Blackbaud invites the user to manage and improve your funding and giving process with Blackbaud FIMS, a single, customizable foundation management software solution.
It is based on the former MicroEdge FIMS product.
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Workday Financial Management
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Workday Financial Management is built on a global foundation that provides organizations with the core financial management capabilities expected from a modern cloud solution. It goes well beyond just managing financial processes to achieve greater insight, improve financial consolidation and reduce time to close, instill internal control and auditability, and achieve consistency across global operations. By using an in-memory architecture and object data model,…
It is a very robust system and with the various modules you can accomplish much of what is needed for traditional transaction US-based grantmaking. If you have more complicated grantmaking, deal with foreign currencies or want to have tighter alignment of finance and budget numbers, GIFTS may not meet your needs. Additionally, some of their core projects have limited accessibility in terms of various mobile devices or access from outside the organization's network.
Workday is well suited for managing employees throughout their full life cycle. It excels at housing employee data from the start of their time with the company through their departure. Workday is less suited to payroll functions, which could be more robust.
The flexibility of going beyond handling the accounts, where we can handle cash, assets, and accounting simultaneously for the customer.
The single platform offers grants management where you can organize the lifecycle of the grants and synchronize it with any criteria of grant closing out scheme.
I personally liked Project billing with the essence of evaluating project revenue and nice reporting templates that can be shared with the customer at any stage of the project while having the flexibility of auditing the reported cost.
While GIFTS Classic is the most barren interfaces of all MicroEdge products, there are some simple capabilities I wish GIFTS could still perform such as better email integration from outlook to a GIFTS request, more efficient requirement reminders, and a wider use of Microsoft Office and other external product integration (GuideStar).
It's disappointing that you have to purchase an additional "Customizer Module" or "Budget Module" in order to access basic functions of a GMS. This seems like a basic system function that MicroEdge takes advantage of, unfortunately.
The online application module (IGAM) is still quite antiquated and you have to be knowledgeable of basic HTML in order to really customize your organization's online application. More flexibility and design functions would be greatly appreciated with the online application function, especially since this is a public document and represents your organization.
Workday is easy enough navigate, as long as it is properly set up. With that said, it can be put together in a modular fashion as well, allowing for a very high degree of flexibility in terms of design and process delegation. Finally, it makes consolidation achievable in times previously unthinkable.
I typically receive a response to an inquiry within an hour or two, if not sooner. Most tech support people are knowledgeable about our problems, and if not, they will escalate to the proper person.
Our support team has been awesome. They are extremely knowledgeable and have been able to guide us through all of the challenges we have faced. Workday's community online is also extremely helpful with many trainings and help topics that can be reviewed at your convenience.
It is really a matter of priority. I can see situations where GIFTS Classic is a very strong option! Once an organization determines its priorities then it should definitely consider GIFTS to see how well it compares with mission critical functionality.
Despite Airtable also being easier to use one thing that differentiates and put forth Workday Financial Management tool above is it's key features and better suited functionality for handling confidential data. The other positive note where Workday Financial Management performs high is it key analytics tool that's easier to use and representation of information into insightful dashboards.
Reporting was difficult on GIFTS - often we had to place data into Excel by hand since we could not create simple customized reports. This increased time spent on tasks GIFTS was supposed to streamline.
GIFTS did not alert us to duplicated organization records, so often it was difficult to reflect an organization's full grant history to our Board of Directors, leading to employees spending time searching through paper records to make sure all information was properly reported.
GIFTS created duplicate contact records, meaning it was difficult to find out which contact was related to which organization and cluttered our data. This caused decreased processing and response time to "new" contacts who turned out to be previous contacts or contacts whose information was tied to previous organizations. Even when contact information was updated for a new organization, sometimes the program would revert to the first organization contact information, several times leading to checks cashed to incorrect organizations---the very worst consequence of using GIFTS to our organization. Thankfully, the money was recovered upon the few times that error occurred, but it led to me and other employees reading through out 800+ checks before issue to make sure the correct organization was in fact being rewarded.
We were able to combine 4 different HR modules into one system.
We reduced data breach incidents by 95% after shifting to Workday. One of our legacy softwares had vulnerabilities.
The initial learning curve was higher than projected. We spent about a week to 10 days extra time deploying it, which affected the profit center that year.
