Item: Financial Edge
Rating: 10
Author: Sunny Reed

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Financial Edge in our business department to serve the accounting and finance needs of our organization. We utilize the General ledger, Accounts Payable, and Fixed Asset Modules. Since our organization has two entities, Financial Edge enables us to manage the finances of both business entities within one system and we are able to house reports and other information in one location. This makes it easy for us to retrieve information requested from our department and enables all users of the system to pull reports in the event someone is out of the office, making our processes more timely and efficient.

Pros and Cons

F-9 Reporting is a great tool. We are able to build custom financials for our Finance Committees and Board of Directors and choose how we want to present information to these parties.
The AP Module is easy to use and has a "common sense" format.
The ability to reference various dates/periods in one journal entry is awesome!

In the list view of Journal Entries, it would be great if we could see the post date in addition to the date added.
Fixed Asset module is not set up for some unique scenarios (removing a previously "acquired asset" that was not necessarily disposed of, but place in FA in error).
Reporting within the FE application is not so great, so F-9 saves the day with respect to reporting.

Return on Investment

Financial Edge has enabled us to save time with respect to monthly reporting.
Financial Edge has helped us streamline some larger entries that were once a pain to enter in Fundware.
The F-9 plug allows us to report information in our desired format as opposed to using the reports within the FE application.
Overall, I would say that Financial Edge definitely saves us time on closing each month which frees us up for other projects within our department.

Alternatives Considered

fundware

There is no comparison. Fundware was such a dated application and I couldn't believe we were using it as long as we were. Financial Edge allows us to post entries to multiple dates in a single entry and edit the post date as we go. When we used Fundware, we had to edit the business date prior to creating the entry and if we needed to post to multiple periods, we had to repeat these steps and create a new entry for each period. This alone has saved us so much time.

Other Software Used

The Raisers Edge, Raiser's Edge NXT

Likelihood to Recommend

We would like to eventually have an all-in-one solution for billing/AR. We are a membership organization and currently have to host an additional database for billing, then post those transactions to FE. For this reason, we do not feel Financial Edge is best-suited for our accounts receivable needs; as we still have to incur costs associated with hosting another database to do what we need to do. On-the-other-hand, Accounts Payable module works well for our business needs. We primarily process check payments and bank drafts and this module makes it easy to manage payments and correcting errors (i.e. deleting invoices or reprinting a check that did not print properly) is fairly simple.

Financial Edge for Membership Organizations

Overall Satisfaction with Financial Edge