Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.4 out of 10

Score

7.4 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Customizable Reporting Features: Users have found the reporting features to be highly versatile and easily adaptable to their specific business requirements, allowing for a tailored approach to data analysis and presentation. This flexibility enables users to generate customized reports that best suit their needs, enhancing decision-making processes.

Ease of Learning and Logical Workflows: The intuitive nature of the system coupled with its logical workflows has been consistently praised by users, enabling an effortless navigation experience that enhances overall usability. Some users have specifically mentioned how the straightforward design helps new employees quickly grasp the system's functionalities.

Exceptional Support Services: Blackbaud's support services have garnered high acclaim from users for their exceptional professionalism, friendly demeanor, and proactive assistance in addressing queries or exploring additional functionalities. Users value the timely responses and comprehensive guidance provided by the support team, contributing to a positive user experience.

Reviews

157 Reviews

Failed implementation...

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

December 6, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Once implemented, it will be used organization-wide. We attempted to convert to Financial Edge NXT a year ago... unfortunately, we still have not converted even though we are paying for NXT. There were issues between host sites... Orange County moving to Boston... I was told that we could test NXT in the hosted environment prior to converting. Once our data was uploaded, I was then told that we could only test in FE on the cloud... not NXT until our live convert. In testing with FE, we found there is a huge lag in processing time as opposed to having the data processing locally. Because it had taken so long I was facing an audit and did not want to have to manage a software conversion during an audit... The final audit report just came back so now we can proceed to convert to NXT... Our development office went live on RENXT in July and find that the processing time is also painfully slow...

Pros

n/a - have had trouble with conversion
Exporting reports to Excel has been extremely helpful
We currently work in the database version because NXT is too cumbersome for data entry

Cons

eliminate processing delays. Per our IT dept, the issue is not on our side.
better follow up by implementation.... WE ARE STILL NOT IMPLEMENTED! WE ARE NOW IMPLEMENTED, BUT USE DATABASE VERSION FOR EVERYTHING EXCEPT REPORTS.
renewal team wasn't aware of switchover and received billings for NON NXT renewals... took a long time to get resolved.
DATA ENTRY IS AWFUL IN ALL MODULES.... DEFINITELY NOT USER FRIENDLY AND VERY CUMBERSOME - WE HAVE TO USE THE DATABASE VERSION FOR ALL DATA ENTRY.
VERY IMPORTANT CANNED REPORT IN DATABASE VERSION HAS STILL NOT YET BEEN WRITTEN IN NXT. THE BLACKBAUD REPORT TYPE IS "PROJECT BUDGET VS. ACTUAL REPORT"... AGAIN THIS IS THEIR OWN CANNED REPORT IN DATABASE, IT IS CRITICAL FOR US TO RUN AND STILL ISN'T AVAILABLE IN NXT... UNACCEPTABLE!!!
WE ARE TOTALLY UPSET THAT THEY SUNSETTED STUDENT BILLING. IT WAS A WELL THOUGHT OUT AND EXTREMELY USEFUL SUB LEDGER. A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO WE TESTED THE BILLING SYSTEM THEY HAVE MOVED TO WITH BAD RESULTS. THIS HAS FORCED US TO GO WITH A DIFFERENT COMPANY FOR STUDENT ACCOUNTS AND NOW HAVE TO RUN REPORTS TO MAKE ENTRIES BY HAND TO GL. I USED TO WORK FOR A SOFTWARE COMPANY AND OUR PHILOSOPHY WAS TO NEVER TAKE AWAY FUNCTIONALITY FROM OUR END USERS...

Likelihood to Recommend

I gave it a "1", because of the fits and starts and then fail in our implementation. Although we haven't had the opportunity to actually use it yet, what I do like is the ability to switch back to the FE view - this will allow staff to learn the system easier. I do appreciate that care is taken to write each module gradually and get the kinks worked out. There are very few FE NXT classes for my staff to take online even though we have purchased "Learn Everything". I am hopeful that my dashboards, queries, and reports do not go away when we do go live on FENXT. I am hopeful that our admin team will find it easier to navigate view only through FENXT... FOLLOW UP JULY 2022 - WE JUST DON'T LIKE THE FUNCTIONALITY OF NXT AND STILL NEED TO USE DATABASE VERSION FOR PRACTICALLY ALL PROCESSING AND DATA ENTRY, POSTING, ETC.

Marie Roake

Director of Finance in Finance and Accounting at Central Catholic High School - Portland (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile

Financial Edge NXT - It's worth it!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 27, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Financial Edge NXT is being used by the finance and administration team in our foundation. The main business problems that it addresses are easy access to reporting for executives and access to information in real time and from anywhere with a web connection.

Pros

Financial Edge NXT provides beautiful, easy to read, and visual reports.
Financial Edge NXT makes access easy for our executive through the various permission levels for access that it provides.

Cons

Financial Edge NXT is still being developed, so not all of the functionality in Financial Edge (the database view) is available yet in NXT. Therefore users must have access to both the traditional view and the webview.

Likelihood to Recommend

Financial Edge NXT is suitable for organizations of all sizes. In fact, even though our organization is large, we only have two users for FE NXT. We have roughly 90 users of Raiser's Edge and RE NXT, however, and the integration between the two systems is valuable.

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

It's been a learning curve ...

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

October 25, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We implemented Financial Edge NXT at the beginning of this year (2017), and it is being used by our finance department. It has been challenging in the respect to our account manager (I believe we have had three so far). While the product is new to us, we have faced numerous questions and seem to have a problem with support and/or our account manager responding back to us. Many features are very similar to what we have used in the past and we have been able to problem solve a lot of issues on our own. The modules have many features that I think would benefit us, but we have not ventured to try and see how they work.

Pros

Accounts Payable, which I use daily, is very straightforward and easy to maneuver around.
Reports in Accounts Payable are what I need and are easy to use.
Running a check run from start to finish is done with ease and hassle free.
Accounts Payable Module is simple and user-friendly. Finding inputted data is a snap to find.

Cons

Payroll in general is very difficult and cumbersome. I have never dreaded running our payroll before, but now it's a form of anxiety for me.
Setting up new employees. We realize that each individual is unique, but setting up new employees has got to be easier.
Reports versus queries. Still learning the system, but I spend a great deal of time trying to get only the information I need on a report. This is especially true of payroll reporting.

Likelihood to Recommend

The Accounts Payable module works and functions as we would like. Reporting out of Accounts Payable meets our expectations. The Payroll and General Ledger module(s) have been a learning curve with very little help from our account manager. There is always room for improvement and this would be the area we think Financial Edge should focus on.

Verified User

Administrative Assistant in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

It's Complicated

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

October 25, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Financial Edge is being used essentially across the whole organization, in conjunction with Raiser's Edge. We have two conference centers that are attempting to complete the entry of June data, as we are in the Home Office. We use all the modules except Student Billing, as we are not an educational institution.

Pros

Accounts Payable has been a fairly easy module to learn, and I have used it successfully for nearly 4 months. It is fairly intuitive, once you learn the process.
Payroll was quite an adjustment, but appears to give us more accurate data than our former software. We have been using it for nearly 5 months.
General Ledger appears to be fairly easy to use, but since we have not closed our first month yet, that being June 2017, it remains to be seen.

Cons

As we have yet to close June 2017, we have encountered many issues, had a multitudes of chats, and quite a few sessions where support has had to remote in to fix or gather data for engineers to fix issues. One issue unresolved is the accrual of leave in payroll. Engineers are still working on that one.
Another issue that has FE folks stumped is the recording of manually entered gifts in RE not coming over into FE. We cannot close June until that is resolved.
For some odd reason, my printer has disappeared twice from AP, to where I can't print checks. They had to get a duplicate of our database and fix it on their end the first time. Support had to remote in to correct the issue the second time - but it delayed paying bills significantly both times.
We had an issue with Pennsylvania local withholding taxes that never got resolved. They gave us a work-around, but I will have to go into dozens of W-2's in January to move the taxes to the correct box. Can't wait.

Likelihood to Recommend

Honestly, at this point, I am not inclined to recommend this software. It was never explained to us the magnitude of labor and cost that would be involved to get it up and running, and we still have yet to close June 2017, here at the end of October.

Verified User

Employee in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Tweetybird

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

October 24, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it through out the organization, but mainly accounting. All of the other departments uses it for entering their travel and creating requisitions for purchase orders. The CFO uses it for all of the financial reporting for the organization. I am new to using Blackbaud and still learning the system.

Pros

Having the ability to create reports quickly.
To void checks and the system creates your adjusting entries for you.
Having the ability to review your accounts payable processing before printing your checks.
The various links to get in touch with someone at Blackbaud is an excellent tool.

Cons

The PO system. It would be great if there would be a section where you can breakdown various items from various departments, when you are placing your order into the system.
Credit memos- once a check is voided and a credit memo is attached, how to remove it if there is several.
Issues with the addresses once it has changed in the vendor file.
When you are adding a vendor, "Lisa Fowler" the system would list her under the "L". So if I wanted to pull her up on the system. Normally it should be under "F" because of her last name but it would listed under the "L".

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited when it comes to posting to general ledger, where it does the adjusting entries for you.

Rosa Scott

Staff Accountant in Finance and Accounting at Department of Family & Children Services/Regional Accounting (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Financial Edge NXT

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 24, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Financial Edge NXT is only being used by the Finance & Operations team. We use it as our accounts payable system & our general accounting system.

Pros

I love the sidebar feature for accounts payable that allows you to see much of the details of the transaction without requiring you to open the full record.
Being able to run a report straight to Excel is very useful & easy.
It is nice to be able to search for vendors more easily than one could in Financial Edge 7.

Cons

The journal entries are cumbersome to use. The view is "backward" from what I'm used to, with the most recent lines entered showing at the top of the entry.
It is hard to review journal entries in the NXT view because only some of the lines (>5) show in each screen & then you have to click to get to the next set of 5 lines, etc. I often revert to the database view so that I can see the entire entry in one screen.
There are no journal entry line numbers in the NXT view. This makes it difficult to find a specific line item & if you search for just that line you can't see the other side of the transaction. Again, I revert to the database view for most JE review & revision.
The most useful & complex reports, such as the Statement of Functional Expenses, are not available in the NXT view.

Likelihood to Recommend

I find Financial Edge to be pretty easy to use. I like that you can include unposted transactions in reports. I find that the report building is easier in the NXT view but it did take some getting used to.

Christine Settles

Sr. Finance Manager in Finance and Accounting at Institute for Sustainable Communities (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile

4c review of NXT

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

October 20, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Financial Edge NXT for high level review of transactions and attachment of accounts payable invoices. It is more efficient than the database version as far as drilling down and finding transactions. We only use the General Ledge and Accounts Payable currently.

Pros

Like I said, the ease of getting around and drilling down for information is the best feature for us.
It is great to have attached accounts payable invoices instead of having to search through an organization of folders to find an invoice copy.
The hidden benefit is always being up to date on versions. We don't have to get emails notifying us of updates, forwarding those to IT and asking them to have our hosting company apply patches. Then we would wait and have the system down off hours before updates were applied. That's all gone now.

Cons

We have to rely on the database version for Accounts Receivable.
I'me not real sure about all the features. I know what I've got in the database view and so I live there. I would like to get into general ledger reporting and queues but the one time I tried, I couldn't get where I wanted to go so I gave up easily.
We've had a couple of issues that came up for some reason because of what we use that apparently nobody else does, like having the many bank accounts we use show up in a drop-down menu. The software engineers have been good to fix those things, but it makes me feel like we are continually using a beta version of the software. It feels like Blackbaud is trying to get up to speed at their own pace and at the expense of users experimentation.

Likelihood to Recommend

NXT seems like a unfinished software product. We're too busy to experiment with a partially finished product with bugs and so we default to the database view. I think in the back of our minds that someday it will be a finished product. In the meantime there's no rush to move from the database view to NXT.

Stephen Forcey

Accounting Manager in Finance and Accounting at Youth for Christ/USA (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Improvement

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 20, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Financial Edge is being used as our main Accounting system. We use it to reconcile accounts, enter A/P and A/R. General Journal entries and cash deposits are accounted for in our Accounting department.

Pros

Finding transactions with the searching engine is quite easy.
Ability to reconcile accounts easily.
Search for check #'s is not hard.

Cons

Entering invoices that have the same invoice number.
Allowing for two or more to enter an invoice and be able to make changes at the same time.
Fix bugs and screen freezing.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for our small Accounting department. However, we don't use it to perform financial statements, since it does not give us detail as to where the numbers are coming from. We would like to have more detailed financial statements and be able to pull up the information as to where the numbers are coming from.

Verified User

Employee in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Frustration vs Satisfaction

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

October 20, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FENXT is being used as our Financial System, including Accounts Payable, Budget, and Payroll.

Pros

I honestly can't think of one thing FENXT does really well.

Cons

Since FE NXT is in the "cloud" it has been a really difficult transition as our company has some special needs that we finally got ironed out in FE, but then started the transition to NXT and now those special needs can not be met by NXT.
Just logging in takes three more steps. Frequently the program logs out and we have to log back in.
Payroll is more difficult than AP. AP is fairly smooth, but payroll is just now starting to go a bit smoother, but we heard there would not be anymore enhancements to the payroll module in the future, so our concerns will most likely not be met in the future. It's up to the clerk to figure out how to meet the needs of the employees.

Likelihood to Recommend

I can't think of any scenarios where it is well suited. AP module is working fairly well in the old style of FE. A co-worker is using the "cloud" version more often than myself. As I stated before payroll has been extremely difficult to conquer. This latest conversion to FE NXT is the third conversion for payroll in the last 3 years for us. First was ADP to Fundware to FE to FE NXT. We are actually now investigating other Payroll modules with other companies.

Audrey Trembly

Clerk in Finance and Accounting at Monroe County Courthouse (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

80-20

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 19, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The whole organization uses FE-NXT and a sister software RE-NXT. Both programs allows us to track 30 different projects, three funds (unrestricted, temporary restricted, and permanent restricted), and 12 sizable grants with matching dollars (local, state, and federal resources). In addition, we can create income/loss statements for each project, fund, and grant for compliance reporting.

Pros

Produce numerous statements for management
Tracks projects/programs within each fund restriction
Tracks Budget-to-Actual by general ledger and projects
Produces visual dashboards for use by our board
Fixed Asset module reduces time creating monthly depreciation schedules
A/P keeps us on-time with vendor payments and the new quick flash feature allows all vendors to be entered on one screen

Cons

The dashboards need to be imported onto company website for board review
The financial reports generated within the program should be as appealing (not so canned) to the ones we have to format in excel
Implementation costs could be a lot less

Likelihood to Recommend

FE-NXT is well suited for batching processes, but I would prefer doing financial activities in "real time" so the financial reports result in "real time". A good comparison is the accounting software titled Red Wing Controller. The FE-NXT software could be more user friendly, especially when it comes to creating financial statements. It is very tricky to remember which template to use when creating a financial report.

Verified User

Director in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Loading Reviews List....

Failed implementation...

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

December 6, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

n/a - have had trouble with conversion
Exporting reports to Excel has been extremely helpful
We currently work in the database version because NXT is too cumbersome for data entry

Cons

eliminate processing delays. Per our IT dept, the issue is not on our side.
better follow up by implementation.... WE ARE STILL NOT IMPLEMENTED! WE ARE NOW IMPLEMENTED, BUT USE DATABASE VERSION FOR EVERYTHING EXCEPT REPORTS.
renewal team wasn't aware of switchover and received billings for NON NXT renewals... took a long time to get resolved.
DATA ENTRY IS AWFUL IN ALL MODULES.... DEFINITELY NOT USER FRIENDLY AND VERY CUMBERSOME - WE HAVE TO USE THE DATABASE VERSION FOR ALL DATA ENTRY.
VERY IMPORTANT CANNED REPORT IN DATABASE VERSION HAS STILL NOT YET BEEN WRITTEN IN NXT. THE BLACKBAUD REPORT TYPE IS "PROJECT BUDGET VS. ACTUAL REPORT"... AGAIN THIS IS THEIR OWN CANNED REPORT IN DATABASE, IT IS CRITICAL FOR US TO RUN AND STILL ISN'T AVAILABLE IN NXT... UNACCEPTABLE!!!
WE ARE TOTALLY UPSET THAT THEY SUNSETTED STUDENT BILLING. IT WAS A WELL THOUGHT OUT AND EXTREMELY USEFUL SUB LEDGER. A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO WE TESTED THE BILLING SYSTEM THEY HAVE MOVED TO WITH BAD RESULTS. THIS HAS FORCED US TO GO WITH A DIFFERENT COMPANY FOR STUDENT ACCOUNTS AND NOW HAVE TO RUN REPORTS TO MAKE ENTRIES BY HAND TO GL. I USED TO WORK FOR A SOFTWARE COMPANY AND OUR PHILOSOPHY WAS TO NEVER TAKE AWAY FUNCTIONALITY FROM OUR END USERS...

Likelihood to Recommend

Marie Roake

Director of Finance in Finance and Accounting at Central Catholic High School - Portland (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile