I think that ShelbyNext does a great job implementing the financials with the rest of the membership program.

Creating custom forms for events and activities at the church has been very helpful. Especially after switching recently to the new forms. They do a great job of making the forms easy to use.

I think that there could be a little more customization with the layout, design and graphics involved with forms; but, honestly, I'm not sure if I would have the time to use any more features than I already use.

Being web-based was a huge need for us. With employees being mobile these days, we needed a solution that could go any where and be used on any platform.

The software is regularly updated to improve functionality and adjust for changes in financial regulations. Support is responsive and typically willing to help, including remote screen sharing.

It can be a little cumbersome for those who don't use it everyday, but you can subscribe to reports you need and get to them fairly quickly if you take the time to do that from the start.

none

* As a church with many funds I liked the ease of creating new funds and departments. * ease of adding GL accounts for multiple funds * When sold we were told complete system; membership, giving, and financials. * When we purchased we like that Ministry Brands will pick and choose from their purchases the complete solution. * price compared to other cloud solutions for the complete solution was reasonable and very competitive. *SaaS/monthly billing. No software purchase.

As I mentioned in the best "that Ministry Brands will pick and choose from their purchases the complete solution" After trying to get this ShelbyNext Financials implemented for 9 months, SN is not the answer. * Customer service on all of their pieces was terrible. Constantly we were in the queue for hours. Consistently we could not get into the queue. Major disappointment as V5 had good support. * Income statement and balance sheet when exported you could not download groupings requiring long name convention and work arounds. * There was not a complete solution as you were required to sign into different websites and you had to push data from membership to financials. If you have online giving that requires duplication and pushing into membership and then to financials. *Downloading into XLS was just a flat file/csv; no formula's, no headers *If multiple funds you could not consolidate the IS & BS for downloading to excel. PDFs you could. * downloading the chart of accounts was terrible. if you have 3 funds with 100 accounts, your reports had 300 line items. Not 100 with fund info. * Implementation for membership was good but financials was none existent. * GL accounts for multiple funds you were required to delete accounts in each fund if changes were made. The negatives far outweighed the few positives we saw. And the positives we saw were really promises of functionality that was not delivered.

We are able to process our normal transactions in a timely manner.

It allows us to process transactions (payroll/ap/general ledger) for our multi-campus church in a fairly simple manner.

1) I am not aware of any "ticket/notification" process to notify Shelby of a need we have/special report request. There are a couple of routine processes that we do not get good reports from Shelby. 2) The change from Shelby V5 to Shelby Next resulted in a general ledger report filter process that is more difficult.

We do bookkeeping for 75+ churches in Illinois and it adapts for our smallest churches to our very largest ones. Good payroll management is always a challenge for churches. The ShelbyNext Financials payroll module does a very complete job of handling all the aspects of payroll and payroll reporting.

Very easy to learn to use the software. Focused for the unique needs of a church.

More flexibility in designing reports. This would include text edits, data selection, and formatting.

Overall I have been very pleased with ShelbyNext Financials. It was easy to use and figure out if you have experience with other accounting software. When you get through to Customer Service they are very helpful and have always been able to help me resolve my issues.

- cloud based so can access from anywhere - user friendly - can do most anything I need

- sometimes glitchy - customer service isn't always easily accessible - doesn't communicate with ShelbyNext Membership

Once you understand how it works, and get it all set up, it is very effective.

The Purchasing Management portion of this module makes requesting purchases and the approval a breeze.

We were trained on how to use it in 3 days. We needed more time but couldn't afford more training time. It was quite a battle getting everything going and understanding how to use it.

Able to process checks for monthly invoices quickly. Enables us to report PR taxes on time and with very little effort. Workers' Compensation report provides all information needed for annual audit; simply run, print and send. Custom Reports allow organization to produce information particular to our need. Creates reports that are easy to read. Cuts down on need for large financial staff.

Shelby software is organized into modular components, Accts Payable, Gen Ledger, Payroll, Bank Mngmt & Insurance Billing. These are stand alone modules, but work together to achieve overall outcome with good audit trails. We do not use Insurance Billing. I have worked with ShelbyNext Financials for 4 yrs & Shelby v.5 for 8 yrs; believe it would be challenging to breach either system. Invoices post to Accts Payable module. Once posted/reviewed info sent to Check Processing where checks are issued. Chk Processing does not allow changes to be made & can only clear entry by processing checks. Mistakes cannot be deleted must process as checks, then voided creating an audit trail for entry. Detail of transactions can be printed prior to processing into Gen Ledger. Gen Ledger does not allow changes to info (date, name, amount) from Accts Pay; must be processed as sent. Errors corrected by reversing journal entry; leaving audit trail. Accts Payable features Recurring Payments for various billing periods. Initial set up of invoices is quick & new vendors are easy to add. Invoice #s/amounts are quick/easy to change as needed & provides significant time savings to check processing. 1099s are printed through Accts Payable. Payroll maintains info for next PR & finalizes to General Ledger. Easy to run Earning reports, Federal/State taxes, W-2s & Worker's Comp reports for WC audits. Shelby has ability to produce customized reports and all reports can be exported to Excel.

Have yet to find something I do not like about Shelby software. There is a learning curve as ShelbyNext is multifaceted and takes a little time and patience to use proficiently, but is easy to learn and tech support is always available to help with problems. There are times when I have waited in que for 20 minutes for help from tech support, however understand other people are needing help as much as me; therefore, should my problem take an unusual amount of time to answer, I know tech will stay with me until my issue is resolved . Shelby techs have ability to remote in to system and see your screen which makes solving problems much easier and quicker.

We have had a wonderful experience with ShelbyNext | Financials and would switch again if we had to do it again.

We truly enjoy the ease of use with this software. We enjoy that we can manage all of our accounting from one program. (ie. accounts receivable, payable, ledger, payroll, etc)

The overall cost is pretty significant compared to other accounting software. However, we use the membership side of it so it is seamless.

We have used Shelby for several years now and will continue to do so. Their upgrade to ShelbyNext was a good move.

Because It has been around a while, they have added lots of features wanted by churches.

Can be a little complicated with a bit of a learning curve.

I am pleased with ShelbyNext. I didn't do much with financials when we were using the older version of Shelby but now I use Next every day.

The design of the software is easy to follow and easy to read. Much better than our older version of Shelby which has small windows and was not very intuitive. ShelbyNext can be confusing at times but with experience and training, I have become more confident using it. I am also helping train others to use the software.

When entering items to make another line you click the + sign but you can also hit enter at the + sign to make another line. Sometimes, if I hit enter instead of clicking on the + with a mouse, it completes the transaction and closes out the window. Also, after entering so many lines a second or third page is created but the window doesn't automatically shift to the new page. Seems like that would be automatic if you were at the end of one page if you clicked for another line it should go to that new line on the second page.

Software has helped with online contribution and has definitely increased our giving. It is very easy to maneuver. Much like V5 was for us. As a whole we have been pleased with the software other than not having much luck with customer service. We did get a call back today and the person was helpful. We hope this continues in the future

On V5 we were able to make more changes ourselves without calling customer support. We have not had much luck with setting up purposes and because of this funds have mistakenly been put in the wrong bank accounts when we have requested changes to be made and even though it shouldn't have affected things like text to give it did. We feel like even though these mistakes have been corrected it should have never happened. We are paying a lot of money for this software to work effectively and at times that has not been the case.

Like the title says - it's just ok. It seems they have not been able to keep up with the ability of user friendly options.

ShelbyNext Financials is somewhat easy to navigate once you learn the system.

There are certain tasks that would be so easy to incorporate that would make the financial software a lot more user friendly but for some reason are not available. For example; it would be so beneficial if the invoice inquires could be sorted right on the tabs or at least be sorted by date entered. It's frustrating looking for an invoice that was created in December because it lines up somewhere other than after November and there is not a sort option. There are actually many issues like this across the Shelby platform.

We have a software that is powerful, easy to use, and meets all of our accounting needs; all in a web-based application. We have had little-to-no downtime and have found the customer support to be progressively more responsive and helpful. Overall, we are pleased with the product and look forward to utilizing all its power in the future.

I have used many accounting software packages over the years and comparatively, the Shelby Financials software has performed well above expectations. I like the ease of use and graphical information display. I am also pleased with its ability to allow you to tailor your screens to meet your needs and to increase speed of accessing important information.

When we first started using Shelby Financials, it was very slow. However, this issue has been resolved and meets speed expectations. Customer support was also a negative when we first transitioned over to the SF package. Again, this negative became a positive over time. I now have a lot of confidence in the response time and quality of the support personnel.

Super easy to use. You can set several levels of approval on check requests. Easy process to reconcile credit card statements.

I love how I can set up recurring payments weekly or monthly!

It times me out quickly. Is this something I can change?

Being web-based is probably the biggest benefit. And I would say that the learning curve from V5 to Next was fairly easy. I just need to clear my time to learn about things we haven't utilized yet, like uploading payroll ACH and emailing payroll vouchers to employees. I'm attending the Shelby International Conference in June, so I am hopeful that will offer me more opportunity to learn about those items & then some.

I like that it is web-based & I can access it easily on other devices besides my work computer when necessary.

I don't like the timing-out feature that logs me off after a certain amount of time. It is too short & wastes much of my time having to log in over & over. I get this is a security feature, but we should have control enough to make it longer when we need to.

it is designed for churches by people who know how churches work. it fits the way we do business.

The fund accounting functionality is very good and helps us maintain our donor designated funds will high accuracy and good detail.

The biggest issue for us is that the software package isn't fully stand-alone. We need the Shelby Arena dB to be available (we self host) because SNF uses the Arena dB. I also wish SNF had more robust APIs so we could tie to our giving system and other ancillary programs that we would like to tie to SNF.

It keeps pretty good records when and it is in the cloud so can use away from my desk at work.

It is pretty easy to get around in and mostly does what we need it to do for our church. I like that you can easily change the month amd payables seem easier that V5.

There are way too many glitches that haven't been worked out and lots of things we still have to do manually or fix because of the glitches. I don't like that financials and membership aren't connected. I don't like how you have to tell it how many lines to add in payables. I don't like that you can delete people it they have a giving record and it throws their giving into anonymous.

I believe the product is very good, limited by my own lack of knowledge on the capabilities. I utilize the Bank Account Management to process cash receipts and that works well. The other primary usage is posting to the General Ledge.

Understanding what type of reports and functions can be challenging, requiring me to run trial reports from the menu of reports for set-up. It would be helpful to be able to access a sample from the actual list of reports, for example scroll down "Report" under the ledger and right click "detail report," to have a viewable sample report. In the General Ledger I find it very difficult to find a detail batch that was posted, viewable format as carried over from Arena would be ideal verse having to add lines and expanding each reporting month.

Pretty good experience overall, it does need some updating

That it is true accounting software, it does what a good system should do and functions fairly well.

Speed is probably my biggest issue, not always very responsive and that could be our connection. Would like more integration with other software companies

ShelbyNext is connected to our Arena database

Why do you need to type in the exact title to search for a vendor? Could it give suggestions? Also, is there a way to send a reminder email to the approver when a po or check request has aged? During the approval process, if an error is made on an account entry, PO vs check request, or date, why can't the approver made the correction?

We have been able to provide better reports and statistical data as necessary.

The software is easy to use and highly functional for my day to job function.

Some options seem repetitive while other's don't exist that seem essential to function. Sometimes this seems to make task that were easier in our previous software with Shelby V.5 more user friendly. Then again hard to say because we used it for so long we were very familiar with the software and we are still mastering all available options in Shelby Next Financials. I also which financials and membership worked more cohesively.

It is a basically good software. Better then a lot of the competition, but could still be better.

It does have a lot of features and we are able to financially manage our entire 1500 person church with 50 staff members on it. It integrates well with other software we use.

It is not user friendly. Customer Service can be slow. We occasionally come across glitches in the system that they need to fix.

We like the ease and use of the software. We also like the new changes that close some of the loop holes in the software that allowed transactions that do not follow generally accepted accounting principles.

We lost the ability to use GL Plus. However, the module has been added back to allow us to have multiple companies in the general ledger