Hi everyone! As if there isn't enough change taking place, we are hoping to use the upcoming roll forward into FY21 as an opportunity to overhaul our long-standing campaign/fund/designation tree. I haven't been through this sort of Tessi transition myself before, so I'm curious if anyone else has gone through this process and can offer any advice or pitfalls to watch out for when making sizable changes like this.
Broadly speaking - we'd roll this out at the very top of our FY21, and make sure to adjust any gifts already booked early for FY21 or later to fit the new structure and give us a clean start across the board.
Our biggest objective is to get funds working again as broad purpose restrictions as recommended by the Network (in our current config, the funds mainly describe who the donor is, like trustees, majors, etc. rather than what they're giving toward). Designations would be specific projects within those broader restrictions (primarily to help tailor acknowledgements), and our campaigns would stay generally the same (broadly dividing up individual/corporate/foundation funders, and so on).
Our Tessitura financial config and Finance's systems aren't as integrated as I would like (that's a whole other project), but the upshot is that we can probably lead the way more on our ideal setup on the Tessitura side without having to deal with too many pre-existing constraints in our accounting software.
Thanks for any thoughts or pearls of wisdom you've got about a project like this! Hope you are all doing as well as can be.
Hi Evan! Kate from SAM here. I hope you are doing well!!
We are transitioning off of RE onto Tessitura (what we're calling Phase 2 - our Ticketing has been live for almost two years) with a go-live date of mid-June. We're struggling a bit with how to set up our C/F/D structure.
Devolopment and Finance at SAM have always used an entity-based coding structure. We in Devo are just about set to commit to the Tessitura recommended purpose-driven structure, while our Finance team would stay with their (numerous and very detailed) entity-based structure. We know this means Tessitura will not be able to function a sub-ledger and we will need to build some backend reports to get Finance all the information they need; they may be willing to restructure down the road.
I'm wondering how your overhaul went, and how things are going for you currently?
Thanks in advance for any advice you may have!
Kate