Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT

Fund accounting works well through Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT. We have 3 funds and are able to keep gift accounts in fund 2 separate by project. This allows us to track investments on the account level and report out to users easily.

I would absolutely recommend this system to anyone looking for a financial system. The accessibility, the ease of use, and the depth of the system is widely useful for any purpose. Being able to accurately record deposits and payments as well as the ease in returning to any deposit or payment later is incredibly helpful when auditing. To be able to go back into a payment find where it was applied in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT and then also have the ability to upload the bank statement for secure documentation is certainly a helpful feature to any organization. I would recommend it because the system is incredibly user-friendly and offers the ability to grow your knowledge of financial management through courses. If the organization did not have a large profit, then I would recommend building the business so that the many applications and benefits that Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT has to offer would then be more applicable to the business. Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT would still be incredibly beneficial to a small business, but the range of opportunities and benefits that it offers is very well suited for larger organizations.

It's very well suited for managing Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. It also does a great job on the accounting end, but some functionalities could be improved (see previous question). It would be great if there was more cohesion between web view and database view, as the functionality in web view is better and looks better, but I still find numerous things I have to use database view for; it'd be great not to have to jump back and forth.

Although I am new to FENXT I have found it very easy to use as far as accounts payable goes. I need to learn more about reporting as I have a hard time finding the right report that I am looking for.

We have been able to set up our account strings and add projects to track our gift accounts in a more detailed manner without having to do the tracking manually.

Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT is very well suited for multiple grants/projects and tracking for each project separately. The AR function is not very clear on what is receivable, and making write-off adjustments is by Journal Entry. I wish I knew more advanced usage of the program because I feel there is much it can do, but we do not know how to use it. What I know, I enjoy using it.

It is well suited for a large company because it let's you select appropriate roles for each user.

Reporting, especially in the area of report data. This version allows for easily using the standard Excel functions of sorting and filtering while maintaining report integrity. I do wish the run date would appear on this version as it is useful to have this system confirmation of the status of the report details and balance.

Blackbaud FE NXT is meant to help non-profit organizations manage their revenue and expenses as well as many other assets. I would say it is typically helpful when you have a medium to large organization since it does so much of the accounting for you with their modules. However, I wouldn't recommend it for small organizations due to the cost potentially outweighing the benefit.

Very well suited for Non-profits that have multiple levels of accounting, endowent accounting and investments. It's not great for Grant management even though their project management was designed for that. It is a little clunky and we had to get an outside software to manage our grants. Budgeting is also simplistic, we had to get one of the add-ons to Budget more accurately.

Financial Edge NXT is well suited for most mid sized to large not for profit organizations. The easy remote cloud access has been a huge boon with increased work from home opportunities. The accounts payable, fixed asset and general ledger functions are fairly well fleshed out. The only basic function absent is accounts receivable. It has been in development for years. To be fair, accounts receivable is available, one just has to switch to the older, more-dated Citrix database view to work within it.

When review cash receipts it is nice to see the deposit import ID in a table format. As previously mentioned not having the deposit numbers being assigned that is a problem

FE NXT has been very stable. I think it is a good accounting package. It has struggled a bit to move from database to the cloud, but more features seem to be working now. Once it has all the features added and if some of the issues previously mentioned could be ironed out, I would be comfortable giving the software a higher rating.

Reporting is excellent and transfers to Excel much better than the reports created in the hosted database. Less appropriate for dashboards for program directors. The switch to data entry through Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT has been challenging because our data entry team has used the old database version for so long that they don't want to take the time to learn the way of doing things.

We are having a little bit of a hard time with the reporting.

None of my team uses Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT team except for quick journal or payable searches. We do occasionally use the journal import feature with Excel, which has proven to be handy. We even find that the filter features on searching for journals is sometimes confusing and less than helpful. As far as the AP Process, we don't use Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT for cutting checks or importing invoices, although these are features we use in Database view. For month end reconciliations, we rarely use Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT. We find it more efficient to use database view for cash reconciliations, as the view is easier to compare the subledger to the activity than in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT and once reconciled, it's easy to get the final reconciliation report printed, rather than having to search for it. As far as non cash account, we also use the query functionality to reconcile these accounts manually. So far I have not seen a query functionality in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT nor a feasible alternative in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT.

I rated it with a 7 due to the A/P module in NXT. FE is still needed for invoicing. Customer service is hard to reach and do not seem to have all the answers. I have been using, installing, implementing, converting from other accounting software, recommending, supporting, teaching other users on Blackbaud FE for 20 plus years. NXT has some great improvements except in the A/P module. Once that has improved I would rate it a 10.

The best thing about Financial Edge is the ability to bring donor records over from our Raiser's Edge donor database, eliminating the need for double entry. Financial Edge is built for nonprofits. It's not an accounting program adapted to the industry. I also like the ease of entering invoices. Especially the ability to copy a previous invoice. Such a time saver.

I can't think of any.

In my opinion, if improvements were made in functionality, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT would work better for us in our social services non-profit world. I have not completed any comparative cost analysis between Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT and competitors as this software had already been selected and implemented prior to my start date. I cannot answer further as to suitability in other scenarios.

It's well suited when I'm doing any invoices. It's convenient and easy to learn since everything is fairly self-explanatory. It is nice to have the feature where you can duplicate invoices. That saves a ton of time, and I appreciate that.

For payables, notifying our vendors with emails regarding payments is great.

Already described

FE NXT is suited for small organizations with simple needs. FE NXT is not suited for organizations with larger databases, multiple worksites (de-centralized operations), and more complex reporting needs. FE NXT provides built-in reporting that may not meet the needs of more robust organizations.

Perfect solution for Non-Profit organizations. My wife also works in non-profit and they recently shifted from MIP to Financial Edge and they are loving this change.