I would like have feed back from persons who have completed the conversion from Blackbaud to Financial Edge without the help of any outside consultant

We just compelted our conversion from AFN to FE this week without the use of outside consultants. It was very easy - the most time consuming parts were re-writing reports and queries. I attended the "Converting to FE" class in February which was a lot of help. I did a TEST conversion, followed by the real conevrsion. I would strongly recommend a TEST conversion if you can. It helped us find a few areas that would be issues when we converted and find solutions to before hand. I had minimal support from IS - they installed the programs and 1 patch but that was about it. Feel free to contact me if you would like more information @ [Email Removed] or 207-973-5060.

I agree that a TEST conversion is important if you are converting on your own. We had an ssue with Accounts Payable invoices, which would not convert when we ran the TEST conversion. We opened a case, which needed programmer involvement to resolve and took several months. Of course, when we finally get our TEST conversion done the way we wanted it, out comes FE 7.21 SQL, which meant we needed MS SQL Server because our FE database ends up being larger than 1.8 Gb. A test conversion from AFN 6.4 to FE 7.21, naturally, fails because of an issue with AP invoices. Open another case, which was resolved a lot more quickly, and, over the weekend of Feb 27 '04 we converted for real. Our persistence paid off, though and now we are running the current version of Financial Edge.

I was a certified service provider with Blackbaud with my previous employer. My current employer wanted to convert to Financial Edge so I set up a test conversion on a standalone laptop. After completing the test conversion we discovered several problems and decided to stay on version 6.4 until Blackbaud corrects the software to our satisfaction. If we had not done this test conversion in January 2003, we would not be able to produce the key report that our board needs because it showed positive numbers as negatives. We also had a lot of problems withe the actual conversion process itself which technical support was able to resovle quickly.

I received three replies and I find all of them very informative and helpful. Yes, during my training also I was informed that I must do it on the standalone first and only when I have checked everthing out, I move it to the server. Thanks