge NXT, helping automate deposit creation and reconciliation to the general ledger.

Deposit Connect also provides a practical example of the vision behind Platform for Good, Blackbaud’s newly announced unified operating system. Platform for Good connects data, workflows, intelligence, and action across the solutions organizations use every day. Deposit Connect brings that vision to life by helping information move more seamlessly among fundraising, payments, and financial management.

The need for that connection is clear. Even an efficient process can create additional work when its information must be transferred to another system. When fundraising activity, payment information, and financial records remain separated, finance teams can be left reconciling data through manual processes.

By connecting those activities, Deposit Connect can help organizations save time, improve visibility, and have greater confidence in the information reaching the general ledger.

Although Deposit Connect focuses on money entering an organization rather than accounts payable, the underlying objective is the same. Whether funds are coming in through donations and payments or leaving through accounts payable, connected workflows can reduce manual effort and help teams move from information to action more efficiently.

What’s Next: Moving From Task Automation to Workflow Coordination

Our vision for the upcoming Accounts Payable Agent represents the next step in finance automation: moving from automating individual tasks to orchestrating the work between them.

Planned as the first autonomous AI agent for Financial Edge NXT, the Accounts Payable Agent is designed to review invoice information, surface exceptions, prepare cash-aware payment recommendations, and support teams throughout the accounts payable process, while keeping people in control of every decision.

This type of support can address the repetitive coordination work that occurs between invoice receipt and payment. Finance professionals must often review information, identify what needs attention, determine which items can move forward, and prepare the next stage of work.

The agent doesn’t replace those professionals or their judgment. Instead, it helps reduce the routine coordination surrounding their decisions, so they can apply more of their expertise to oversight, strategy, and stewardship.

Building Capacity for the Mission

Together, these innovations are building a more connected future for nonprofit finance.

Payment Assistant powered by BILL connects more of the vendor-payment journey. Document Intelligence helps automate the intake of invoices and expense documents. Deposit Connect links fundraising, payments, and finance in a workflow that advances the Platform for Good vision. The planned Accounts Payable Agent points toward another evolution, where intelligent systems help coordinate work while preserving human oversight.

The reason for making these workflows more connected is capacity.

Every hour spent entering invoices, chasing approvals, tracking payments, or reconciling spreadsheets is an hour that can’t be spent analyzing performance, advising leadership, or supporting an organization’s mission.

The future of nonprofit finance will be shaped by how effectively systems work together to reduce friction from start to finish. Through AI-powered document processing, connected vendor payments, automated reconciliation, and intelligent workflow coordination, we’re helping finance teams gain greater clarity, greater control, and greater capacity to focus on the work that matters most.

Ready to create more connected financial workflows? Contact your Blackbaud account executive to learn more about Payment Assistant powered by BILL, Document Intelligence, Deposit Connect, and what’s ahead for Financial Edge NXT.