Community Health Center Review of Abila MIP fund Accounting
Updated January 16, 2018

Community Health Center Review of Abila MIP fund Accounting

Maryann Freepartner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Abila MIP Fund Accounting

At PCHS, we use MIP for HR, Payroll, General Accounting and Financial Reporting, Budgeting, Accounts Payable and limited Accounts Receivable.
  • For in-depth analysis of the GL transactions, reports can be filtered to drill down on an account, a time period, a vendor, a department or grant, and then downloaded to Excel for use in pivot tables and other analysis.
  • We use MIP for grant budgets and reports, making the preparation of financial backup for monthly, quarterly and annual reporting quick and easy.
  • The budget module can generate budgets from the actual prior period history to the dates specified. This area can really give you the ability to generate a budget with limited manual input.
  • The help support is usually very quick to get back to you, to point out where you can find the information and help you navigate the knowledgebase materials. Everyone I spoke to gives a sincere impression that helping you is the most important thing for them. I appreciate that friendly manner!
  • I would personally love to have more "cut, copy and paste" functionality within the modules. In particular, when using journal entries there is no ability to "copy" 20 lines of entry, edit the department and move the amounts from debit to credit to reclassify items from one department (or grant, or gl code) to another.
  • The bank reconciliation function is time consuming. Since we do a direct deposit, we have 140 or so "checks" for each payroll whereas the bank statement has one big debit. Each of these has to be individually checked off. When you move to another window and come back, the list jumps around and you can accidentally uncheck or check the incorrect item. It is very hard to troubleshoot when you have a lot of bank items.
  • This may be a function of PCHS being in Alaska, but I find the training to be generally expensive. Since we have a limited budget for training and travel, particularly for accounting support staff, I have not been able to attend any of the multi-day training courses and have had to train myself. I have just purchased the summer training pass and hope to be able to get a lot of value from about 10 live webcasts for $795 instead of $125 per hour. Up to now I have not been able to attend the multi-day training because of the high training cost (about $500 per day for live classroom training) combined with airfares, hotels and other travel costs. Additionally the consultants who are willing to travel to our location want about $1,600 per day for one-on-one training. Any free webinars are generally for the purpose of selling add-ons or additional modules.
  • I find the user manuals to be hard to read. They all start with you having a new installation, so it is hard to find the information you need without doing an online search. Usually I do a live chat to narrow it down.
I believe we have a good handle on the spending under our grant programs by using MIP Fund Accounting. We can filter results by grant or program for easy monitoring and reporting, in multiple reports that give a big picture and detail pictures.
I don't know when the decision was made, it was years ago. However, we are not looking for anything new and are sufficiently happy with the product that we are not looking now and have no plans to look for a new product.

We have multiple departments and multiple grants that cross departments, so having the GL-Dept-Grant account coding enables you to pull reports by grant, by department, and by any combination thereof. Additionally you can download the information to Excel and create a matrix report to review data and give you operational input.

Because the software is purchased module by module, I would recommend really looking at your needs to see if you need the power of MIP or if a less sophisticated process would work equally well. For example, the fixed asset module is more than we need, so we use another program and copy over the journal entries to MIP.

MIP Fund Accounting Feature Ratings

Using Abila MIP Fund Accounting

2 - We have an IT Director who works with all our software applications. We also have an IT Systems Administrator who provides the ongoing support by implementation of all updates for all workstations, troubleshooting any system-related issues, and assists if you request help in making a call to MIP Support to be present and answer any of the technical questions that might arise as your case is resolved.
  • HR and payroll administration is a very intensive use. The HR/Payroll team of 3 people use MIP in conjunction with TimeForce to track employment dates, accrual of vacation and holiday time, pay rules and distributions, payroll and direct deposit, year end reporting and more.
  • General Financial: Monthly financial statements for the Board of Directors, Departmental statements with comparison to budget for Directors and Managers, ability to drill down for grant data, expenses by account and vendor and other reporting to provide information for decision making and evaluation of program successes.
  • Cash management and bill paying: Integrated accounts payable, payroll and cash receipts provide a reliable foundation to monitor and reconcile cash balances, determine accounts payable payment and invoicing questions, and track expenses.
  • Grant reporting: With the use of the grant segment of financial reporting, it is easy to drill down and provide supporting backup for grant expenditures.
  • The Excel export feature is useful for so many various uses. Who gave us donations? How many people traveled last year? What is the result of this particular program? Being able to run reports on posted transactions, export to Excel, prepare pivot tables are all ways to use the MIP product.
  • We have not yet tapped the features that could provide a paperless system for accounts payable. With the attachments features, there may be a future possibility to eliminate the files of paid bills we currently maintain.
  • Setup of electronic bill paying. We have not moved forward to implement these features and instead use either paper checks or pay through vendor portals.
  • Purchasing and requisitions. We are still using a paper system for requests and purchases orders through receipts and bill payment.
Since our system has been in place for almost ten years, we occasionally talk about doing a new implementation. We do not talk about moving to a different product. MIP has many options for support, including cloud support, that we can evaluate. The overall satisfaction between HR, Payroll and Accounting is high. We have taken advantage of training and have developed a good level of expertise and the program upgrade features do not require reworking our processes. We have not found the product to impede any of our process improvements and find new ways to utilize the features as time goes on.
6 - 

HR and Payroll - 3 individuals including time tracking, benefits tracking, reconciliation of employee benefit programs and payroll, quarterly and year end reporting, tracking employee anniversaries and birthdays, general recognition and interface with annual evaluation tools.

Accounting Manager, Accounting Clerk and CFO - all accounting functions from deposits, miscellaneous billing, recording and payment of all bills, cash reconciliation, monthly and annual reporting.