Scholarship America
For more than 60 years, Scholarship America has worked directly with students, parents, colleges, businesses, and communities to help students fulfill their college dreams and achieve their higher education goals. Since its founding in 1958, Scholarship America has distributed more than $4.9 billion in scholarships to over 2.9 million students.
Through its partnerships, Scholarship America helps organizations create mission-aligned scholarship solutions that make a lifelong impact on students and their families. As the largest non-profit scholarship provider, they also provide mentoring, financial education, and emergency grants to support students in the most holistic way possible.
“It was a huge lift for the team, and we are transacting confidently in the system. We felt so much better having NPact on board. It started with their proposed solution that we liked, and that worked. NPact continues to be a resource to support us as things come up. They understand our business and the unique way we operate within FE. It’s a very collaborative and positive relationship.”
Barb Mostaghimi
Director, Accounting, Scholarship America
Reconfiguring Financial Edge
Scholarship America was in need of a replacement for an outdated financial system that was custom-built using COBOL—which Microsoft no longer supports. After deciding to move their 35-year-old system to Blackbaud’s Financial Edge NXT, they knew they needed help configuring their existing FE NXT database to meet all of the requirements from their internal stakeholders spanning across multiple departments.
The outdated software system managed both financial and scholarship activities. It also connected with Scholarship America’s scholarship administration system, which managed all scholarship and student data. In addition to FE NXT needing to integrate with this software, the organization was moving to a new banking partner. Therefore, Scholarship America needed to develop a transition plan to allow for an overlap period for checks to clear from the old system.
“It was a hectic time for our team. We were replacing legacy software that housed our scholarship management and some financial pieces. Microsoft was no longer going to support it, so we had to transition off the platform. We had a timeline to move the legacy system, and we did some of it on our own, but then we needed to move the financial pieces, so we looked for a consultant to help us with that.”
Barb Mostaghimi
Director, Accounting, Scholarship America
Custom Solution
After meeting with all stakeholders to talk through existing processes and data flow in detail, the NPact team provided a custom solution to help Scholarship America migrate to FE NXT. The first priority was to bring over the subledgers and to balance them in the general ledger, removing the need for dual entry, which was a necessary workflow in the legacy system.
The NPact team also helped establish the new FE NXT processes for A/R, A/P, and the pools—including a way to balance pools by program cycles and by students, which hadn’t been done in the old system. NPact also developed solutions to support data clean up, imports/APIs, and reporting that would help the entire organization operate more effectively. After completing the project on time, NPact continues to collaborate and provide ongoing support to Scholarship America as they further optimize their system.
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