Veracross

Benefits:

I like that everything is in one learning management system. Budgets, class lists, discipline forms, and the school calendar are all in one spot. I can easily email groups of parents with one click. I can see what my past report card comments have been and track student attendance. In the past we have used several learning management systems for all of the previously listed items and it was a lot to learn at once. This makes everything much smoother.

Drawbacks:

I have multiple sections of the same course. I am unable to email them all at the same time, which is something I wish I could do. If I want to email all 4th grade parents it requires me sending several emails through veracross. Our previous learning management system let me check off which classes I wanted to email and I could send a bulk email to all of my courses. This is a small inconvenience in an otherwise great software.

Benefits:

A one stop shop for all CRM and data needs for private schools. I work in the development office, so it makes keeping track of donors, donations, and development goals easy

Drawbacks:

It is a full-fledged CRM, so there is a steep learning curve to utilizing all of it's features

In sum:

I work on the development at a private school. We use Veracross for our donation record keeping.

Benefits:

Veracross provides a single web-based system for all of our offices (admissions, development, finance, student records) and constituents (teachers, students, parents, staff). Having one system to support (as opposed to multiple interconnected systems) makes things much easier for everyone. In addition, the feature set is very extensive and allows us to customize things as needed. The company is constantly adding new features and listens to requests from users. Finally, the support is better than any software company I have ever worked with.

In sum:

We were able to streamline support across all our offices using Veracross. In addition, the system has so much functionality that we no longer need to do any physical mailing. All communication with constituents, as well as paying bills/fees and making donations, is handled online through Veracross.

Benefits:

We have been able to transfer so many manual, offline functions into a more efficient place with Veracross. When we first implemented Veracross, we intended it primarily for academic and admissions use. Over the past four years, however, we have been able to extend its use to everything from enrollment and reenrollment to sign ups for our writing center. It's powerful and flexible.

Drawbacks:

We pay a lot for Veracross, but the partnership that comes with it is worth the price. In the beginning, some of the documentation left something to be desired, but that's come a long way recently.

Benefits:

other areas are okay such as admissions.

Drawbacks:

I have continually been pitched this software to be used as an "all-encompassing" school software. This is fine for anyone that does not need to do real accounting. Even Quickbooks handles accounting more accurately. Absolutely horrible! Every report that is basic in accounting has to be "custom made". I STRONGLY recommend you look elsewhere for a product if you do not want to do the majority of all financial statements and analytics via excel. I suspect a non-accountant designed this part of the software and is why the flow of information is so poorly executed.

Benefits:

- Easy to use - Support various functions of school (Admission, Classes, Accounting, Billing...) - Many add-on modules available - Mobile-friendly - Tech Support

Drawbacks:

- Limited customization, very fews things are automated (workaround mostly needed) - Two-factor costs extra

Benefits:

I really like the Query feature. It's very usefull for generating reports based on specific criteria. As a school, we often need to pull a list of students based on certain things and this feature makes it easy to do so. I also love their Support team. I always get almost immediate answers to my support tickets. They provide screenshots and make it very easy to understand how to do something. I love the upload feature. Uploading Journals or even Student Charges make it much easier to do than doing it manually - very time saving.

Drawbacks:

There is not a lot of room for error in this software, but that can be a good thing also. It is not as easy to edit transactions once something is posted... so you need to go through a few hoops in order to reverse and fix. It's extra work, but it forces you to really think before you post something, and is better for auditing purposes. I think fixing the way a payment is applied should be easier. Parents can often pay the wrong invoice by accident. Once a payment is applied, it's a bit difficult to reapply that payment to another invoice.

In sum:

When I first started using Veracross, I really did not like it. I thought it was one of the most difficult platforms I had ever used. My previous CRM was Netsuite, and this was like a night and day comparison in regards to userfriendlyness. However, after using Veracross for about a year, I can honestly say it has grown on me and learning how to do things on this software that was not possible or much more difficult on Netsuite, has somewhat changed my mind. This is my first experience at a school, so I'm not sure whether there are other software systems that are easier and better than Veracross - but so far I have really grown to like this one and their support team has made using and learning how to do things on the software very easy.

Benefits:

The query functions are very powerful. You are able to search based on various attributes. Very useful.

Drawbacks:

The ability to have outfacing forms on our website without needing to create a record needs improving.

In sum:

Veracross is a great product. I would recommend it to others in the nonprofit education arena.

Benefits:

The information is always available without any data hostage. The Query section is very useful if you know what you are looking for. Easy to download to Excel

Drawbacks:

- The latest version (online) is better than the previous software version, but is very slow, even with high-speed internet. - On the Query section, if you search for a field on the search option, the same results appear. This is confusing because if you are running reports under the Development module but your search field you selected is Adminission, then the result may be different. The field search specifies the source (Development, Admissions, etc) but it's very cumbersome to navigate. - It requires training to understand the system, which represents a cost for the organization

Benefits:

The company leadership takes client feedback seriously and uses it to improve their product. Time and time again feedback our school has provided to Veracross has found its way into the product. They also excel at understanding the needs of schools and how best to integrate data across departments and divisions.

Drawbacks:

Some modules and API data availability are not where they need to be but this has improved in recent years. Veracross also needs to improve upon their support program. We love the single point of contact but at times it is limiting in support response speed.

In sum:

We benefit, daily, from having a totally integrated campus database system that requires not shuttling of data between modules and products.