We did do the conversion last October 07 and we are having issues in Student Billing. Things are worse since we did the 7.75 update. I wouldnt recommend it just yet.
Hi Monica, Can you be more specific? We are planning our conversion from 6.4 to 7 this summer.
Monica; My name is Peggy Berry at St. Mary's Ryken High School in Leonardtown, MD. You say you are not happy with the 7.75 upgrade. Neither are we. Payments do not apply correctly. You can apply payments on one day and go back in and apply payments another day and the one you applied before has now reapplied to different charges. Reports do not balance out either.
What issues are you having with 7.75?
Thanks
Hi Sophie,
We converted April 2006, we had a horrible experience, however I think they have now pretty much taken care of all the bugs. It's much better now and I think the support centre are much more equipped to handle any issues you might encounter. We also upgarded to 7.75 recently and are discovering more problems with this upgrade. Payments are not being applied properly, I run EFT twice monthly and the payments are not being applied at all.
What problems did you encounter during the conversion? Did you have Blackbaud help you with the conversion. We're a small shop and can't afford the steep cost that Blackbaud quoted us. We took the first step to convert and hit a major road block.
Amy Pennington
Rockhurst High School
We had Capital Business Solutions help us with our conversion to SB7. Not a lot cheaper than Blackbaud, but they train you on your own database which is nice. We had a few student balances that were incorrect and we had to correct them with a do not post entry. Payments seem to be applying OK. Our biggest problem is the speed. It is SO slow!!
Do you know of anyone who has successfully conversted without help?
We have had a terrible experience. We converted lst July, and have had serious issues that kept us from being able to post into our GL for 8 of the last 12 months. I currently have 2 outstanding issues, so I am unable to close our books. All of the issues prventing our posting have required BB tomake changes to their software. Of course we really stretch the system. We have a large number of transactions and use projects and bill to to different funds,
From talking to other users, I did not want to converts but it was decided that we would go to Net Community so we had to go from 6 to 7. It is much slower and more difficult to use than 7. it takes 20-30 seconds for transactions to take. Our SB Aging takes 20-30 minutes to run. Opening a record's activity tab takes 10-15 seconds.
One of our open issues results from the software not converting the records corectly from 6 to 7. BB is working on that now, but are already 3 weeks behind the date they said they would be done. Another open issue is the fact that when SB creates unapplied records it can assign incorrect classes which cannot be changed and therefore we can't post because classes are out of balance.
The biggest complaint we have is that we were not properly informed of the necessity of making all data in SB and EE and RE correspond exactly when we first began using BB. We had many different people inputting names and adresses into the modules, and everyone was doing different things. For example Street can be Street, STREET, ST, St, ST., St. Names can have middle initial or suufixes or not. Anyway we have almost 2 man years correcrting our records so we could roll them into NetCommunity. Even if you are not going into NC, you will still have problems if your records don't match between EE and SB.
Another issue that may have been just corrected was the inability to automatically apply payments if you are charging finance fees. If a parent had two children and sent in a payment to pay off both balances and one of the children charged something new in the meantime, the system would allocate the payments based upon the new balances. This would then leave one of the children's account not paid off and a finance charge would be added even though the parent paid off the statement balance. That sure cost us in good will.
As badly as the administration wanted NetCommunity, I think that almost everyone regrets having undertaking this journey.
Don Campfield
Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy