Is Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT right for your business?

My review of Financial Edge NXT

I like Financial Edge NXT and I couldn’t imagine doing my job without it!

Pros

I like that this software is for finance and accounting professionals. It has helped me to perform the daily functions of my job with limited interruptions.

Cons

I haven’t been able to understand the allocation module, and so we are still doing our investments manually. The guide that is provided seems to work more for people who have an overall understanding of how it should work.

Good product - backward implementation

The worst part is implementation. We had to make decisions about setup that cannot be changed before we fully understood how we wanted to use the software. They should have allowed us to use our own data in a "sandbox" model to learn how things work.

Pros

I love the fact that you can create journal entries and invoices and include that information in reports before posting them. This helps to avoid mistakes. The web view is user friendly and fairly intuitive.

Cons

The database view is archaic and not user friendly. Many functions have not yet been converted to the web view and must be done in the database view.

Blackbaud for Nonprofits

Overall this is a great product. We are very pleased with Blackbaud and do not plan on changing vendors any time soon.

Pros

This software is perfect for our organization. It continues to implement updated features to make our jobs easier.

Cons

The expense tracking sometimes appears to be offline and causes our staff a good amount of time to enter their expenses.

Financial Edge NXT Not Ready for Primetime

After seeing the NXT demo, it was clear that moving to the new platform would provide our business with all the functionality we were missing in our on premise thick client version. THIS WAS A BIG MISTAKE! Although during the demo it was clearly stated that some of the modules would not be moved from the old version to the new, it was not stated that features in the NXT migrated modules would not be available... so if you are working in say AP and rolling along with your work, you might hit a feature set that does not exist in NXT and requires you to switch to the Citrix version think client. It turns out that only a small percentage of the system has been migrated to NXT. This plan to migrate the modules and functions within the modules in realtime is a massive failure. The performance hit moving to the cloud was intollerable. GL uploads take twice as long even after assessing bandwidth and attempting to do the uploads on the local Blackbaud servers in the cloud. Its as if they did not build the environment robust enough to support the client base. There were features that simply did not work. Printing is problematic and the WebPortal for purchases and requisitions simply does not work. It fails with a web browser error. They said they fixed it as they had identified a node that was not turned up (you would have though they would have a monitoring tool to know this was the case) but this did not solve the problem in the end. Screen lockups, and crashes began to occur and yet there was no one who could effectively analyze the issues and solve the problems. We now have to roll our database back to our on premise version and search for a new solution. We will not be using Blackbaud. Their support is horrendous; forget telephone support your could be on hold for an hour or more; we were able to get on chats but that took some time as well. It was not until we started yelling and escalating that we finally got some response because the number of open incidents was ridiculous. I'm sure their bread and butter CRM and Grand management apps are probably fine but hosted Financial Edge/NXT definitely not worth the money.

Pros

None...

Cons

Product just does not work.

Blackbaud NXT functions with great effort

Blackbaud has two ways of interfacing with the software. One can use a database interface or NXT. In some cases, NXT is easy to use. In other cases, the database option is more efficient. I find myself having to use both. Blackbaud has a steep learning curve. Parameters that control the software are buried in a sea of screens and options. It is often a needle in a haystack search. Blackbaud documentation is exhaustive but hard to find answers. User manuals may run on for hundreds of pages without answering the question.

Pros

The report writer allows financial statement to be developed using column and row specifications that are user defined. The row specs are based on organizing the chart of accounts. The columns are user defined and are adequate.

Cons

Blackbaud is not intuitive or user friendly. Trying to control the software is very cumbersome. Also the report writer in Financial Edge is less flexible than other software products I have used. Columns are defined as to time periods. But if one wants to run the same financial statement from past time periods, these specs must be re-written. The reporting periods should be a relative definition and should refer to a fiscal period selection at run time.