Billing Management/Financial Edge integration

Laura Forshay

Curious to hear if anyone has experience implementing Billing Management and Financial Edge concurrently, and what that integration looked like. We're working through our cutover planning now and are having some trouble understanding where each billing piece lives in the integrated Blackbaud environment and when each piece should go live for students.

Dawn Alonso

Hi Laura,


We did ours about 6 months apart, only because of release issues.  Using EE, I could do billing and post to general ledger, however it was all done in the database.  Our FENXT cutover was in the summer and then we started on the data pull and integration in November, once most billing and payments were finished.  The one thing that I have to say is that we finished it up over our winter break, we had given data to be input to Chris and he did it when the school was on a break.  That worked the best because I was not actively needing to be in the system while it was in a transitional state.  I would highly suggest doing it in stages, especially since there is a pretty big learning curve on your side.  You need to be confident in the ins an outs of the system in order to be able to find problems and correct them, especially since the two are not connected yet.  When you do anything in student billing, you will need to export the journal entry and use the plug in to get the journal entry into FENXT.


I did put together a power point for our students to show them the ins and outs of their use of the Student Billing Module, we gave that presentation in early February, about two weeks after their return. All in all they have been very adaptable to it, our Freshman being the most adaptable because they had gone through the Enrollment process in Blackbaud.  We went entirely live for students in January, but there wasn't much they needed to do until that presentation.  One of the big hurdles is overcoming people reverting to the old way of paying.  However, because of the presentation and my email information that included all of the current process, we had very few payments come in through our old portal (I would say maybe 5.)  We are consistent in pointing them to Blackbaud if they want to review billing, payments posted, and financial aid applied. 


If you have any questions about what we did, or how we have been since implementation, please feel free to reach our personally.


Dawn