We have been trying to implement Blackbaud (FE) into my church's school for too long to mention. Long and short is that we do not have the funds to pay for professional converstion of data from Quickbooks and another accounting package; into FE7. Has anyone else successfully been able to import data from non-Blackbaud products into FE w/out the help of paid consultants? If so, please tell me how you did it? Thanks.

We were shown by a consultant but did the work ourselves. The first step was to enter the balance sheet account balances from the period prior to the first period we wanted to import. We then generated a csv file for each month that we wanted to import. We loaded the csv file into Excel. Since we had different account numbers in BB than we did in the old system we used Excel's vlookup function to convert from the old numbers to the new. It took a little bit of time but by the 15th month it took less than 20 minutes for the last month. We decided to import the previous fiscal year and 3 months of the current year so that we would have comparative numbers when we ran financial statements.

I understand about entering in the end of period (EOM or EOFY - Fiscal year) balances for historical data but, we're stuck at the point of having so much vendor, payroll, etc. info. How did you import that over into Blackbaud? Did you setup all of your vendors, employees, etc. from scratch and then just imported over financial totals to create your yearly/monthly historical info? Thanks.

Our first task was to get the GL imported. We imported not just the totals for historical purposes -- we actually imported the detail. At the same time we were doing the GL import we imported the vendor information to set up the vendors. For AP we went live on September 1. To get the detail for checks written in July and August we enter the July and August checks as manual checks. Instead of posting the manual checks to the General Ledger we posted them to a file that was then deleted. This avoided duplicating the original check entries in the GL and enabled us to pull the information for our auditors from one source. As far as the payroll went -- we did not start that at the same time. We waited six months and started the payroll April 1 of the following year. Ideally, we should have done it January 1 but we had too many other priorities. To cover ourselves in the meantime we exported the payroll entry from our old system to a csv file and then modified it to import into BB as the payroll entry. We also had to convert from the old account numbers to new with vlookup. We were able to get it done piecemeal. We would not have been able to do it all at once.

We had success exporting vendor and customer information (name, address, etc.) from our old system (ACCPAC) into Excel as a .csv file. We then cleaned up the data in Excel and imported the vendor & customer information into Blackbaud

We were in the same situation it appears you were in. We wanted to totally revamp the chart of accounts but we had a lot of useful data in subsidiary modules that we didn't want to lose. What we did was convert the data to FE as it was. The we used the used a query with mass change to change all the account numbers. The query reference a spreadsheet that had the old and new numbers as well as other required information in it. The great thing about it was that it changed accounts numbers everywhere in the system. We did have some help from a consultant that works with us on an on-going basis but depending on skills and time you should be able to accomplish what you want.