Payment Assistant Onboarding

Welcome to Payment Assistant! We're pleased that you're ready to onboard with this helpful, new service that's included in your subscription cost of Financial Edge NXT. Payment Assistant is a combination of Blackbaud technology in Financial Edge NXT and our partner, REPAY's payment capabilities.

Our goal is to replace your entire invoice payment process with a new streamlined version, saving you time and improving your payment processing. For some customers, there may still be a small number of payments that need to be processed separately, such as wire transfers and international payments. For the rest, learn how to become more efficient and secure with Payment Assistant.

Note: Payment Assistant™ is currently in Limited Availability (LA). Are you interested in participating? Apply to join our LA group. During this time, we'll review and implement participant feedback to prepare for general availability.

Onboarding Preparation

To use Payment Assistant, you need to authorize Payment Assistant to collect funds from your bank account to pay vendors on your behalf.

The basic steps to get started include:

  • Complete the Payment Service agreement.

  • To verify the account to withdraw funds from, attach a copy of a voided check, bank statement, or account verification on a bank letterhead.

  • Complete the Docusign sent by email to the authorized signer.

Before signing up for Payment Assistant, we recommend you discuss the workflow with your auditor or other key financial people at your organization. We currently provide a single-tier approval process that is permission controlled within Financial Edge NXT. We have separate permissions for who can create payment runs and who can approve them. In the future, we're working to support a multi-tier approval process.

Also, when you sign up, you agree that every vendor in a payment run can be contacted to set up their preferred payment method to use with Payment Assistant. This is a required step regardless of any previous settings they have set up with your organization in Financial Edge NXT. For more information, see Payment Assistant for Vendors.

Payment Service agreement

To complete the agreement, you'll need the following:

  • Corporate name, address, and contact information.

  • Doing business as (DBA) information. We use the DBA name and address, and the remittance phone and email for the payment's vendor remittance. For virtual cards and ACH payments, an email remittance is sent. For checks, the name and remit to address is displayed on the check.

    Tip: If after onboarding you need to update your remit to information, contact Blackbaud Customer Support.

  • Federal tax ID number(s), business start date, and SIC code.

  • If applicable, information about beneficial owners. Not all organizations have beneficial owners. If you do not, you can skip this section of the agreement.

  • Bank information for the account you want to withdraw funds to make payments. While you can switch bank accounts later it does require you to go through onboarding again to use the new account. It may take some time to do so, so we recommend you carefully consider which bank account you want to use.

  • Personal information about the executive sponsor. This is a required step in the banking industry. It helps verify the authenticity of your organization. This is the one individual with significant responsibility for managing the customer, such as an executive officer or senior manager (e.g., Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Managing Member, General Partner, President, Vice President, Treasurer); or any other individual who regularly performs similar functions. This information must be provided even if no beneficial owners are listed.

Will my payment process change?

We are saving you time and effort by writing checks to vendors for you, so some processes may require adjustments. For example, if you require validation on who signs the checks to vendors, you may want to make that person who validates a payment run approver.

Offline processes can still be used for more visibility, like having multiple signers on a pre-payment report.