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.

I love that you can import reports to Excel. Also watch for page breaks. If you like to use less paper, each segment of a report might appear on a separate page.

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.

We upgraded to NXT and were given the opportunity to redesign our GL. The implementation team was excellent and helped us to think outside the box. It was a lot of work but was the smoothest implementation we could have had. I would recommend this software for any business in need of a robust Accounting Software.

It is well suited for an organization with a lot of individual funds.

Well suited to a small, or medium-sized non-profit environment. It does everything we need it to and rarely leaves us needing more. I wouldn't recommend it for a complex organization like healthcare. The thousands of lines of accounts would cause reports to run too slowly to be practicable.

FE NXT allows user to easily find journal entries by partially typing the title, to easily find account numbers by partially typing the account number or account name; reports are customer friendly and offer new and better options than database. Wish queries could be created in FE NXT, we can use queries for report filters, but we can't create new queries in database. AP posting filters in FE NXT can't be customized as in database. We have encountered glitches in the credit card automated uploading, we have missed some transactions.

FE NXT is very well suited for not-for-profit organizations. It has the capability to implement "projects" for various grants or funding opportunities so that expenses and other information can be tracked and maintained easily. Many grants also require very specific reporting. With the FE NXT reporting capabilities, these reports are easily created and saved for later use. The budgeting module is also very useful for not-for-profits that manage various funding and grants. Although this software works well for my organization, I think FE NXT might be a bit overwhelming for very small organizations with small budgets, a small number of expense transactions, no fixed assets, etc.

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.

IT is well suiting for managing the non-profit business, but we also have an LLC subsidiary where the profits are a source of funding for the non-profit. Running that as a business in the same ledger has been a struggle.

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.

Financial Edge NXT is a more robust accounting package than something like QuickBooks, so if you are outgrowing QuickBooks or need functions not in your current package, then Financial Edge can probably be set up and/or customized to meet larger entity's needs. However, Blackbaud added a "Payment Enablement Fee" in the middle of our fixed price contract, and despite being a loyal user for over 10 years, cited the fine print of the contract that allowed them to add this additional fee in the middle of our contract. This was in the wake of their data breach, and subsequently, support staff and front line customer contacts had high turnover and had to escalate support issues and related credit requests, dragging out support cases for weeks or in some cases, months.

Overall Blackbaud is a great accounting software. It has it clinches like any other program but it's much easier to see & track your business transaction

Blackbaud has a steep learning curve. Once it is figured out, it functions, but the software is extremely complicated and not user friendly at all.

The "bank feeds" feature makes reconciliation and the finding of errors ahead of time easy and effective. This has saved me many hours of work and had reduced my time in reconciliation greatly.

Data entry is quick. Both journal entries and invoices have copy/duplicate options.

Easy to learn and self explanatory.

The report functionality is great. You can choose what you want to include using the chart template and VCO and can customize to your needs.

One thing we struggle with is that when looking at single accounts it does not include non posted transation data, only data that has been posted

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.