Financial Edge Spoiled Me
Updated April 30, 2021
Financial Edge Spoiled Me
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Financial Edge
Financial Edge is the premier nonprofit software I have worked with. It allows for deep segmenting and analysis of expenses as well as grant management. If an organization has two or more grants, I highly recommend Financial Edge to them. One of the better features is dashboards that allow department or team managers to quickly review their budgets and expenses at a glance without burdening the accounting team.
- Grant Management - nothing is more harrowing than grant reporting, and FE does it best. It allows for layered budgets and limitless division of expenses among grants, overhead, or other projects/programs.
- Reporting - Most financial software tries to adapt for-profit accounting into a non-profit mode without addressing the unique needs of a nonprofit for reporting and auditing.
- Multiple projects and/or cost centers within a budget and system - nothing is more challenging than trying to manage expenses over several cost centers and FE is a champ at allowing that complexity.
- Not for "out of the box" users - Financial Edge is a great system, but implementation requires support or even an consultant. You want to make sure you have set it up correctly - not duplicating what you have always done, but in a way that makes the robust reporting in FE work for you.
- Better exported reports - Reports exported to Excel always seem to have too many lines and columns as well as at least one column that is off one cell to the right. Not a huge issue, but it takes a little time to reformat.
- Like any enterprise software, there are costs/investments ahead of return. It isn't something you would implement without support.
- During the significant financial downturn, we were able to use FE to forecast trends and make budget adjustments easily. It transformed communication about forecasting and cuts with assurance.
Most FE installations I have participated in were from QuickBooks Pro. QuickBooks, if set up well, is a great alternative for the smaller association or nonprofit, but it has challenges handling some of the unique aspects of nonprofit accounting. Recent editions of QuickBooks Pro have included a new nonprofit component, but it can be difficult to use.