News and Blog
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Today's Friday Feature is special. I really wanted to show you how you don't have to use your mouse in Escape Online 5 but a picture (or video in this case) is worth a thousand words. (The video is only 1 minute long!) |
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CASBO is really fun, especially when you have friends like Cathy from Tehama County Department of Education!
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Almost every activity in Escape Online is set up as a Search/List/Form. That is, when you start an activity you land on a search form. You enter some parameters, press Go and you land on a list. You select a record, and you land on a form. If your work style is anything like mine, you will find that you jump back and forth a lot between these three elements. And, you know how I love keyboard shortcuts, so you can well imagine that I use them just for this purpose. |
These shortcuts are as easy as 1-2-3, literally. Search is Ctrl+1. List is Ctrl+2. Form is Ctrl+3.
Combine this with Ctrl+G (Go) and keyboard shortcuts for the list and you are good to go! Pun intended. :)
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The CASBO 2010 conference is a wrap and we had a great time. Enjoyed meeting some new friends and spending time with current friends as well. Hover over the picture below and click on the play button to see a video of customer interviews.
Many thanks to Douglas Crancer, CBO Auburn Union SD, and his awesome staff. We think you are pretty special too!
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One of the biggest 2010 Roadmap items is our new GRID! This is how we will be doing ad hoc querying and reporting.
I’m happy to announce today that our Grid is up and running, and will be part of our 10.3 release (available in June). We will provide more details later, but here is a preview:
Once you have a list (in this case fixed asset records), you can move the data to the grid with one click. Once in the grid you can:
And you can run reports as well! We’ll show you that on another post here on the news blog.
The grid is already up and running in every single activity in the Escape Online 5 system.
We still have more to do, including export to Excel, and incorporating detail records (all of the sub tabs on our records). We are really excited about this functionality and we know our end users are going to love it.
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In November of last year, the Friday Feature focused on the employee lookup that is used through the HR/Payroll module. What I didn’t mention was that in the Leave Transaction activity, the employee lookup has some extra special feature for speedy key data entry. The lookup is unique in that it allows you to lookup an employee by name, SSN, employee Id or person Id all from a single field. This is how it works. |
You can search by last name by entering two or more characters (bai). You will get a list of all employees whose last name starts with those letters.
You can search by the last four of their SSN by entering 4 numbers (5678). You will get a list of employees with those numbers as the last four of their SSN.
You can search by emp Id by entering 5 or 6 numbers (minus leading zeros). You will get a lookup with that employee, OR you can press Enter to automatically fill the employee’s information and move to the next field.
Finally, you can search by person Id. Enter the Id to get a lookup or press Enter to automatically fill the employee’s information and move to the next field.
These handy tricks make entering leave transactions much easier. No matter how your site locations send the information to you, there is a way to enter it quickly.
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Dateline: Roseville - April 14, 2010 - Bob Towery
You'll want to keep checking the News page this week, it will be quite a week!
Today I want to talk about the Detail Window, which will be in the 10.2 release and I'll bet that every Payroll user will be doing handstands.
Here is the background... After going live initially in 2008, Payroll users expressed displeasure at how long the data entry form was taking to open, for most kinds of data entry. It was particularly bad for entering batches. Although we have another activity expressly for entering "time sheets," most Payroll users didn't want to utilize it, wanting to stay in the main "Adjust Pay" activity.
You may recall that last year we discovered what was causing the form to take so long to appear. It was the tens of thousands of instructions .Net gave to Windows in order to display the form. So we changed the form somewhat which cause a dramatic increase in performance. We released this as Adjust Pay v.2 last year. A 100% increase in speed.
But that really was not good enough, for users sitting on stacks of hundreds of time card entries. Form opens/closes were taking 5-6 seconds on most up to date computers. The only real solution was not to open a form at all. We developed a specification for a major modification known as "the Detail window." Let's take a look at it.
Here is your regular Adjust Pay v.2 activity, but you'll note there is a new button, the Detail (window) button. When you click on this button, you have a choice to open the Detail window for Addons, Contributions or Deductions.
By selecting Addon's, we are presented with the new Detail window! The Detail window appears in the list space, pushing the list down. This typically takes 2-3 seconds to open. You see a new banner on top, with more information. And then you have all the pre-loaded addons, and you can additionally copy those or add new ones.
In most cases you are just adding some number of units to Addon lines that are already there. And yes, you got to this point with a couple of mouse clicks, probably 1/2 the clicks (or keystrokes) of the form you have been using. But here is where the magic really begins!
Previously, in order to compute the employee and see the results in the snapshot, you would choose "compute pay now," wait for that to happen, then ask for the snapshot. Now, you just ask for the snapshot and everything is automatic.
Likewise, you can just move to the next emp on the list, or any employee by double clicking on them, without closing the detail window. It generally only takes a couple of seconds to save off your change, have the pay computed, show that in the list, then load in the new employee.
You can also with one click flip to contribs or deducts. Also, note that the Detail window is new functionality for Adjust Pay. The existing functionality is completely unaffected - the same form you have had is available. Which you would use for Assignment changes, for example.
I believe we have again developed about a 100% performance increase, but just as important, we have reduced the keystroking even more. We have shown it to three customers, and each was very excited about this new enhancement.
The Detail window represents about 7 person months of spec'ing, development and QA. A very significant effort, and an important one for our payroll users. But it won't stop there. We plan to enable this same capability on one or more additional activity each release. There are numerous places where this productivity increase will be welcomed.
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Escape’s training webinars continue to get more popular. Last week we had a live webinar covering many payroll activities:
Well over 100 people attended the live webinar with dozens more scheduled to watch the recording over the next week or two. Eight organizations, including six counties and two districts, paid the nominal fee for the ability to attend the live interactive session and receive a recording that can be used throughout the year as a training tool for new users or as a refresher course for more advanced users.
Having our users be the most proficient they can be with our software is very important to us. Part of our preparation for every webinar is to review the support incidents to include these questions as part of the training, providing tips for the more advanced features and reviewing those functions that are not a part of your every day processes.
With Elen Meltonyan monitoring the chat box, and our payroll staff, Jennifer Stahr and Julie Leaman, assisting in developing the materials, I received a lot of help making the webinar a success. It was a great team effort!
If you have never attended a webinar, one of the special treats is the chat box which allows you to send in questions. The answers are either explained to all by the trainer or sent directly to you through the chat box. After the webinar is over, you receive a follow up report that includes every one's questions and answers.
We are happy that webinars are another effective means of supporting our customers. We have a complete schedule for 2010. Check out the schedule and sign up!
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Everybody knows how I love lookup windows because they only show you entries that are applicable to the field you are entering, but what you may not know is that lookup windows also have special logic for filtering entries based on what you are doing and what makes sense. For example, say you just negotiated a contract with ABC Office Supply that will give you better prices than 123 Office Supply, and the contract goes into effect at the end of May. |
After the new contract goes into effect you don’t want requisitioners to be able to create a new requisition for 123 Office Supply but you still want to be able to search for any requisitions where 123 Office Supply is the vendor.
Easy squeezy! You go to the Vendors activity and open the record for 123 Office Supply and inactivate it. Check it out. Here is a list of vendors in the office supplies category. Notice how there are several vendors that are inactive.
Now, if a user creates a new requisition, these “inactive” vendors will not appear in the lookup window for office supplies.
But, everyone can still search for requisitions for this vendor. See how the lookup for vendors (on any search page) still shows 123 Office Supplies AND lets you know it is inactive.
Of course, this doesn’t just work on vendors. This is the standard logic for all lookup windows in Escape Online. And, lookup windows are used for everything from departments, buyers, statuses, deductions, addons, bid categories and pay cycles and on and on. This is really cool, because it gives you control over what users can enter into new records but also provides search capabilities for historical purposes.
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I like to open a lot of activities simultaneously. At any given time, I will have a half dozen to a dozen activities open in Escape Online. And, as you know, I also like to keep my hands on the keyboard. There are several ways to keep the action going: using the activity drop down, keyboard shortcuts for scrolling through activities and the jump key to take me to the activity tree. Let’s take these one by one. First, let's talk about the activity drop down. This is at the top of your workspace. This drop-down menu shows all of the activities I have open and a LIVE thumbnail of each activity. |
I love this drop-down because very often I will have more than one vendor requisition or employee open and I can use the thumbnail to make sure I pick the right one. Now of course, you can use your mouse to get to this menu, but for keyboard users like me – just press Alt+Enter and then use your arrow keys to select the activity.
Next up is the keyboard shortcuts for scrolling through activities. If I have only a few activities open (it happens!), then I can use my Alt-arrow keys to scroll through the activities without displaying the menu. It is very quick and efficient for jumping back and forth between two activities.
Last, but not least, is the little known jump key for the activity tree. Press Ctrl+J from the workspace and you will land on the first module of the activity tree (Finance or HR/Payroll for most users). If you arrow down, you go to the next major group. For example, if you land on Finance and arrow down, you would go to HR/Payroll. Or, if you are in Finance-Fiscal and you arrow down, you would go to Finance-Requisitions.
If you arrow right, you drill down to the next level. For example, if you land on Finance and arrow right, you will go to the Finance-Fiscal group; arrow right again and you go to Finance-Fiscal-Accounts.
Now that was a lot of keyboard shortcuts, so let’s have a quick review:
These shortcuts can be great time savers. For more about these shortcuts and others, check out the Escape Keys in the Online Resources module of Escape Online. Happy keyboarding!
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Often our news articles detail the progress of large projects at COEs or big districts. Sometimes we describe software releases or great features of our software. Rarely do our "departmental" customers, districts using a subset of our financial software, make news. We call these customers "departmental" because Escape Online 5 is used only for purchasing and stores, not to manage the financials.
Actually, our departmental customers were among the first to implement Escape Online 5, so they have been using the software for years now. In early March, I visited one of these districts, Santa Maria Joint Union High School District. Santa Maria is a mid-size district using Escape Online 5 for purchasing, stores and fixed assets. They were not only one of the first to implement Escape Online 5, but among the first to upgrade to version 3.
I visited with Brenda Hoff and Kelly Gilbertson, business office users of the software. We talked about their interest in setting up a barcode interface for fixed asset inventory, which we can easily do. I then spent some time watching Kelly do some requisition management, and answered some questions.
Kelly Gilbertson of Santa Maria Joint Union High School District in action!
Thanks to Brenda and Kelly for the hospitality. Overall they love Escape, and now think of Escape Online 5 as part of their daily operation. Kelly especially likes running multiple activities and using the Requisition Listing (ReqPay02) report for tracking requisition encumbrances. She has learned all the tricks, and loves the function key capability!
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