As your business grows, it is vital to invest in various systems to support your growing operations and achieve your goals. While several separate systems seem manageable, the business disruption could reduce productivity and transparency within the organization.
On top of all this, if your Customer Relationship Management platform and Accounting System can work together as a powerful integrated solution, then you can avoid duplication and gain a 360-degree real-time view of constituent information. And that’s where Accounting Subledger comes into the picture to help you avoid manually reconciling transactions between Salesforce and your financial system.
What Is Nonprofit Cloud Accounting Subledger?
Accounting Subledger is a new, feature-rich package that is installed on top of the Nonprofit Success Pack. It lets you generate ledger entries for Opportunities and Payments designed to be sent to external accounting systems.
This feature makes it easy to prepare fundraising information for your accounting system to save fundraising and finance significant time and effort on reconciliation tasks by syncing data and linking the system to provide a single source of truth for revenue and payments data.
Features Of Accounting Subledger
Map To Accounting Systems – It provides custom mappings to homegrown systems and customized templates for accounting systems.
Generate Debits And Credits – With Accounting Subledger, you can create accounting records in the style of standard journal entries, with support for double-entry journals.
Detailed Gift Allocations – Accounting Subledger supports cash and accrual accounting. It enables you to distribute gifts to specific funds at the level of detail necessary to recognize donor intent.
Accounting Periods – Open and close accounting periods to ensure consistent and accountable activities in both systems. Ability to set the period according to your accounting method.
Integration With Nonprofit And Education Data – Accounting Subledger uses the Non-Profit Success Package (NPSP) and Gift Entry Manager (GEM) and advanced features of the Salesforce ecosystem to expand your gift-recording capabilities.
Benefits Of Accounting Subledger:-
High Transparency – The information is updated in the financial and CRM systems, generating economic and operational reports for internal and external stakeholders who have invested in the organization.
More efficient time use – The Accounting Subledger manages complex tasks across various programs, projects, and fiscal years. It allows you to spend more time on raising money and growing your mission.
Unified View Of Operations: One of the main benefits of optimizing the data between your CRM and your accounting system is that you can have all the information about your donors and every other transaction in one place and provides you a truly unified view of giving and operations.
Accounting Subledger Licensing
It is the brand-new feature designed by Salesforce that comes without any additional cost. The two types of Accounting Subledger License that are available to Salesforce users are:-
1. Starter Edition
To seamlessly manage adjustment, reversals, and write-offs, it recognizes payments and pledges. It lets you generate ledger entries and predefined reports for Quickbooks, FinancialForce, and Sage Intacct.
2. Growth Edition
It offers all kinds of functionalities for the starter edition to generate credits and debits. It enables you to create general ledger codes for predefined nine accounting systems reports.
Best Practices For Using Salesforce NPSP Accounting Subledger:-
Before you start using the Accounting Subledger in your organization, you will need to select a few checkboxes:
Data Alignment: Ensure that your finance and fundraising teams align on the terminology, definitions, and required data so that the final result meets all requirements.
Latest NPSP: You must have installed the most recent version of NPSP.
Enable Payment Distribution: If you’re enabling Payment Allocations in your Salesforce org for the first time, you need to consider the implications for your current data and reporting structures.
Enable Automatic Payment Creation: It is quite different from the setting for Enhanced Recurring Donations, where you can select an option to turn on automatic payment generation.
Assign Default General Accounting Unit: Accounting Subledger can be assigned Default GAU to any Opportunity (and Payments) that don’t have any allocations. But, this can be modified or overridden via integrations during gift entry.
Recurring Donations Considerations: If you are using Recurring Donations, Accounting Subledger supports Enhanced Recurring Donations (not legacy Recurring Donations). However, if you’re not currently using Enhanced Recurring Donations, there is a need for a system upgrade.
Final Wrap
The Accounting Subledger feature is a phenomenal addition to the Salesforce platform used with both the Nonprofit Cloud and Education Clouds. Accounting Subledger extends the critical aspects of NPSP such as Opportunities, Payments, and General Accounting Unit Allocations) with features that operate in the back-end to automatically create data records, called Ledger Entries. These Ledger Entries can be exported from Salesforce org and imported to the General Ledger of any accounting software. In a nutshell, Accounting Subledger serves as a translation tool between Salesforce and Accounting, reducing coordination time, increasing data accuracy, and saving manual data entry time.
Need help getting started with Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack Implementation? Cloud Analogy, the top-class Salesforce Consulting partner, aims to help nonprofit clients transform all facets of their business operations and drive innovation at a rapid pace. Our team of Salesforce certified experts can help you optimize business operations and utilize technology to get the most of your Salesforce investment.
Deepali Kulshrestha
Salesforce Certified Developer | Delivery Management Head
Deepali, a certified Salesforce Advanced Administrator and Salesforce Developer and CSPO Certified at Cloud Analogy, is a successful name in the industry circles when it comes to the delivery of successful projects with end-to-end testing. Deepali is a globally-renowned industry stalwart when it comes to managing Operations & Delivery Planning in driving Business Performance Management.Hire the best Salesforce Development Company. Choose certified Salesforce Developers from Cloud Analogy now.
