Great for non-profit accounting and reporting (don't use their payroll/HR modules)
September 17, 2015
Great for non-profit accounting and reporting (don't use their payroll/HR modules)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
ver. 15.2
Modules Used
- AP, A/R Billing, A/R Reporting, Adv. Security, Bank Rec., Budget, Data Import/Export, EFT, Exec. View, GL, Visual Analyzer, Fixed Assets, Allocations Mgr., Grant Administration
Overall Satisfaction with MIP Fund Accounting (formerly Abila MIP)
MIP Fund Accounting is used primarily across the finance organization. We set up executives and program directors with read-only access to their particular departments but these people don't use it much as their needs are minimal. Everyone in finance uses it for payables, billing, managing A/R aging, cash receipts, monthly financials and ad hoc reporting, contract and grant management. From a CFO perspective, the flexibility of the reporting function helps me immensely in my monthly reviews and for ad hoc reporting. While there isn't drill-down capability within the reports, it's easy to click to another tab to drill into the detail of particular accounts. From there it's easy to drill down to source documents (i.e. AP invoice entry which also includes a link to scanned invoices stored on a shared drive).
- Reporting functions make it easy to design a variety of reports for standard and ad hoc reporting. All reports can be easily exported to Excel.
- The ability to import large amounts of data from flat files (Excel, csv) reduces time required for data entry.
- Fixed Asset module ensures that assets are recorded and depreciated correctly. It definitely beats tracking fixed assets in Excel.
- We use their hosted/cloud/SaaS version where we've experienced problems adding/deleting/changing users (we can't do it ourselves, must use a paper process through their customer support). The login process has too many steps. Printing from MIP and saving exported documents requires a special setup that our IT department has to set up.
- On the reporting side, there's no capability to create reports of monthly balance sheets (columns for each month across the top). Some types of consolidating reports must be run a few times with different setups to get the varying levels of subtotals that we require.
- The payroll and HR modules leave a TON to be desired. We added this functionality in January and were ready to throw it out the window by May. We've worked closely with their customer support but consistently experience issues like employee's direct deposits disappearing from the file generated by MIP that gets uploaded to the bank. We created our own workaround for this. It's impossible to create reports that include information from payroll and HR making it very difficult to generate reports required by the ACA. The user (employee and payroll/HR staff) interface is confusing and prone to high levels of error. While the process to generate a payroll is fairly straightforward, our payroll administrator then spends a considerable amount of her time resolving the errors that fall out after each pay period. We've identified a new payroll system to which we'll be switching next month.
- On the payables side, the EFT functionality has significantly improved efficiencies. MIP worked with us to create an add-on that creates files for our bank's Payment Manager program which works in a way very similar to the EFT function except that the bank prints and mails checks for us instead of sending EFT's (for vendors who don't want EFT's). We've double the volume going through our payables department without adding staff.
- The payroll system has significantly reduced efficiencies and will be replaced in the next month or two.
- Reporting and the allocations module have helped with the quick generation of monthly and ad hoc reports to better understand what's going on in the business.
I replaced Blackbaud's Fundware system with MIP three years ago. Fundware was horrible. I couldn't generate financials that were worth anything from the system (no flexibility) and it was a nightmare to create the setup to generate them in Excel. Trying to drill down to understand data wasn't almost impossible too. When we reviewed new systems, Blackbaud presented their best offer which still couldn't hold a candle to MIP. We're happy with our choice to move to MIP.