Sending Invoice to Department Heard for Signature

Ranjan Gajurel

Is there a way to send the invoice attachment to the department head for signature and approval through Financial edge NXT?

Mark Eisinger

@Ranjan Gajurel, yes, if you have Expense Management module in Webview, you are able to do this and more.

Christopher Hafer

@Ranjan Gajurel
The recommended Expense Management module has very limited functionality from our experience. It's a $1,200/year Add-On, that once added on, Blackbaud won't let you cancel it. At least, that's what they're telling us. We tried the module for about 3 months, and processed over 600 invoices through the module. We found it to be bugged, unfinished, and didn't meet our organizational needs. We tried to cancel it moving forward, and they won't let us. Proceed with caution.

Mark Eisinger

@Christopher Hafer I have implemented the Expense Management invoice requests for many clients and have not had issues.

Christopher Hafer

@Mark Eisinger
As a Blackbaud consultant, you have a vested interest in promoting Blackbaud products. As a third-party user who has tested and found the service wanting, I could never recommend it to others, and I have nothing to gain by being untruthful here. I'm only sharing my personal experience with the Expense Management module and warning others of the potential trap that they could fall into by getting stuck paying indefinitely for a service even if they find it doesn't meet their needs. I can warn against that because that's exactly what has happened to us.

Crystal Ratering

@Christopher Hafer, did you have to implement the service yourself? How long ago did you use it? We weren't ready to have it implemented when we moved to NXT a few years ago and now BBD is saying that a 20 minute web-ex with an implementation specialist fulfilled our training on implementation. I'm just curious if you have any tips on getting it set-up or if it is worth paying for them to help us. What were the bugs that you ran into? Any info you could provide would be greatly appreciated!

Christopher Hafer

@Crystal Ratering
We actually paid the team at Blackbaud to set-up the expense module and get it running. At the time, it was $4,500.00 for implementation. I wasn’t with United Way of Central Florida at the time, but they worked with our IT person at the time to get it running.

It was from December 2021 through March 2022 that we tested the Expense Management module. During that time, we processed 685 individual invoices to test how it worked, the flow of approvals, and how invoice requests ultimately translate into the pending invoice list at the end of the process.

During testing, there were issues with inputs translating correctly. For example, account coding must be entered in when the invoice request is created. To start, each “Expense Category” (account code) must be set up individually for users to select which account to use. I don’t know how complex your chart of accounts is or how knowledgeable requesting staff would be to correctly identify the appropriate account codes to use, but that could present a challenge to you. Ours has four main segments, a project, funding source, and impact area. One account code for promotional shirts for a specific leadership event for example use looks like this:

10-866008-701-418

P7418-Sponsorships-OH FR

Which translates to:

Fund-Account Code-Department-Marketing Segment

Project-Funding Source-Impact Area

The expense module is extremely limited in what can be selected as an account code. Like I said before, you can create the account codes for every single account individually or you could bulk like items together (which is what we tried), but we still ended up with a lengthy list for users to select account codes from, and regardless, when the invoice makes it to the pending invoices list, someone will need to still go into each invoice and correct the account coding after the fact, since there’s no feature to add the project, funding source, or impact area withing the Expense Module.

Another example of inputs not translating correctly is the date. With each invoice, there’s an invoice date, due date, and post date. There are only two dates within the expense module though (Invoice date, and distribution date). It didn’t matter what was input though for the distribution date. When the invoice made it to the pending invoices list, all three dates would match the invoice date and have to be manually changed to the correct date.

There’s also no feature to take one step back in the approval process. Let’s say for example, there are three levels of approval. Invoice request is created, it’s approved at step one and step two, but let’s say that the third approval person brings up a question. There’s no step-back feature to allow the approvers to ask questions of department supervisors like, “I see you’re over budget here. Are you going to use dollars from another budget item to make up for it?” Without supplementing other means of communication, the only option is for the level three approver to reject the invoice with a note for why it was rejected. Then however, it goes back to the requisitioner to start the process all over again with no notice to approver one or approver two. A step-back feature would have been helpful to us to keep invoice requisitions within the expense management module.

The main reason why we wanted to use the Expense module initially is that we were trying to go paperless. We were promised functionality to add documents like PDF’s to requisitions so invoices and approvals would all be stored electronically. This feature, however, was hit and miss. Sometimes we could get the file to import correctly, however sometimes we couldn’t import a file at all. This was a huge problem to say the least.

The invoice creation process using the Expense Module ended up taking a lot of extra time, and still needed manual adjustments to the invoices after they went through the approval process, and without consistent, reliable performance, we ended up having to drop going paperless from our strategic plan altogether. It was a big letdown.

Crystal Ratering

@Christopher Hafer Thank you!

Nikki Baldwin

Hi @Christopher Hafer,

Your voice and feedback are extremely valuable to us as we look towards future enhancements in our Expense Management solution, as well as in Financial Edge NXT. We would love the opportunity for members of our product management team to speak with you directly, so we can dig in deeper to better understand your organization’s needs and hear your insights. If you’re open to speaking with us, please let me know, as this type of customer feedback is vital to ensuring we’re delivering on our promise to deliver essential software that supports your organization’s goals.

Thank you!

Karen Edwards

@Nikki Baldwin We have some of the same concerns about Expense Management which is why we have not implemented it yet. There are features in the old web purchasing portal that are better then expense management, so we use it for all our approval workflows even though we don't need POs for all those invoices. We would very much like to provide input to BB as the web version is being developed. We did provide some feedback once or twice several months ago, but have not been contacted since.

Nikki Baldwin

@Karen Edwards yes, thank you so much for hopping on a call in October with the team! Hallie advised you and team gave us some phenomenal feedback regarding your purchasing workflows and approval needs, so thank you again! They are actually planning on reaching back out to you and team once we are just a little bit further in the development on the approval workflows and when you'd have access to those items. This way you can see what changes have actually been made (or are in progress) and give active feedback again in response. Again, appreciate it so much that you are willing to have these conversations with us--absolutely invaluable to the team! If you have any specific issues/questions in the meantime, please don't hesitate to reach back out to Hallie!

Sylvia Cook

@Karen Edwards
HI Karen, out of curiosity which features do you like in Webpurchasing that are not in Expense Management? One thing that I know that work in webinvoicing and not expenses management are negative lines. Can't enter a negative in expense management, which will be a problem for us if they take webinvoicing away. We often have a amount to pay, which we reduce with a fee that goes to a different GL account and pay the net. It is a lot more work to have to create a credit memo after the invoice is approved to pay. I have added this to the Idea Bank but still have seen an action on it.

Karen Edwards

@Sylvia Cook I think the best feature is that our staff can submit requisitions, but they do not do the coding. All of our reqs are sent through the program staff approvers and then go to one fiscal staff that does the coding. I see the reqs after she does the coding, and I can either change it or approve it as is. We have many accounts, cost centers, grant and project codes that we use to track expenditures, and most staff are not knowledgeable in that area.

The other feature I like is that if staff are using a new vendor, they can put all the information in for that vendor and the requisition can go through. Then our Fiscal staff can set up the vendor before they process the requisitions to POs.

Sylvia Cook

@Karen Edwards
Yes, good point about being able to include new Vendor information at the time of making the request. I think that is only available in Webpurchasing, not the Webinvoicing side.

I know that when a requisition in Webpurchasing gets submitted it doesn't have to have the GL distribution, but the first approver has to enter the distribution or they can't approve and finalize. Maybe there is a setting that I need to change. Another thing, when someone edits the GL does it not restart the approval process again? I like your points that users that are just submitting have no idea about account distributions. I do like the expense category in EM but the down side is that one can have too many expense categories, so still need to make edits along the way.

Karen Edwards

@Sylvia Cook I'll try to take a look at our setting for WP. Our staff definitely do not have to enter any coding to approve and finalize a requisition.