Having second thoughts about implementation...

Shannon Morrison
Shannon Morrison
Third Anniversary
in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® General Discussions

Private school, new to Blackbaud. We've finally implemented Learning Management, Enrollment Management, Tuition Management and Financial Aid Management and are about halfway through with Website implementation. We're about to start FE NXT and RE NXT.

Our implementations with the other products have been less than excellent, which is very disappointing because when I used Blackbaud RE twenty years ago the service was very impressive. The employee turnover rate has been astounding--one product had three different project managers in six months. Some support personnel I meet on chat don't even have basic reading comprehension skills. There is also a substantial difference between what was sold and what the product can actually do.

I started training on FE NXT this week. The consultant was showing us the “Ideas” section of the community forum, and I was appalled to see “ideas” for two VERY basic functions (recurring journal entries and searching by transaction amount). This makes me want to cry if my “upgrade” that costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours is not an upgrade. I'm not so far in that I won't pull the plug.

I have two questions:

  • What is the actual functionality between FE NXT and Tuition Management System? RE NXT? That's the main reason for our switch--making sure our income is tied to real enrollment. If it's similar to the functionality between Enrollment Management and Financial Aid Management it is completely nonexistent. The “mapping” is actually just manually entering the amounts in both systems.
  • Does the system generally function well? I pay $35/month for Xero with no complaints so now I feel like I'm crazy to switch.

Comments

  • Paul Wu
    Paul Wu
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Shannon Morrison
    May be best to direct message me if you want to know my real thoughts.

    I inherited FE NXT about 4 years ago and I'm finally going to take some of the FE training courses, along with the rest of my accounting group. This has been the first time we have all used FE, and Yes, I've been using FE without training. So take that into consideration.

    As of April 1, I'm also getting a test database, and I think/hope that will help me test some of my ideas and test the basic process and new reporting structures we are moving towards. Doing this while doing our fiscal year end in March and doing a budget load to new depts we haven't created, yet. You know the usual fun stuff.

    FE has the next 1.5 years to prove its worth. Otherwise, I'm going to find the cheapest accounting solution to implement.

    As we do our learning and testing, we are going to document our processes and to a certain extent replicate the backup in our AP and GL JE's in our Teams environment. So that if we ever switch, I know I have access to my data and backups.

    We have RE and I'm not linked and I don't really know the benefit to linking the two. I don't trust anything a BB person says. You do know BB is a publicly traded company, right? I didn't until just recently, and searched some of their recent earnings call. Interesting info in it.

  • Dana Flanery
    Dana Flanery
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Shannon Morrison
    We made the switch from QuickBooks to FENXT and would not do it again. That being said, we don't use any other Blackbaud products, so I can't speak to the integration factor. I just know our FENXT implementation did not go well and it does not do the things that sold us on the system.

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