Configuration is My Superpower
Abila's netFORUM Enterprise is a powerful system that is feature rich. The more you use the system, the more ways you can find to use it. Most of the good systems that scale up for larger organizations have the same functions so you need to pay attention to interface (which is clean, easily learned) and the responsiveness of the system to changing business rules without programming.
The configuration/set up is critical to netFORUM's flexibility and value and it is extensive. In the financial areas, if you cannot do something with the configuration options they have, maybe you should reconsider doing it at all.
That said, when implementing this system, I encourage staff to configure deep but narrow. For example, set up a single, representative member type and test it all the way through its lifecycle (i.e. sell, renew, confirm benefit access, terminate, and return after a gap) before you start configuring all the other types. Setting everything up and then finding you have blocked yourself from doing something is maddening. No one wants to play the configuration version of Jenga!
Get your staff training on the baseline and explore its power before you start customizing. Periodically, go back to Abila for training on things like pricing; in upgrades, we get very focused on making sure we can stay in business and do everything that we are doing pre-upgrade. You will miss the opportunity to enhance your usage or simplify your processes if you remain in the dark about new features; release notes are not especially effective in conveying HOW something can be used.
Like any great power, configuration can be used for good or evil. One caveat is that the system is NOT strong on tools that help you check your configuration and make sure that it is complete. For example, you can configure lots of prices for a product and neglect to have even one marked as default or leave gaps in your price dates so that you end up with a 2-day period when the product cannot be sold because there is no active price. You can build (or have someone build) child forms that serve as custom filtered lists of records that need your attention; this works as well for configuration as for customer accounts. It would be nice if a suite of these came with the system instead of having to be built for everything.
Another caveat that I would offer concerns the Fund Raising. Abila has made a lot of improvements in the module but, if you have a foundation AND a PAC, you cannot manage them in the same Fund Raising module. There is a single profile and all contributions are combined. While that might make sense from the POV of summarizing engagement, these two types of fund raising typically have different donor levels and want to see YTD and lifetime totals separately, specific to the cause.
In general, this is a powerful system good that is probably better for medium to large organizations. If you are smaller, or find netFORUM Enterprise to be too much (money, complexity) then netFORUM Pro might be a better fit.
