Acumatica vs. Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT

If they were looking for a little more sophistication out of the box from QuickBooks and we're not gonna do a lot of customizations at all that I think your system is fine if you're gonna customize it to operate in your unique environment, I think your system due to the upgrade process is highly complex to maintain long-term.

The look of the reports and the platform is great. It's easy to lookup vendors and find some information. I wish the flow to navigate around the system was more intuitive. We tend to do more going back and forth to move to another vendor. It must be an easier solution. But that's the learning curve piece we need.

Incentivized

• We're excited on how it links everything together. So our current system, we have a hard time, if we're in a service ticket, being able to easily go back to an old service ticket of that customer and it's so many clicks away. And with the side panels we're very eager to be able to in the same screen click and have the information that we need.

Incentivized

• Uploading and inputting information is easy due to a clear format and outline.
• Researching and finding past information is quick and easy to navigate due to searching and filtering options as well as the ability to name the files for quick searches.
• Pulling project titles and accounts - you can have a large amount of projects and accounts and are able to know them through the system without having to memorize each individual title.
• Being able to export a general ledger for an account to excel while still being formatted correctly.
• Having the ability to filter in what transactions are pulled in the general ledger. You are able to easily look at all the activity or only activity in a certain time frame or other specific filters.
• There is always access to help from Blackbaud services for any sort of difficulty.
• Learning and the ability to attend Blackbaud classes are readily and easily available so you can increase your knowledge and ability to serve well in your organizations' role.

Incentivized

• Manufacturing suite. You have all the time. So for the Manufacturing edition, you're able to have negative issues that are unlimited and are not balanced into a job that needs to be improved. The mobile app itself for warehouse picking and management sets the default item to one. This is not how most warehouses that I've ever worked at operate. Bomb hierarchy and respectful of child elements. These are nitty gritty elements, but these are kind of down-and-dirty items that need to improve. But overall it's pretty good.

Incentivized

• Queries is not fully set up yet and could use more functionality within the reporting structure
• Recurring payments do not seem to be moving forward and we have several annuities that run quarterly
• Queue appears to be going away and report scheduling is coming, however, you cannot send to users outside of your organization. We run so many monthly reports that we used to have emailed out via queue that now we have to run them manually and save them to a sharepoint site for our campus partners to access.
• A little concerned with printing checks once database view goes away since the one time I tried it the printing margins were totally off.
• Integration of papersave products and cash receipts.

Incentivized

We aren’t going to switch at this point! It’s a great system and we are looking forward to realizing the full potential of the system once we can find a VAR who has a bench that can support us.

Incentivized

BB seems to forcing changes on customers at a faster rate. This company needs stability because it is understaffed in accounting. There isn't time to drop everything and work up workarounds or even try to judge effects. There also isn't the time to find a replacement suite unless things get really bad.

Incentivized

I give it an 8 because it is very intuitive and easy to use for day to day work. I find it more difficult to create general inquiries and financial statements than it seems that it should be. It's not very intuitive in those areas.

I don't have much to compare it to but if I speak of just the reporting options; sometimes there are so many options I spend more time finding the "perfect" report when a basic report with minimal columns is needed. But I know I can always add to the report if asked.

Incentivized

It's always available.

there have been some performance issues

Incentivized

We used Acumatica Support directly for the first year or so. Overall it's pretty good, but sometimes the support staff wasn't educated on the customizations we had, nor was I as the Customer as I couldn't remember which things were customized and which things were out of the box, so when there was an error, there were some misunderstandings.

Incentivized

No one is perfect, but this support team is as close as it gets. They respond promptly and if the person I'm talking to doesn't have the answer they find someone that does. They also provide documentation and/or resources to support their responses to my questions. The online chat is awesome and usually all I need

Incentivized

It was on General Inquiries and it's just a complex topic.

They taught us the basics and we were able to be pretty self sufficient on the day-to-day operations.

The training is semi helpful if you have already been in the system. If you are completely new it does make it kind of hard since chart of accounts will be different among organizations. For a general idea it is helpful. One complaint on training would be that as FENXT is attempting to go fully to the web solution there were often times things that were moved or changed that even the trainer was unaware of and had to adapt on the fly.

Incentivized

I'd say the partner selection is critically important. I think the software is very easy to implement. It's very customizable to your business. Finding a partner that will work with you to understand your business and your needs is the critical piece to make sure that the system goes along with it.

Incentivized

The implementation can be easy depending on how familiar you are with Blackbaud products. It is cloud based so there is not a need for IT involvement but you do need to know your business requirement.

Incentivized

Well, we decided to go with Acumatica and I believe it was a really good decision. The VAR was a big part of that as well because of their insights and knowledge, but I just felt Acumatica was the right fit for us in size and it had the capabilities we needed, but it also wasn't overkill.

Incentivized

Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT is clearly designed for the non-profit industry organizations, and it shows! The features would not necessarily be a great asset to some for-profit businesses given the design and focus on grant/fund reporting, but for non-profits it hits the "ball out of the park" so to speak! It clearly shows the product is engineered by people who are experiences and passionate about philanthropy and giving!

Incentivized

No, annual invoices are fine. I do like that unlimited users are included.

From my understanding, the P.O. module is not very robust, at least the last time I inquired about it. At the time, it had a one-to-one match, with one invoice for one P.O. and that isn't practical for many businesses. I don't believe it would be an easy system to use for sending out invoices, if we had thousands of retail utility customers. We do a small number of invoices because we sell wholesale power, not retail, so we only Invoice the municipality. Not each utility customer.

They are very responsive and knowledgeable about the product. If the rep doesn't have the ability to solve the issue, they quickly get someone else involved to assist us.

• Positive impact. Customers had no problems getting their products during the implementation process and this location still grew 10% this year. So, it's enabled us to handle more with less steps and also with less people. Even though we didn't need to let anyone go, we were able to divert those resources to things that help generate revenue or to handle more orders.

Incentivized

• Record accuracy has gone up with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT. We are able to keep everything separate using both natural accounts and projects.
• The AP module has increased our speed in issuing checks. We are able to easily review and see where approvals may be stuck in order to get checks out promptly.
• The approval chains and easily viewed records of approvals have helped our auditors easily track processes for internal control walkthroughs.

Incentivized