News and Blog
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Year end brings a lot of precision research. You are looking at just about every document in the system to make sure everything is in order before closing. In many cases, you will be performing this research by account number. Escape gives you broad capabilities of searching for records by account. You can search by component, entering masks and wildcards. Another option is using the filtering mechanism of the lookup. |
When you are in a lookup, you can start typing and the lookup will show only those entries that match what you typed. Let’s look at an example. Here is a partial screen capture of the lookup window for object codes. As you can see from the small scroll bar, this lookup has lots and lots of entries.
If you only want to see the 5000 objects, you can type 5 to filter the lookup to only 5000s. Or, 55 to filter the lookup to 5500s, like you see below. Then, if you so desire, you can type 5 to go back to the 5000s, or you can type 3 to switch the entire lookup to the 3000s. It is very flexible.
If you want to go back to your original lookup list, just press Ctrl+F. Note that filtering applies to the column that is sorted. You can tell which column is sorted by the little triangle next to its name.
If you want to filter on a different column (e.g., see all of the descriptions that start with “classified”), just click on the heading of that column and type “cla”. It is really that easy, making lookups all the more powerful and friendly!
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Yesterday, I acquainted you with the preparation for year end testing. Today, I will lay out the process we use to ensure that every activity, document and report operate separately and together as part of the whole.
Terri and Craig worked together to create a 249 line item spreadsheet with every possible scenario. They verified sales tax liabilities, printed checks, accrued, carried over, released, rolled back and then did it all again. Terri even included common mistakes as part of the procedures. For example, a user carried over too much and needed to change the liability after July 1.
They entered pre-payments. They changed the system date, and entered payments for “last” year. And on, and on, until all 249 separate procedures were tested.
Then they checked the journal entries for every document. Terri and Jacque and Craig painstakingly verified every debit and credit for both fiscal years using the Journal Entries activity, the Year End Checklist snapshot, the Fiscal15 Year End report and a variety of other fiscal reports to ensure that the dollar movement was correct for all of the different types of organization setup our customers use.
If the testing team found an error, they would roll back to the step before the error occurred, get the updated software from the development team, then move forward again. We completed this arduous process for both version 10.02 and 10.03, and we will do it again in 10.04.
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Year-end testing is an integrated process. There are lots of bits and pieces that need to fit together for a smooth transition to the new year. For the 10.03 release, we went through a comprehensive set of year end processes to ensure that every part was working with the whole.
The people behind this effort were Craig Hewitt, Jacque Santana and Terri Hammond. This tireless team worked together, taking requisitions from every status into the new year, rolling them back, making mistakes (on purpose, but common enough that we need to test them) and more.
In this two-part blog, I walk you through our testing process. Today, I will go over how we decide what needs to be changed and what data would best suit the testing project. Tomorrow, I talk about the steps we follow to ensure the testing process is complete.
We accept change requests from all sources, all year – programmers, support, project managers, and customers. Starting in February, we create a list of change requests and prioritize them according to severity and timing. For example, we included some CRs in 10.02 because those changes were needed for the beginning of the process, put the bulk of the changes in 10.03 (released last week) and then saved a few stragglers for 10.04 because they were not needed until closing.
The importance of relevant data cannot be overstated! We got permission to use a recent backup of a test database from a LIVE customer. The data was scrambled at the customer’s site, ported to Escape and then installed on a separate server so we could control the date (especially important to year end processing).
The data included all of the appropriate document types: vendor requisitions, invoices, stores items, fixed assets, etc. This made the testing process more “real,” making certain that we don’t miss a thing.
Tomorrow read about how the data is tested now that it has been gathered.
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There is no doubt about it: quick starts are quick. Quick starts are the fastest way to launch an activity, fill in search parameters and start the search. Basically, you enter a two to three character equivalent for an activity, like VR for vendor requisitions, and then you enter search parameters and press Enter. Voila! Escape Online launches the activity, enters the search parameters, and “presses” Go for you. AND, if you are in Finance and your search only results in one record, Escape Online will also automatically open that record. |
Sounds too good to be true? Read on.
Let’s pretend I am a Fiscal user and I have just logged in and I want to open a particular requisition. Let’s go through the exact steps and see the difference in the number of keystrokes. Inquiring minds want to know: will quick starts really make a difference?
These are steps I use without quick starts.
Here are the steps I use with quick starts:
Now that’s incredible! I cut the number of steps by more than half, from seven steps to three!
Every activity has a quick start. You can see all of them by clicking the down arrow in the Quick Start field or pressing F1. To see which search fields you can use, simply enter the quick start activity equivalent and press F1.
Now you can use the list and all of the knowledge you have about entering dates, ranges, text, etc., into a search form. There are only a few rules:
Here are some quick start (QS) examples for vendor requisitions:
QS Entry |
Search Results |
vr fy 10 |
all reqs for fy 2010 |
vr fy 10; dept purch |
Same as above for Purch |
vr fy 10; dept purch; ? |
Same as above; No auto go |
vr date 1.. |
All reqs for this month |
vr buyer Sam; date 10/1..10.31 |
All reqs created in Oct assigned to Sam |
vr f1 |
Use favorite F1 |
There is a minor caveat to using quick starts. If you have DEFAULT favorites, they will always be used instead of quick start parameters. This means that you could type just "vr" as the quick start (instead of type in "vr f1") and the Vendor Requisitions would launch with your default favorite!
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Last week Terri and Jacque hosted a year end webinar that was attended by almost every single one of our customers. After this amazing feat, I asked them to tell me how it went and what their thoughts were about hosting this event, and what's next on the ticket. Listen for yourself!
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Yesterday, we held our annual Year End Processing webinar. It was a huge success, with almost every customer in attendance and hundreds of users riveted by the professional styling of Terri Hammond. I was able to attend the webinar and the best tip that I got out of it concerned the Process Default field in the Year End Closing activity. I know that when I was writing the Year End Reference and then again when I was creating the tutorial, I had to go through the entire year end process and it was this field that saved my poor fingers from too much typing or mousing. |
This field sets the default for the list. So if you are at the beginning of the process and selecting documents here and there, you would want to set this to No, but if you are at the end of the process and trying to as-fast-as-you-can wrap up every document, you would want to set this to Yes. In fact, for some document types, like stores requisitions, you may want to set this to Yes from the very beginning, and with one or two clicks of the mouse, set every stores requisition (no matter how many) to a status of Closed.
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Everybody knows that change is not easy, so converting to Escape Online from Escape Classic after 14 years seems like it might be just that much harder, but it appears that isn’t the case for the Fairfield-Suisun team. While there have been the usual conversion/training/new procedure bumps, I was thrilled to hear from the Fairfield-Suisun district implementation team that things were going very well: |
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As you know, we are working on a great many fixes and enhancements to the system, including Roadmap items. But don’t think the Performance Task Force isn’t still watching report statistics. We recently reviewed the stats for the first four months of the year and the results are pretty amazing.
For January through April of this year, these are the statistics for Escape Online users.
Number of reports run |
679,921 |
Total pages generated |
2,890,020 |
Number of individual users |
2,732 |
Number of individual reports |
447 |
Our analysis of these reports show that over 95% of the reports took less than 10 seconds as generated on the server. In fact, almost 100% of all reports completed in less than a minute, with only 0.0035 percent of reports (or 2,475 out of 679,921) taking over two minutes to run. Incredible!
Even with these great statistics, we plan on contining to improve report performance. We often do this in conjunction with report enhancements requested by customers. In our three releases this year, including the soon to be released version 10.3, there have been 98 Escape Change Requests completed for enhancements, fixes, and new reports. Here are a few report before/after timings from our QA group:
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Seconds |
|
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Report |
Pages |
Before |
After |
Improvement |
Fiscal10 |
2 |
11 |
8 |
138% |
Fiscal15 |
131 |
30 |
20 |
150% |
ReqPay99 |
1 |
6 |
2 |
300% |
Benefit99 |
1 |
76 |
4 |
1,900% |
Employee99b |
1,359 |
130 |
33 |
394% |
Leave01 |
1,611 |
70 |
24 |
292% |
Leave02 |
109 |
21 |
9 |
233% |
Leave04 |
94 |
24 |
11 |
218% |
Leave05 |
9 |
8 |
5 |
160% |
Retire03 |
17 |
13 |
8 |
163% |
Retire95 |
383 |
69 |
43 |
160% |
Two of these reports are worth special attention. Notice how the Employee99b was the only one that took over two minutes, and now it takes about a half of a minute, an almost 400% improvement. Other news of note, is the ReqPay99 report. This is the requisition snapshot. This report is run daily, maybe even hourly, or more. For a report that is run that much, two seconds is 300% better than six seconds, literally!
Of course, this isn't the end of the story. We will continue to improve performance and report back to you the results of our testing.
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Here is another video from the Sonoma County Office of Education's celebration of their successful implementation. This time, I am speaking to Dawn Hoff, Director of Internal Fiscal Services at the county office. She talks about the celebration, the implementation, and her favorite feature: budget reports. Listen for yourself!
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While the weather is starting to heat up, the fiscal year is starting to cool down. So, now is the time for you to get ahead of the year-end process by using the Ledger02 – Receivables and Liabilities Activities report. Sounds cool, huh? Well it is. This report is really easy to run with a ton of options (which I could explain in detail, acting like a technical writer, boring you to tears, but I won’t). Instead, I will let my officemate, Terri Hammond, be the expert and tell you the exact criteria you need to make this report an essential part of your year-end process. |
To get organized quickly and clear all prior year payables and receivables, Terri says you should run the report twice: once for AR and once for AP. Both times, though, you should enter 2009 (yes, she said 2009!) in the Closing Year field and NO in the Cleared Items field. Here is a screen capture so you can see what she means:
The report is very comprehensive, showing the effective date, reference number, account, JE number, object codes, setup, paid, cleared, remaining balance. Check out the PDF from the Report Sampler!
Take the cool advice of my officemate and start running this report (Finance-Reports-Ledger-Ledger02). That way the only thing that gets you hot under the collar this fiscal year end is the weather!
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Ramona and I had a great time at Sonoma's celebration of their successful implementation. I asked some of the users to tell us how they felt about the implementation and the software. In this video Debbie Wolfe of Oak Grove UESD talks about her training, how she can get information faster through Escape Online reports and her favorite feature, payroll encumbering. Listen for yourself!
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So far this year there has been a lot of great news at Escape Technology. We reported this week that the initial implementation of the Escape Online 5 system at Sonoma COE and 65 districts has been completed. What a milestone! Today I’m happy to announce another huge milestone: we have received the contract for our TENTH County Office of Education! Shasta County Superintendent of Schools and their districts have made the decision to switch to Escape Online 5. The implementation will commence this July. We have been working with Kelli Roberts and De’An Miller of Shasta COE for some time now, and appreciate the careful and thoughtful way they went about the decision process, with input from county office, as well as district staff. Let’s hear from De’An: |
“We are very excited to be moving forward on our conversion process and looking forward to having one common financial reporting system in our area. This will be very advantageous for us all to share resources and best practices as we all try to do more with less. Escape has developed a very sound, user friendly product. Their focus and experience with K-12 education in the California market was also important to our user community."
~ De'An Miller, CPA
Director - External Business Services
Shasta County Superintendent of Schools
One of the factors in their decision process was the option to use our Project XCOE hosted model, which will save them tens of thousands of dollars per year in IT costs.
We are thrilled to be adding a great new group of districts and a COE to the ever growing Escape family. A huge thank you to our current customers who generously shared their time and experiences with the Shasta staff.
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Having been a Project Manager and Director of Project Office for nearly 15 years, I can tell you that I haven’t been to many “Celebration of our Success” affairs. That’s one of many reasons why working at Escape has been such a treat. Together, with our customers, we are tackling very large implementations involving many hundreds of users and very complex software customizations, all the while creating success stories…what a great combination!
A celebration for a successful implementation!
The project began in May 2008 with Escape being selected as the winning vendor after a 2 year RFP review process. Dan Bienkowski’s team at Sonoma County Office of Education created a project plan where four groups of districts would first go live in Finance, then three groups would go live on HR/Payroll. These seven milestones ran from January 2009 to May 2010 and each phase was implemented on schedule! They have now just completed that last phase, with the final group of 65 districts going live on payroll. The Escape Online 5 system is now producing monthly payrolls for 19,000 employees across 65 organizations, amounting to nearly $4 million worth of payroll and benefits.
Bob Towery, Bambi Weinberg, Denise Calvert, Ramona Marshall, Tina Rodriguez, Rosalie Sulgit-Shay, Dan Bienkowksi, and Kimberly Williams
Last week Bob Towery and I had the opportunity to attend such an event at Sonoma COE, celebrating all of the hard work from the districts and SCOE staff, resulting in this successful implementation. During the celebration many users stopped Bob and myself to thank us and relate stories about how they are getting along with the system. Tomorrow and Thursday we will share a couple of great videos of two of these users. We are very happy for the nearly 700 users that are now part of the Escape family!
Dan’s team was very effective, and they are a model that I hope future customers will emulate. There was a lot of work done by Team Escape as well, which consisted of Jennifer Kenney our ‘data magician’, our developers, testers and especially the Project Manager, Carole Williams.
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