F9 Financial Reporting for Financial Edge:Arthritis Foundation Case Study

PRESENTED BY KIM BALLO AND BERNADINE BRAMBLETT

Learn how Arthritis Foundation is speeding up

their financial reporting cycle with F9!

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Content Slide• Bernadine Bramblett

• Senior Director, Finance SystemsArthritis Foundation, National Office

• Kim Ballo• Finance Systems Analyst

Arthritis Foundation, National Office• Jeffrey Sobers

• Global Partner Development Manager

Blackbaud• David Stewart

• Director of Sales

Infor F9

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• F9 Introduction• About Arthritis Foundation

• Introduction• Why Arthritis Foundation was Selected to Present• Business Objectives• Why F9 was Selected• Example F9 financial reports

• Summary• Resources• Contact• Q&A

Agenda

What is F9

• Powerful & easy-to-use Financial Reporting and Analysis solution dynamically linking the Financial Edge GL to Microsoft Excel

• Provides Business Intelligence (BI) & visualization tools (dashboards & KPI’s)

• Offers easy one-step recalculation…PRESS

• Embedded Business Logic in Excel

Ventana Research found that 93% of companies use spreadsheets during the closing process.

F9 for Financial Edge: Customer profile• 1000 current Blackbaud clients (FE and Fundware)

are using F9 today!• Small to medium sized non-profits AND even larger

institutions and divisions of large multi-nationals• Any non-profit leveraging Microsoft Excel for financial

reporting and want to eliminate rekeying and redundancies

• Finance requires a powerful yet flexible reporting solution

• Enables non-technical finance users (no IT involvement required)• IT budget challenged• Need an easy-to-install, learn and use solution that is

scale-able• #1 buying criteria: “lowest total cost of ownership”

What makes F9 different?

• Easy to learn: You know Excel… You know F9!• 2 hour 1 on 1 training course by Blackbaud Training Team

• Ease of Use: Leveraging power of Excel• Easy to Install: Minimal effort required (15 Minutes)• Easy to maintain – low TCO

• no development or IT maintenance required• Live, real-time access to your Financial Edge G/L

• 30 day free trial - Try before you Buy! • http://www.f9.com/downloads/Blackbaud_Trial.aspx• Specific F9 for FE sample Report pack

• NOW AVAILABLE IN BLACKBAUD HOSTING!!!

Features of F9• Excel-based functionality ensures ease of use• Formula Calculations eliminate re-keying of numbers • Ad-hoc Reporting using the Report Wizard, Table and

Pivot Table analysis• Report Analysis diagnoses errors in a report• Drill-Down Capability by any account segments (Projects

Codes, etc), transactions (TransCode 1 to 5), pivot details• Consolidations over multiple companies, funds, projects• Scheduling report calculation, distribution and email

Arthritis Foundation Case Study

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About the Arthritis Foundation• The Arthritis Foundation is the largest nonprofit organization

dedicated to the prevention, control, and cure of America’s leading cause of disability: Arthritis.

• The Arthritis Foundation provides services and conducts fund raising through a nationwide organizational structure that consists of 10 Regions and a National office. Some Regions have Branch office operations as well.

• Each of the 10 Regions and the National office are separate legal ‘entities’ within the organization. Each entity has their own Financial Edge and F9 Users who prepare financial statements and reports for their entity. Consolidated reports are prepared by the National office.

About the Arthritis Foundation• Most report layouts/templates are created and maintained by

National office staff, but the monthly reports are run by the entity staff.

• Some types of revenue are generated by the Regions and shared with the National office and some types of revenue are generated by the National office and shared with the Regions. The share amounts are calculated as a percentage of the total revenue, net of certain expenses. Our monthly reports calculate the share amounts.

• Some types of services are contracted on a national basis, coordinated by the National office, and billed to the Regions for their portion of the expense. Our monthly reports include the amounts due to the National office/from the Regions.

About the Arthritis Foundation• The Arthritis Foundation implemented Financial Edge with a go-

live date of January 1, 2011 and converted 2009 and 2010 data from our former database to Financial Edge for historical reporting.

• The Arthritis Foundation implemented F9 Reporting in January 2012.

Why the Arthritis Foundation was selected to present:• The Arthritis Foundation utilizes F9 within a hosted

environment (was first F9 hosted client in FE)• The Arthritis Foundation’s organizational structure consists

of multiple, separate legal ‘entities’, but the separate entities operate within a single Financial Edge database, rather than separate databases for each entity.

Why the Arthritis Foundation was selected to present:• The Arthritis Foundation has complex reporting needs:

• separate Entity reporting from a single database• detailed reporting at various organizational levels (reports by entity, fund,

location, department and project)• some reports need to calculate ‘share’ amounts based on selected gross

revenue lines, net of certain expenses (some shareable at 27%, 35%, and 45%)

• Some reports need to calculate ‘share’ amounts based on the ‘event date’ (calculations are $0 until 60 days after the ‘event date’)

Why the Arthritis Foundation was selected to present:• The AF staff worked closely with F9 staff during F9

implementation as we were hosted beta client:• Open communication between the AF staff and the F9 staff enabled the F9

staff to further understand AF’s more complex reporting needs and enabled them to provide valuable feedback.

• The F9 staff willingly reviewed and tested some of AF’s more complex report layouts and implemented system changes to improve and enhance performance (indexing, software enhancements, and use of *wildcards instead of ranges).

• The communication and collaboration resulted in a smooth transition to F9 and a positive implementation experience.

Business Objectives

Objectives:

Create standardized monthly reports • Financial Statements (by entity and consolidated entities)

• Trial Balance Report (by Fund)• Statement of Position• Statement of Activities (All Funds, by Fund, and by Special Event)

• Inter-organizational reports• ‘Share’ calculation reports (revenue and expense amounts due to/due from

the Region/National offices, both current and future share)• Detail of contributions receivable• Detail of restricted and non-shareable contributions• Detail of bequests and planned giving

Business Objectives

Objectives (continued):

Create detailed monthly reports• Statement of Activities:

• by Fund (unrestricted, temporarily restricted, permanently restricted)• by Location• by Department• by Project • and any combination of the above

Business Objectives

Objectives (continued):

Create User-friendly report layouts/templates that require minimal maintenance

• Enable the User to select the report timeframe (fiscal year and accounting period) and have the timeframes within the individual columns of the report layout automatically update, based on the User’s selection

• Create report layouts that enable the User to run the report at various organizational levels (consolidated or by entity, by location, by department, by project, etc.)

• Have report criteria fields auto-populate with minimal User input.

Business ObjectivesIssues prior to F9 implementation:• Due to the AF structure, separate report requests had to be created and

maintained in Financial Edge for each of the AF’s entities. • The Arthritis Foundation’s Regions and National office are separate ‘entities’ within one

Financial Edge database. Each entity has unique Fund codes that have to be selected within every Financial Edge report request. Each entity has unique Fund codes which consist of an ‘entity code’ preceded by 1, 2, or 4 to designate unrestricted and restricted activity within the entity. Example:

• 11 South Central Region• 111 Unrestricted, 211 Temporarily Restricted, 411 Permanently

Restricted• 12 Heartland Region

• 112 Unrestricted, 212 Temporarily Restricted, 412 Permanently Restricted

• 13 Mid Atlantic Region• 113 Unrestricted, 213 Temporarily Restricted, 413 Permanently

Restricted• The sum of the 3 Fund codes equal the entity activity. The 3 Fund codes have to be

selected within each Financial Edge report request.

Business Objectives/Issues

Issues prior to F9 implementation (continued):• Transactions for each entity can be distinguished by the transaction’s

account number, which consists of 4 required segments: Fund Code-Account Code-Location Code-Department Code. This enables us to separate transactions by entity but requires many codes within the database and requires more filtering in report request criteria fields.

• Each entity’s budget data is retained within a separate Financial Edge ‘budget scenario’ and the budget scenario has to be selected within every budget data column of a Financial Edge report request.

• Report timeframes are selected within each column of a Financial Edge report request and have to be maintained/updated by the User.

Business Objectives/

Issues prior to F9 implementation (continued):• Many of the Arthritis Foundation’s Entity monthly reports are workbooks

that consist of several individual reports/financial statements within one workbook. In Financial Edge, each report is a separate output file.

• While the Financial Edge Queue enables Users to schedule and run multiple report requests on an automated basis, each report is a separate output file. Our Users had to manually consolidate the separate output files into one workbook for each entity.

Business Objectives

Issues prior to F9 implementation (continued):• Some of the Arthritis Foundation’s monthly reports have fields that

populate with calculated amounts from one report to another and require data fields that are not available in Financial Edge reports.

• Some of our reports have calculated fields that provide a ‘percentage of’ or ‘sum of’ totals from another report. In Financial Edge, each report is a separate output file and these calculations from one report to another are not available.

• Some of our entity financial reports calculate balances due to/from other entities based on ‘event date’ and the event date field is not available in Financial Edge Financial Report layouts.

Why F9 was Selected

Why the Arthritis Foundation selected F9: • F9 is a powerful and versatile reporting tool. • F9 and Blackbaud staff were attentive to our needs, which created a

good working relationship. • Blackbaud’s willingness to implement F9 in a hosted environment.• Collaboration between Blackbaud and F9 to enhance processing speed.

Why F9 was Selected

F9 was selected because it is a powerful and versatile financial reporting tool: • F9 integrates standard Microsoft Excel functionality and formula

calculations with Financial Edge General Ledger data. • F9 provides the report design flexibility we were seeking. • F9 enables us to create workbooks with numerous worksheets/report

layouts and run all of the reports at the same time. • F9 enables us to create a single workbook ‘template’ that can be used by

all of the Arthritis Foundation entities without modifying the workbook template for each entity.

Why F9 was Selected

F9 was selected because it is a powerful and versatile financial reporting tool (continued): • F9 enables us to create reports with standard rows of general ledger

data and incorporate additional rows of organization-specific calculations (our ‘share’ calculations). We can also use Excel formulas to transfer amounts from one worksheet to another.

• F9 enables us to include Financial Edge data fields in our F9 reports that were not available to us in Financial Edge reports, (such as the ‘event date’ field).

• F9 enables us to use Excel formulas to auto-populate multiple criteria fields of a report layout based on a few selections made by the User (more user-friendly reports).

Implementation Highlights

Successful roll-out of F9 to our entity UsersThe most significant decision we made during our F9 implementation was to create and integrate our Define and Prompt sheets into every F9 workbook we created.

The Define and Prompt sheets:• provide standardized report criteria• minimize maintenance of report layouts• eliminate duplication of effort• provide simplicity to our Users

The Define sheet(example of a simple Define sheet)

• The Define sheet is where we list, or define, report criteria specific to each of our individual entities (the entity’s fund codes, budget scenarios, etc.). We also list, or define, reporting timeframes (fiscal periods and fiscal years).

• The values listed in the Define sheet are then used to auto-populate various fields of the Prompt sheet and, ultimately, various report criteria fields of the F9 report layout itself.

• We hide the Define sheet within our F9 workbooks so our Users do not inadvertently make changes to it.

The Prompt sheet(example of a simple Prompt sheet)

• The Prompt sheet prompts the User to make certain selections before running the F9 Report. The prompt options are displayed in drop down menus at each prompt field (which are the ‘lists’ within the Define sheet).

• When the User makes a selection at each prompt field, Excel formulas within hidden cells of the Prompt sheet retrieve and auto-populate the cells with values from the Define sheet. Each selection at the prompt field retrieves a unique set of values from the Define sheet.

The F9 report layout (example of report layout where the report criteria is auto-populated with values from the Define and Prompt sheets)

• Excel formulas within hidden criteria fields of the F9 report layout retrieve and auto-populate the criteria fields with the values from the Prompt sheet.

• The use of the Define and Prompt sheets enable us to create generic F9 report layouts that can be used by each of our individual entities.

• The report criteria within the generic report layout auto-populates with entity-specific criteria, based on the selections the entity Users make at the Prompt sheet.

Live F9 Sample Reports

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Summary

• F9 is a powerful & easy-to-use Financial Reporting and Analysis solution dynamically linking the Financial Edge GL to Microsoft Excel

• Turn-Key Product :• Easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to maintain• Easy to learn: You know Excel … You know F9!• Low cost of ownership

• Live, real-time access to your Financial Edge G/L• 30 day free trial - Try before you Buy! • http://www.f9.com/try-f9-free/

F9 resources

• Website: www.f9.com

• Weekly Webinars: http://www.f9.com/about-f9/events every Wednesday

at 2pm EST/11am PST and quarterly F9 for FE Webinars from Blackbaud

• Free 30 day trial with unlimited technical support from F9 for Financial

Edge clients: http://www.f9.com/try-f9-free/ and Blackbaud website

• Hosted clients – contact to play with F9 in FE Hosted “sandbox”

• F9 for FE Brochure: https://

www.blackbaud.com/files/resources/downloads/Brochure_F9forFE.pdf

• F9 Recording: http://youtu.be/ny4DxB1e2Dg

• F9 Application Training and Support through Blackbaud post-sale

• David Stewart, Director of Sales, F9:• Email: david.stewart@infor.com • Phone: 778-373-4132

Please contact your Blackbaud Account Manager for more information

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