Financial Edge - Hands Down the Best Nonprofit Accounting Package

Listen, price is always a concern, but so is the time you'll spend manipulating reports in Excel when you work with lesser software packages. I guarantee you, pit me on Financial Edge against an accountant on any other software, and I can get the job done at least twice as fast, and if it's QuickBooks, five times as fast, and without ever having to go into Excel to do anything.

Pros

I've worked with Blackbaud's Financial Edge for over 2 decades now (even back when it was called Accounting for Nonprofits), and it's the best for nonprofit accounting. Its chart of accounts can be changed at any point to accommodate as many segments as you need (I have worked with as many as 4 segments), and reporting of any kind is easily accomplished with the variety of accessible reports and queries. A lot of journal entries that you'd need to create in other software packages are easily handled through invoice entry in accounts payable, at the time of invoice entry, through miscellaneous distributions. Customer service is excellent as well.

Cons

The annual support for customer service is a bit pricey, and designed to keep you on the hook forever (if you don't pay for a year, because you don't think you will need support - and after the first year or two you may not - as soon as you need support, you've got to pay a large percentage of all the years you missed). Not a con, but Blackbaud's products get a bad rep from bookkeepers who are more used to the silliness of QuickBooks than the accountant's dream that Financial Edge really is.

Blackbaud Financial Edge (BBFE)

BBFE has both strengths and weaknesses, as might be expected. It is a true fund accounting software with the ability to handle thousands of funds. Being able to push data in and exporting data out are 2 features that are usually very important, and BBFE mostly does that well. BBFE allows for attaching various homegrown codes to the data at the fund, account, and transaction level. This is not a panacea but can be helpful. The software can be used in a fairly high volume a/p environment and the g/l functionality is also pretty good.

Pros

Exporting data is easy, so long as the export you are looking for is available. Importing fund codes is do-able but may require some significant preparation of the upload. BBFE allows for a seemingly unlimited amount of codes to be attached to funds, accounts, and transaction lines. This is very helpful. BBFE has some built in custom reporting facilities that can be helpful. BBFE has a detailed security model that can help with internal controls.

Cons

Reports: many of the builtin reports do not contain running totals and grand totals as well as header information page-to-page as one would like. Exports: the data exports are not true sql type, but are a simplified version, which is sometimes adequate. You might need another sql facility to adequately access the data and control the data joins. BBFE imposes credit memos and disallows negative invoices--depending on what you are doing, that could be a big problem that will need to be addressed. BBFE automatically computes and shows balance forwards and each year does not stand on its own, so for some data analysis you might have to compute balance forwards in order to avoid having to download all historical data. BBFE doesn't enforce cash balancing for JEs (if 2 funds are exchanging cash, the JE can give more cash to the recipient than was removed from the payer). BBFE doesn't seem to understand control funds (a fund that holds detail information that belongs to a pool of other funds)--this will require booking JEs that would be unnecessary in some other fund accounting software. BBFE enforces using an outside service for production of 1099s.

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.

The best nonprofit accounting software, period.

Pros

FE is quite flexible, especially its chart of accounts and the number of segments you can report on. Setup is easy, and unlike other packages, you're not glued to what you set up originally. If down the road you find you need to add a segment to your chart of accounts for reporting purposes, you can do that on the fly. And you don't need to be concerned at set-up with adding future account segments. But make no mistake: you've got to have a basic understanding of accounting in order to appreciate this product for all it can do. Customer support, through annual maintenance contracts, is excellent.

Cons

I too would like to be able to export financial reports into Excel without having to re-format when I get to Excel. That's a mild inconvenience, but there are times when you want to put stuff, data onto financial reports that can't get there any other way than through manipulation in Excel.

Maximizing Time and Effort - Minimizing Paper

If you are having issues, contact support staff. Work with them. If you need to refine your initial setup do so earlier than later, you will appreciate it the long run.

Pros

The integration between Altru (our sub-ledger), BB Merchant Services and FE/NXT is superb in my opinion. You have the ability to track a transaction backwards and forwards. We use the visual chart feature to create our budget in five different views - relating to the grants we are using, thereby eliminating errors in data collection by excel spreadsheet creations not getting updated. Someone mentioned that thinking about the creation of your organization and GL was a big con for them. I disagree. We came on board with expert advice from BB and created a cohesive database that allows us to close the month within two-three days. I think the effort that is put into creating a tool should be as important as the information that you hope to receive from its use.

Cons

A few spotty delays when I an running an exceptionally detailed report as you watch the Jeopardy button go around in circles.