Eddie Barker, THANK YOU for this explanation.  All too often, I think we get confused about which is which, and your explanation makes it very clear and concise.  I would love to see the ability to use distributions in the General Ledger, the same way we use them in Accounts Payable. 

Hi all,

I'm working on Allocation Management NXT and wanted to ask this question. There is sometimes a dichotomy between what we in Blackbaud R&D call allocations, and what clients call allocations. 

An allocation is a moving of debits/credits already posted to a set of accounts/projects, etc (class, t-code, and so forth). in General Ledger to another set of account/projects, etc. The end result of an allocation is a set of balanced journal entries.

A distribution is a spreading by percentage to different accounts/projects at the time you are entering a transaction. The classic one is, in payables, while you are entering an invoice, you want to spread it to multiple accounts/projects, etc. We offer the ability to create distribution sets to do that now in payables, and an Excel add-in as a direct pipeline into the database to create complex ones more easily. Validation is, obviously, the requirement that 100% be distributed.

I'm unclear as to which one is referenced in this. Also, there are definitely connections between the two that we can consider implementing, but I need to get the issues sorted out and separated appropriately first.

Any feedback? You can of course email me at eddie.barker@blackbaud.com or respond here. IF you want to setup a call to discuss it, that would be awesome. Thanks for reading all of this. :)

Eddie Barker (Product Manager, Financial Edge NXT)

it would also be great to view the cost centers utilized with the distribution amount or % when trying to print a posted journal entry to avoid having to pull the original to determine how it split; currently it is blank 

I have the same suggestion. In additions, please add a report that will show the cumulative % or units by person by allocation JE. It will be helpful to see the summary how the total payroll for the person was allocated through out the year. Also, if someone reviews the Journal entry right now it is hard to check if the calculated amount is correct as there is not report or part of the journal entry that shows how the numbers we calculated. Even the allocation reports for misc allocations do not show the %.

Allocation management is a great feature but it needs the % to be shown on the reports.

You can set up a distribution in configuration that the allocation references and updates when the distribution is updated.  That way you can open the distribution and update it when you need to, instead of all of the individual allocations.