News and Blog
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Now that we have entered the time of year end processing, many of you are entering requisitions for next year. This is the perfect time to take advantage of one of the cool features of department requisitions. Department requisitions are used for goods or services from internal departments, like food services and print shops. Department requisitions do not generate POs or payments (although they may generate interdepartmental transfers of funds). |
Let's say your district charges for copies from the print shop, and you know that you are going to make a lot of copies throughout the year. You also know that times are tough and that you want that money for copying to be set aside for just that purpose. In other words, you want this requisition to be encumbered without having to enter (guess) what exactly you are going to copy on which day for whatever reason.
Well, we have the answer. Department requisitions are unique in that you can add line items even when the requisition is in the Approval status, and the account total does not have to match the line item total. That means that you can set up one requisition and have it encumbered for the entire year, but add line items as needed.
Another example is for food service. You could set up a requisition for $500 for testing snacks and submit it for approval without entering any chargeable line items (i.e., you enter a "testing snacks" with no unit price as a placeholder). The five hundred dollars would be encumbered, and when you added snacks for the first round of testing, those could be expensed with the remaining balance staying encumbered. Voilà!
* Please note that the Friday Feature writer will be celebrating her country’s birthday next week, but will return on July 10th. She wishes all Escape employees and customers, and their friends and family have a safe and sane Fourth of July!
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For those of you that remember, in my former life I was a Project Management junkie in the big corporate world, and although I’ve moved into my COO role here at Escape, I still get together with some of my Project Management peers to compare processes, experiences and to maintain my professional network. The entire group agrees that professional networking is always critical but never more so than now due to the state of the job market.
A few nights ago I sat in a room of 12 people and was the only one that worked for a company that isn’t down-sizing or eliminating benefits. As people described their personal versions of doom and gloom, I reflected on how lucky I am to work for a company that has steady work and a loyal customer base. Below is a description of the recent actions they are taking to save money.
Company A – outsourcing all software development and testing to India…at least 50 people are affected
Company B – recently laid off 121 IT personnel
Company C – laid off 10 people (20% of their work force) and eliminated 401k matching
Company D – 1st layoff in 5 years...a minimum of 50 people affected...maybe more
Company E – Converting all Project Management positions to contractors
Company F – Project Management positions are no longer secure, waiting daily to get laid off
Company G – no layoffs yet, but they are coming
Company H – has closed all satellite offices and now outsourcing software development and testing to India
Company I – closing their doors after 17 years in operation
Not that I wasn’t already thankful for the chance to work with Escape customers, as well as my coworkers, but this meeting really put an exclamation point on it. Thank you for your honest feedback, thank you for listening, thank you for challenging us to be better every day. And finally, thank you for your continued business…we do appreciate it! I can tell you that even given the State budget mess and how it affects education, these 11 peers of mine wish they were working at Escape.
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The last few weeks I wrote quite a bit about searching, reporting, and managing your data in Escape Online. Now, I would like to focus on your year-end tasks – making last minute payments, setting up next year’s requisitions, and closing last year’s requisitions (carrying over and accruing). This week I am going to focus on making those last minute payments. It is a busy time of year, so there are a lot of invoices coming in that need to get processed as quickly as possible. |
There are two activities you can use: the Payments activity and the Enter Payments activity (more like a batch). Most of our customers seem to like the Payments activity because the workflow is quick and easy, so I am going to use that activity for this article
The Payments activity is like most of our other activities, in that you click New, enter your data, and then click Save/New to open another new form, ready for input. And, it does all the fancy footwork, like when you enter a reference number (requisition number or PO, you make the call), Escape Online fills in all the details, as in vendor Id, requisition comment, bank Id, item count, items received, received amount, requisition total, and unpaid amount from the requisition into the form. Phew. That’s a lot of automation.
Sure, it is all quite fancy, but the really cool thing about the Payments activity is how the Payment Amount field works. You don’t just enter a number and then try and figure out the distribution by yourself, manually. No, no, no. We help you out. This is how it works:
If you enter a full, partial or negative amount, Escape Online distributes the amount automatically: first to the liability accounts with unused liability amounts, then to the other accounts based on the percentages defined in the requisition.
If you enter zero (and this is what I really like!), Escape Online doesn’t distribute the amounts; instead, it creates a list of all the associated accounts so you can determine which accounts get which amounts. This is super fantastic for partial payments of requisitions that need to be distributed differently than the requisition because there are lots of items for lots of different locations, and the items are being shipped slowly, but surely, painfully, separately.
Another valuable year-end feature is that the Payments activity automatically knows today’s date and puts the payment in the correct fiscal year, no matter what the requisition’s fiscal year is. This is not only a time saver, but a frustration reducer. You are too busy to be bothered with filling out fiscal years, when the system already knows all of the dates.
So, let’s start paying all those bills, and next week I will tell you all about setting up requisitions for bills to be paid next year!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
There are certain times of the year – W2, Budget, Year End – when you need software to address specific issues. This release, v1.09.04, was focused on year end and reports.
Our first step was to add a receivable column on the Account tab in Invoices. (This is just like the Liability column on the Account tab in Requisitions.) This field allows you to change the receivable after you have already processed the invoice using the Requisition Year End Closing activity, but before the fiscal year closes. All you have to do is change the amount in the 2009 accounts and Escape Online modifies the 2010 accounts and creates the appropriate journal entry.
Then, we added a tutorial for the Requisition Year End Closing activity that shows you how to use the activity along with other year end features.
We also updated the Year End Requisition Processing snapshot so that it now matches your list. This means that if you have filtered your list by order location, department or document type, the report will honor that filter, showing you basic information from the document including detailed account information. This really helps you stay focused on working your list. Of course, if you want to see everything, you can run the Fiscal Year End Checklist (Fiscal15) from the Finance – Reports – Fiscal activity.
Finally, we fixed some known issues with payments and the Requisition Year End Closing activity.
This release is full of new reports, new sort options, and new report criteria. We have been very focused on making sure that you can get the data you want in the format that best fits your needs:
Benefit Provider Reconciliation (Benefit03) – New powerful enhancements. First, we added a new sort option for employees, and an "Include Adjustments" field so you can include, exclude, or only report employees with benefit adjustment amounts. Then, we created two new fields for benefit providers and bargaining units where you can enter wildcards, like question marks (single character), asterisk (multiple characters), commas (for a sequence) and two periods (for a range)!!
J-90 Employee (Employee17) – New report that provides much of the information necessary to fill out the Salary and Benefit Schedule for the Certificated Bargaining Unit (J-90) report. It includes the employee’s name, hire date, assignment/job class, bargaining unit, location, and total FTE. It also includes degrees, majors, and education type as defined in Escape Online. It will really help the personnel staff member who fills out the J-90 form. At the end of the report is a total of employees and FTE.
Journal Entry Detail by JE (Ledger01) – New fields for entering account components.
SACS Extract (Fiscal51) – New Projected Year Totals Date field for entering an "as of" transaction date for journal entries affecting revised budget accounts. The total is displayed in the projected year totals (column IP).
Stores Item Activity Summary (Stores03) – New report that prints an item summary of transactions and costs for adjustments, issues, receipts, and returns. You can select which columns (adjustments, issues, receipts, returns) you want on the report, and in what order. You can filter the report by department, item category, item number, or a date range. The report shows a sum of the number of units and a sum of the costs for each stores item within the specified criteria.
Stores Valuation (Stores05) – New report that lists detailed information for stores items as of the date specified. The purpose of this report is to determine the total value of the stores warehouse. It can be sorted by category, item number, or description. There are three display options, including order units, issue units, or both.
Vendor Detail (Pay17) – New sort option that disables all suppression is now available. The "x" option prints all information on every detail line so it is easier to export to Microsoft Excel for additional analysis.
And, of course, everybody knows about the Report Task Force and its work on identifying and fixing reports that should be running faster. Well, this release they optimized eight reports:
Year end isn’t just about closing last year, but getting ready for next year. This release also included some very impressive payroll enhancements that can be implemented for the upcoming fiscal year.
Introducing "pay the days." Now you can set up a "pay the days" calendar for employees that work only a few days at the beginning and/or end of a calendar. For example, if you have employees that work an 11 month calendar but start on August 25, you may not want to equalize the pay across all months. Instead, you can pay only for the days worked in August and then have equalized pay in the other 10 months.
You can set the "pay the days" month to be the first month, last month, or both. You can also specify whether or not you want to include HW benefits. The pay calculation changes to a daily rate for those days worked in the "pay the days" month, and then equalizes the balance across the other "regular" months.
This type of calendar cannot be used with pay period percent salary schedules, STRS retirement, or manual calendars.
Additional proration of benefit computations. Now you can prorate benefits by FTE Ranges. The new option (Prorate FTE on FTE Ranges) for the Prorate Option of the Bargaining Unit, automatically displays an FTE Range form at the bottom of the workspace, where you can define the ranges. Using proration ranges, you can set up a benefit that does not calculate an ER contribution for employees with less that .5 FTE, a percentage for those employees .5 to .74 FTE, and a full ER contribution for those with 1.0 FTE.
Recognize new lump sum earnings amount for tax calculation purposes. Now you can set up addons to pay a lump sum as annual earnings, preventing the tax calculation from annualizing it. Per IRS regulations, this option is available only for non-primary pay cycles where the addon's Rate 1 is not an hourly or daily rate, and the addon is set up to pay for only ONE month.
Of course, if an addon is setup as annual, payroll technicians can override this in the Adjust Payroll activity.
This release also included quite a few other enhancements. There will be a release review on Thursday, June 25th. Contact Terri Hammond to make a reservation. Release reviews are free for the viewing for all Escape Technology customers!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
As mentioned in a previous news item, the RTF’s focus is shifting to report defect fixes and enhancements, as reported and requested by our customers. However, we are still monitoring the performance statistics for anomalies. This has resulted in an important development, which we will get to shortly.
First though, our customers set a new record last week: for the first time they have generated more than 25,000 reports in one week.
Report response times continue to be excellent, and improving. Ninety-four percent finished in six seconds or less. Not shown on this chart, but computed from the same report statistics, the percentage of reports that take longer than one minute is down to 0.5% - a half a percent. (As before, this is the time spent generating the Crystal report on the server; it does not include network transit and client rendering time.)
Our “payroll snapshot” report is one of the most frequently used by our customers. In fact, during the period April 1 through June 13, it was number one, with 16,620 runs.
As we analyzed performance statistics report by report, we noticed that this particular report was slower at one COE, as well as Sacramento City USD. We assigned a report developer to figure out why. Turns out these organizations have a great deal of retirement data, and a lot of it for one organization (as opposed to say Ventura COE or Placer COE where it is spread out quite a bit across organizations).
The SQL program gathering this data was re-written to be more efficient with retirement data. Before our re-write, this report at Sac City averaged 17 seconds, much too slow for an important payroll user report. The individual runs were from five seconds to about a minute. After the rewrite – the average was around 1.5 seconds. Our in house testing showed performance improvements anywhere from 200% to 500% in several different customer databases. Now that it has been installed for a week and a half and is performing well, we will roll this out to all customers.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
We introduced a new section to our web site today: Infrastructure Technologies, under the Escape Online 5 menu. We created these pages to address the history, present, and future state of technologies used in the development and implementation of Escape Online 5.
The main purpose of this area is to document, discuss and plan for future technologies that will affect Escape and our customers. These technologies are always on the table for discussion at our various user groups. Our intent is to let all voices be heard, and integrate our timelines based on requirements and technology adoptions by our customers, whenever possible.
Each timeframe – past, present, future – gives a brief summary of technologies on the desktop, server, and database, with links to relevant web sites, and comments from Escape Technology and Escape user groups.
We hope you will take the time to browse through these pages and give us your thoughts about the technologies and the direction of Escape.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Time for a little self-validation. As you all know, I spend day-in and day-out writing the documentation for Escape Online. I hope all of you are reading it. Of course, you are! :) Let’s review, just in case. Escape Online provides documentation in a couple of different formats. First, we have user guides: there are 29 of them, everything from Admin User Guide to Credentials District User to System Implementation. The user guides can all be accessed from the Help menu within Escape Online. |
You will see only those guides that are associated with your role. So, if you are an Admin User, you will not see the Payroll User Guide. Everyone has access to the Escape Keys. Everyone also has access to the Release Notes and Known Issues, which are updated with every release.
Escape Online also provides How-Tos. These are accessed from within the activity. They are the chapter from the user guide that is specific to that activity. So, if you are in the Approve Requisitions activity, you will see the chapter for approving requisitions. Reports also work this way. They do not have a How-To menu, but they do have a lookup that gives you access to the definitions of each of the report parameters and a sample of each of the sort options, including any special considerations like calculations or how the data was derived.
Finally, we have been building a library of video tutorials. Right now, we have tutorials for Approve Requisition, Budget Entry, Budget Management, Department Requisitions, Vendor Requisitions, Stores Requisition, Stores Issue, Receive PO Items, Requisition Year End Closing, Employees, Adjust Pay, Pay Manual Checks, Retro Payroll, Leave Transactions, W2 Processing, and Users. You can access these through the activity to which they belong.
(Personally, I find it kind of frustrating that I am not exactly sure which activities have videos and which don’t. Take heart. I have an idea I have been working on to add them to the Help menu. You can look forward to seeing this improvement in a future release!)
I would also like to remind you of the Knowledge Base. This can be a great resource for answering questions quickly. And, of course, there is our AWESOME Escape Customer Care if there is any question that you still have after reading the documentation.
Please note, too, that we are always trying to improve the documentation. Every release, I make at least a dozen or so changes to documentation that are not due to change requests, but from emails that support reps and customers send with ideas on how to make the documentation better.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
In addition to the 38 districts that went live in phases 1, 2 and 3 at Sonoma COE, these remaining districts all went live on the Finance module this week:
Welcome to the Escape family one and all!
That leaves two more districts (Live Oak Charter and Petaluma City Schools) to go. With so many new districts coming on board, we thought this would be a good time to update our readers on the count of organizations already live, and in conversion, on our systems.
| Organizations | Count |
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| Live on Online 5 | 118 |
| In implementation, not a Classic Customer | 41 |
| Still on Escape Classic | 63 |
| Total | 222 |
Most of the organizations that are in implementation are going live July 1, so in less than a month we will have over 150 organizations on Online 5.
Now here is something kind of fun. I decided to Google “numerology 222” and well, here is what comes up on tons of web sites:
The number 222 signifies that the person is on the right path and he/she will face fewer obstacles. This number shows that the person is doing the right work and the person is going in the right direction as well.
Works for us!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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The last couple of weeks I have been going on and on about lists: how you get them, how you sort them, how you manage them. Now I want to talk about another way of displaying data in an organized fashion, namely reports. As of release v09.03, Escape Online has 370 reports in the Finance, HR/Payroll, and System modules. I figured this out by counting the number of Crystal Report files delivered with that release, excluding custom reports. That’s a lot of reports! |
And, don’t I know it. It is part of my job to create all of those little ol’ report samplers you see in every report activity. You might wonder how a productivity hound like me creates so many reports exhibiting the most glamorous features on a single report page, like the Payroll Differences report with an employee with a minus (was on last month’s pay cycle but wasn’t on this month’s) and an employee with a plus (new to this pay cycle) on the same page.
It’s magic.
Seriously, Escape Online makes this very easy. As you already know, we are working on making reports run faster and faster. That helps a lot, but I also need to keep changing my criteria, whittling it down until I get just-the-right example. All I have to do is jump back to the report criteria, change my criteria, and press Ctrl+G to make the report “go” again. The report runs, and when it is done, Escape Online displays the new report in the Report tab. (I told you it was like magic.) I can do this over and over and over again, which in many cases is necessary to get all of the features onto one page.
I can see how you might want to do this, too, especially for some of Escape Online’s more sophisticated reports. Like the Benefit Provider Reconciliation (Benefit03) report where, in release 09.04, you can enter wildcards for selecting benefit providers and/or bargaining units. Or, the more complex Comparative Account Summary by Object (Fiscal04) report where you can customize the data source, the way it is displayed (decimal points and percentages), the column headings, and the order of the columns.
Just as the search/list/forms allow you to create the perfect list, report activities allow you to quickly modify criteria and regenerate a report until you get the perfect report.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
This week we are sharing another of our statistical reports that document reporting performance across all our customers. This report shows how many reports are finishing in 0-1 seconds, 1-2 seconds and so on. It covers the entire month of May, where our customers ran over 81,000 reports. Let’s have a look at the report.
As you can see, 50% of reports are completing in 0-1 seconds, 75% in 0-2 seconds, and so on. Nearly 98% are finishing in less than 20 seconds.
More information of note:
Note that these times are purely server side – this is the time to generate the report on the server. It does not include time of getting the request to the server, nor sending the finished report back to the users computer for rendering there. But the server side is the part that we have control over, and the most important element to make the reports as speedy as possible.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
One of the changes put in place after I arrived is a quarterly, full day off site meeting for all Escape employees. This replaced the monthly first Friday of the month meeting.
We just had one of these meetings on May 8, and thought we would share a few pictures from the event. Escape is an incredibly busy place. We have a lot of customers, a lot of ongoing implementations, and a great deal of development. The day flies past pretty quickly here! With the whirlwind day to day, these meetings are our chance for everyone to pull back and consider the big picture. Ensuring we all have the same vision and are working together as a team is the primary outcome of these sessions.
We hear in depth about each implementation, and learn from each other about what went right and how we can improve. We learn what our Research department is working on for future enhancements and technologies incorporated into our system.
It’s all about making our customers, from the first, to the newest, the happiest and best users we can make them. In this meeting, we focused our agenda items on the upcoming release of .Net 3.5, our Report Task Force results, and an update on how we will address the new Federal, State, and retirement regulations coming down the pipe.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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