Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT Reviews

"Mostly use the GL module for input/reports but have access to others"

Pros: Being a Windows-based product, there's a lot of flexibility in the info you can enter in your batches. It also gives greater flexibility in creating reports. I mainly do input on the GL but have to use the other modules to look up information. They're very easy to maneuver around in.

Cons: I wish you could use the up and down arrows in the batches.

"Financial Edge grows with us"

Pros: The accounting system can be easily expanded to cover additional modules (GL, AP, AR, Cash Receipts, Fixed Assets, etc.) and the system itself can be easily modified to meet additional funder reporting needs for tracking various fields of data.

Cons: It's expensive, but worth it if you can find a good financing deal!

"Very intuitive based on the demo and initial research our company did."

Comments: Hope to get more information during the BBCON this year. I plan on attending!

Pros: Advanced General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable Banking functionalities are most beneficial for our company.

Cons: A bit costly for a company of our size, but we are definitely considering and exploring the feasibility of implementing this year.

"Adequate"

Pros: Produces good reports
Data flow is a big plus

Cons: Very expensive
Requires additional training

"Sophisticated accoutning system"

Pros: I find the technical support staff informed and willing to work with us on a problem until it is resolved.
It can talk directly to Raiser's Edge.

Cons: The wait time for customer support has never been less than thirty minutes and usually more.
The program is very sophisticated with strong reporting functionality. However, that functionality implies a level of knowledge that most accounting staff do not have. It took me four hours to set up a simple balance sheet report format--with help from technical support.

"Great Software Experience"

Pros: I've been using Gifts for a few weeks now at my current job and it is a great resource!The amount of information that can be stored is fantastic for research and referencing back.

Cons: The report generating software is not very intuitive, and I often have to download the reports into Excel in order to make them more presentable. Little things like an extra total column will be on the reports and it's difficult to figure out how to remove them without having to move out of the Gifts Report Manager

"Transitioned from American Fundware"

Comments: Really miss my quick and easy American Fundware. FE is decent, but oh, so, slow. Just not a dream come true.

Pros: Not sure there are any more pro's than with American Fundware. C'mon Blackbaud, let's get on some of these items. Phased out a perfectly good software which takes ten clicks and many more minutes to do what was done in seconds with American Fundware.

Cons: Very slow Does not work well with F9. Allocation module is cripplingly slow. Sorry, just not a big fan.

"Financial Edge NXT is a cloud accounting solution from Blackbaud that provides transparency across t"

Pros: It's a great improvement over the database view and I am looking forward to the continued delivery of new features as they role them out.

Cons: You are not able to use papersave with it just yet so the drag and drop/ upload feature is obsolete to me.

"Good software"

Comments: For my work, I don’t need pretty screens. I need the numbers to be easy to find and correct. This software does just that n

Pros: I like the ease of use of this product for financial management. It is simple and to the point with easy page to page layouts.

Cons: It is very basic. It gets the job done but doesn’t have any wow factors or a very visual appealing interface.

"I use NXT for my staff to see vendor history, but use Classic for all AP transactions."

Pros: I like NXT for the look and feel and that I can pull reports into a good excel format. My staff love that they can see vendor history and payments.

Cons: There are functions that I need that I can not use in Financial Edge NXT. Therefore my got to is Financial Edge classic for my daily weekly and monthly tasks.

"great app! very useful."

Pros: What I really like about this product is that you dont need to process your financial transaction in manual, it has a tools that automatically provide processes you just need to input details.

Cons: I dont see any problem in this product it is very useful especially in financial fields and it is worth the price.

"Started with Fundware, now Financial Edge ready for FE NXT"

Comments: It gives us the information required to invoice for our grants.

Pros: Ability to run many reports, view different scenarios. Tracks our expenses by funds, projects, sub projects for various account codes.

"Streamlined Accounting"

Comments: I am positive this tool will be the excellent complete package once the transition in completed!

Pros: -Ease of Navigation
-Intuitive
-Multi-level Filtering on Displays/Dashboards
-Detailed Filtering in reporting
-Ease of Report Export
-Inclusion and detail of Accounts Payable Subsidiary Ledger (Module)

Cons: -Slower transition from Database version, forcing the switch between the two versions to complete all tasks.

"This product really can only get better"

Comments: Our finance and marketing departments use Blackbaud FE and RE daily and they get the job done. Migrating to something else at this point would be a monumental task, but it still may well be worth the effort.

Pros: Interfaces with our Fund Raising software (Raiser's Edge, I am equally thrilled with that too, and mostly for the same reasons cited herein). Blackbaud offers a good training program (which considering the product license fees all of which should be free).

Cons: The reporting is cumbersome. Lack of a self-service audit trail. The interface is not intuitive.

"Way too difficult to use."

Comments: I could not recommend it for any organization under $500MM in revenue. This is for Big companies with Big staffs. No need to reach for this unless you have the size and infrastructure to support this solution.

Pros: The software clearly has a lot of capabilities. If you are a large organization with lots of time and money to burn, you can get some value out of this.

Cons: The program is very difficult to use. I was leading a team that took over the accounting function from another organization. This was their software. The company had not seen a balance sheet they had confidence in for many years. Getting information out in a form and format that they could use was difficult to impossible. I was told they spent $250k getting the program up and running in implementation costs. This was a terrible option for a company with just 2 people in the accounting department. I'm sure it may be good for a MUCH larger organization, but a bad choice here.

"Training is Essential"

Comments: I'm still learning NXT and all I can say is anyone considering the investment to also look at the total investment and purchase the training package. Your Employees will thank you!!

Pros: I love the training level that Blackbaud has in place I think that to be successful with Blackbaud a training package to meet your companies needs is essential. At the end of the day Blackbaud wants your success with their software and they offer the solution in awesome training opportunities.

Cons: The software has many different moving parts and being the only employee in the ar/ap deparment makes some processes a little cumbersome. I think the software is designed for larger non-profits.

Comments: I work for The ALS Association Greater Philadelphia Chapter. We provide support and services to persons with ALS and their families. We also support research to joining in the fight to defeat ALS. We've been using Financial Edge for over 10 years. We also use The Raiser's Edge and other Blackbaud products. We moved from an old DOS based accounting system so we could use a real chart of accounts and produce great financial statements. We researched many options, but decided that FE would meet our needs best. I think we are somewhat unusual in that we moved to FE before we chose RE. We keep up the patches to stay on the latest version of FE and RE. The two systems are integrated and provide a great way to assure that we get our revenue from RE into FE. We have a wonderful audit trail and good processes. The implementation went very well. In fact, we were so impressed with FE it helped make our decision on using other Blackbaud products. Blackbaud's excellent support and customer service convinced was one of the convincing factors. Other benefits come from ease of use and the link between applications. In the last few years, we moved to accrual accounting and really started to use FE fully. We even purchased F9 to allow our new Controller the ability to write custom reports for our Board that update every time FE is changed. We're very happy with FE and all of our Blackbaud products - we now use BBNC, Sphere FAF, ResearchPoint and many of the data enrichment offerings. We also benefit from using partner applications such as Papersave and Import-O-Matic. It's a total solution for us.

"The Cadillac of Nonprofit Software"

Pros: Financial Edge is both user friendly and robust. It has significant available features to tailor your needs for reporting, querying, lookups, and of course importing and changing journal entries. The additional modules such as AR and AP are a must and integrate seamlessly for GL posting. Raiser's Edge, Blackbaud's sister product, posts directly into FE and contains significant available data for our development team. The two systems are fully linked, so that if there is a RE batch posted in FE, I can click on it in FE and bring up the record in RE.

Cons: The only big drawback with Financial Edge has been cost. The initial install and annual maintenance are a hefty price for a nonprofit struggling to serve its constituents.

"Education Edge - Blackbaud"

Pros: The ability to create new customers, make deposits, and create statements is extremely easy with this software. Of course, the success of any program is dependent on the proper training

Cons: It is sometimes a little difficult to look up a payment when searching by certain criteria. Running a query on a specific set of customers can be difficult if you don't use certain filters. Despite some of the cons, I am satisfied with this product.

"Great to stay up-to-date"

Pros: This was the best option for our organization as we have a large amount of staff that are in need of quick access to financial and budget information. Being a cloud system, this has allowed our staff to have quick access at any place in the world to stay informed.

Cons: Speed. I know a lot has to do with internet connection but even in places where we have fiber internet connection, the load time is lacking. This is a great opportunity area for improvement.

"Cloud based software with your needs as their top priority"

Comments: Blackbaud is very customer focused. It is important to Blackbaud that the client voices are heard. Every year they hold a conference that not only addresses the software but also gives us tools that we need as non-profits.

Pros: I love the fact that I can easily extract data. I also like that I can setup account restrictions and distributions to make sure data is correct and accurate, not to mention it saves time!

Cons: Currently, accounts receivable and payroll are not in the cloud. I look forward to when all the modules are in NXT.

Comments: Blackbaud's FinancialEdge is fantastic. We here at Evangel University has been using FE since 1997 and have no problems to speak of. It is very easy to use; very easy to customize your account number structure; very stable. You can create any report you want, from very detailed to summary information. All this is capable through the Chart Organizer. It has the capabilities to create PivotTables, charts, and update with just a click of a button. It has a dashboard which allows you to put reports, queries, or charts on one page and all the user has to do is hit a button to update - which saves me a lot of time when individuals call me to send them updated information. We purchased the option to have View-Only Access. I have setup our department heads and admin assistants with the option where they can view their GL accounts and create reports and queries on what they want, when they want. The best feature is that they can view the activity in their GL account anytime with current information. If you have to send out reports, which I still have to do for some, it's all done with the Accounting Que module. This feature is the best thing about the Financial Edge. I start the que and it runs by itself in the background, and I can go about my day. No more spending hours generating and distributing reports. It will run just about any report or process, including posting to Accounts Payable. You can set up your que to run anytime you want. Support is excellent. With the few problems I have had, they always were on top of it and never went more than a day or two with out hearing from them or receiving a solution. They have the capability to log into your machine and fix, or show, where the problem is. Top notch people that are easy to understand; they speak in common terms not that techy stuff. I recommend Blackbauds Financial Edge to anyone looking for an excellent and stable accounting software.

"FE- no thanks!"

Comments: We were pushed into FE after our original program, Fundware, was "sunsetting". In hindsight, we should've researched other programs before settling with this one.

Pros: I guess if not being "too complex" is a pro, that would be it for Financial Edge. It is a simple product and doesn't have too many bells and whistles so its pretty easy to pick up on.

Cons: Hmm where to being....
I will preface this by saying that our implementation of FE was a nightmare. They had people leaving the company left and right and in our 3 month implementation and data conversion, we were passed along to 3 different Project managers. Because of this we were playing a constant game of catch up and I don't think we were ever really given a good training of how to use the product. Also, employee support is HORRIBLE with this product. Blackbaud parcels out their support to 3rd party companies and we were working with Zobrio. They were of no help to us. The prduct doesnt intergrate with our other platforms well, so importing info in to our GL is a process that could be made much easier. We also used them for payroll for a while which was an absolute nightmare. Our W-2's were wrong due to wrong info being imported during our data conversion. We also spent many late nights working on payroll issues in the program and again, had no response when calling Zobrio or Blackbaud. ( Blackbaud did get back to us once and worked well with us, but it was quite an undertaking to even get to a person at Blackbaud. The accounting side of the software is probably the best, but overall, I am sure there are much better accounting programs out there.

"We use the full suite of modules and like the integration and support. Payroll is more challenging."

Pros: Help and support tools / resources are great. Chat support is responsive and gets a solution to the problem.

Cons: Payroll leave time management configuration is challenging for our organization that has a complex leave time structure.

"Financial Edge NXT Not Ready for Primetime"

Comments: 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.