From Checklists to Confidence: New Tools for Smoother Monthly Closes with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®

Financial Edge NXT is undergoing a rapid transformation to a modern, action-oriented user experience. As part of this evolution, users will soon see an enhanced home page and a brand-new General Ledger action hub.

While UX designers working within Financial Edge NXT have long envisioned action hubs strategically placed throughout the system to support key workflows, the General Ledger wasn’t the most obvious — or glamorous — place to start. After all, areas such as Treasury, Payables and Receivables have so much more, well, action by way of money going out or money coming in daily, often at high volumes.

But a surprising insight from last year’s (2024) home page discovery work changed the team’s perspective.

An Unexpected Focus on Closing Checklists
Last year, the Financial Edge NXT UX design team conducted a round of discovery interviews to understand what users expect from an enhanced home page in the fund accounting platform. They uncovered several key findings, but one stood out: users’ reactions to a feature the design team hadn’t even spotlighted.  

Buried in a secondary version of the home page concept was a “monthly closing checklist.” The team hadn’t emphasized it, yet nearly every participant homed in on it as a compelling feature. One they’d welcome, albeit with caveats.

Almost 90% of participants remarked on the concept. As one said, “It [the monthly closing checklist] would be incredibly useful, actually. Especially since we share responsibilities between multiple people.”

The Bigger Picture: Close Management
As the team dug deeper, they learned that many organizations already maintain closing checklists. But the complexity and scope of these lists vary widely depending on the organization’s size and workflows.

Users described needing support for recurring tasks, assignments, approval workflows and more. What they described was far advanced compared to the simple list of checkboxes depicted in the prototype.

The checklist, it turns out, was just the tip of the iceberg. What users truly need isn’t just a checklist. They need a way to manage the broader closing process that ensures accurate financial reporting and audit readiness. This larger opportunity is what the team is now calling Close Management.

Helping Financial Edge NXT Customers Accelerate Their Closing Process
As the team explored this domain, it’s clear there’s significant room for improvement. Closing fiscal years on time reduces the risk of performance issues and degradations to the user experience.  More critically, poor data hygiene can result in inaccurate financial statements and audit findings.

The industry standard for organizations that do complete a monthly close is 6–10 days (APQC). By creating a more guided close experience within the platform, Financial Edge NXT users would be able to easily meet or beat that standard. So, there is a clear opportunity to accelerate the closing process for customers by giving them clear insights and actions through a new GL action hub.

Designing for Real-World Complexity
To begin supporting both the checklist concept and the broader Close Management needs, Financial Edge NXT users will soon see a “Closing assistant” tile in a new General Ledger action hub.

This tile and page surfaces key actions users need to complete before closing their fiscal period. It will surface unposted transaction lists proactively and provide users with greater visibility and context for closing fiscal periods and fiscal years.

What’s Next: GL reconciliation and AI-powered anomaly detection
As the Financial Edge NXT design team explores Close Management further, it’s important to acknowledge that Blackbaud isn’t building one particular feature; instead, it is introducing a broader set of capabilities to support this important domain, with the next areas of focus being General ledger reconciliation and AI-powered anomaly detection. 

GL reconciliation is a huge area of opportunity because many organizations aren’t properly reconciling their GL accounts. In fact, some organizations don’t even know they have a problem until it’s too late. In addition, data anomalies can lie hidden and make reconciliation more difficult. Once available, users will be able to leverage AI to help easily identify and resolve “problem transactions,” leading to faster reconciliations, and ultimately a much faster close process.

The new Close Management tools and General Ledger action hub in Financial Edge NXT will give users an easier, more confident way to handle the month-end process. These updates mean finance teams can move past old checklists and count on a strong foundation for more accurate data, faster financial reports and a much simpler audit experience.