Migrating from FE Student Billing to Blackbaud Billing Management

Bruce Kariya
Bruce Kariya
Fourth Anniversary Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ General Discussions

We are on the precipice of migrating from FE Student Billing to Blackbaud Billing Management and we just learned that moving from an end-of-life Blackbaud product to the current model will result in us losing any and all visibility to our student A/R detail once we go live on the new NXT platform. Only beginning account balances are brought into Billing Management from what I was told today. The advice we were given was to print and save PDFs!

I don't imagine we are the first ones to go through a migration like this. Does anybody have some better ideas on how to manage this so we aren't left with multiple A/R subsystems or spreadsheets all over the place?

Thanks!

Bruce Kariya

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  • Dawn Alonso
    Dawn Alonso
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi Bruce,

    For our current Students, we imported all A/R data (we are a 3 year program so for some it was 3 years) and just marked it as “Do Not Post.” You could do that for any number of users, just understanding that the greater the data migration the longer it would take. Also, you can still see historical data in the database view (while that exists), but if you don't migrate it you won't be able to see it in Billing Management.

    I would suggest that if you have a need to view the A/R details like they are a current student or have an outstanding balance make them a part of your data migration. For anyone who had graduated and had no balance, we simply printed a final account statement showing all activity and put it in their file (which was the process followed when we did SB).

    Hope that helps!

    Dawn Alonso

  • Bruce Kariya
    Bruce Kariya
    Fourth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Dawn,

    Thank you so much for your response. What you suggest is very much in line with what I would ideally hope to achieve. The problem is that we have been told that the only data that will migrate is beginning account balances. No detail. Therein lies the rub. Since we have just started our Fall session, we have a lot more detail to track as we migrate to the new platform.

    I just learned from Blackbaud today that we will continue to have access to the Student Billing database that we are migrating from, even after our migration is complete. I think my best bet is going to be to run the old Student Billing system in parallel, to some degree, with the new Billing Management system for a couple months until the payment activity dies down. There are some operational trade-offs I will have to work through, but there does not seem to be any other viable alternative.

    Thanks again!

    Bruce

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