CommunitySuite Fund Accounting Reviews

The fund accounting features make it easy to track transactions, allocate investment income, and administer fees by fund. CommunitySuite Fund Accounting has the ability to create multiple allocation, fee, and cash management structures to meet the unique parameters of each fund.

Features are constantly being improved based on user-feedback. These upgrades are often helpful in allowing more flexibility and efficiency in our processes. Sometimes the releases are not relevant to our foundation, and that's ok. Occasionally, releases cause more work - either learning a new process, or on rare occasions, feel like a step backwards in product development.

There are three things I like most about this software:

1) It is designed specifically for use by community foundations - they get "it"!
2) The customer service. Second to none. Responsive. Knowledgeable. Experienced. Resourceful. Caring. Oh, and they are a heckuva a lot of fun, too!
3) Migration. Rarely is the term "easy" used in close quarters with discussions of transitioning from one core software package to another. However, the good folks at Foundant specialize in this process. In fact, it may be the only company out there that has customers who consistently use the term "flawless" when describing their data migration (at least from FIMS to C-Suite).

Basically, Foundant has built itself upon the idea that community foundations are their niche market. Make that "only market". Community foundations (CF's) are their only customers. What's more, a large portion of their staff have past personal work experience either with CF's or with the former industry-specific software, FIMS, from which the majority of community foundations have or are in-process of migrating from.

There is no perfect solution (yet) for community foundations. While Foundant comes fairly close by providing a ready-made solution, it is not as customizable as our particular organization would prefer. While it appears to be able to handle all of our required needs, we will be employing a few work-arounds and changes to our processes to make it fit those needs. Ideally, a software solution would allow the client to change the program to suit its workflow. Not exactly so with C-Suite. That said, it is a HUGE improvement in terms of integration and report generation over FIMS. It also increases functionality at least 10 fold. Not looking to purchase an additional CRM solution (cough...Salesforce...Raisers Edge...cough)? C-Suite is still a huge upgrade over FIMS.

This software is exactly what we need to track our funds, donors, and operations. Tech support is always quick to respond and willing to work through problems to help us learn.

The only thing I would add that would make it 100 for me as the accountant/CFO would be a payroll module.

I love how we can use one platform to manage funds, donations, grants, and scholarships.

A feature I would like to be incorporated is to be able to send payment confirmation emails for electronic/ach (like we do for grant payments) for the voucher payments. We have to manually send these emails currently.

We have been using Foundant for five years and they are always improving. They have different levels of support that are very helpful and quick.

The custom reporting takes quite a bit of practice to learn.

We had been using Quickbooks and spreadsheets to do fund accounting. The transition to CSuite has been transformational for our office!

The software isn't the most inuitive and reporting functions are somewhat difficult to learn, however, Foundant has a great support team that is able to assist us as needed.

CommunitySuite is user friendly and intuitive. The initial struggle of learning to do customized reports ended with a powerful feature to get the information I need. Customer service has been outstanding throughout our time with Foundant as a whole. The Sandbox feature where you can practice with real information and try new processes/ideas has been invaluable.

The summary pages are not organized in a way that is useful for me. Some of the date features are a struggle for our controller because they are not the way we process.

Foundant is very flexible. We have several users with different levels of computer knowledge all can navigate in Foundant. The training is great and the programmers are always looking to make the software more user-friendly. The time we save using this software allows us to spend more time in donor and community development.

There is not much that I don't like about Foundant. The only thing is new releases and it's really not a negative. It's just that so many good things get implemented that I don't always keep up.

Fund accounting is unique even by accounting standards. Using other solutions that weren't made to do what we needed them to in order to cobble together our operations was a nightmare. CommunitySuite brings it all together in one easy-to-use solution that is constantly being improved - and they take customer feedback to heart when making improvements. Additionally, the personalized training and the absolutely stellar customer service Foundant Technologies provides, coupled with the opportunities to meet and work with their team one-on-one, makes purchasing CommunitySuite a no-brainer!

CommunitySuite is great for fund accounting, but it's lacking a little on the CRM side. It works, but not as well as some other solutions (but those solutions don't have the robust fund accounting capabilities, which was the priority for my organization). However, Foundant Technologies is constantly working to make improvements on the CRM side, and I am confident that it will only get better and better!

CommunitySuite combines solid financials with good CRM/donor management and tightly integrated grant and scholarship management modules, if needed (extra cost). Extremely easy to implement and use.

With excellent support from Customer Success Manager team, we were trained on key functionality and brought foundation from spreadsheets to state of the art systems in less than two months. That support has never waivered and after 2 years of use , they only keep getting better, with more features .

Donor management and integration with third party payers (Stripe) may not be quite as robust as a standalone boutique module, but it is steadily getting more robust. Newly enhanced custom reporting tools are also filling a gap that existed two years ago.

CommunitySuite provides an integrated platform to run our Community Foundation at a price that is affordable for even a very small Community Foundation. The support and training provided through the implementation process made it possible to implement the software with very limited staff. Once implemented, the simplified fund accounting process made it possible to offer more options to our donors, including the introduction of non-endowed funds and multiple investment portfolios. These increased options have helped us to more than double the size of our foundation in less than two years. We could not have accomplished what we have without CommunitySuite.

The campaign process is my least favorite part of the software. While it is nice to have an integrated system to manage events, mailing lists, etc., those who are accustomed to using dedicated event management systems may find the features somewhat limited. It works fine, just without a lot of bells and whistles. Since we generally don't need bells and whistles, and we appreciate the integrated aspects of campaigns, we happily use the features provided. It is simply an area that has room for improvement.