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Friday Feature – Workflow Overview

Now, I have written a few Friday Features about workflows in Escape Online (see below) but I have never really explained how workflows are setup and how they work. Let’s start that process today, and spend the next six weeks covering such topics as document types, leveling, requiring all approvers to approve or not, notifications in general and notifying users specifically. In other words, let’s talk workflows!

First things first. We really need to define what the term workflow means in Escape Online. In a nutshell, workflows are used to define the progression of a document through its life cycle, defining approvals and notifications sent to users when certain events occur.

Oh, now that was tricky. I introduced two more terms: document and event. For Escape Online, a “document” is a record that is processed, generally with approvals along the way. This means that the term “document” refers to requisitions, payments, HRAs (human resource authorizations), journal entries and work orders. (Next week, we will explore document types in depth, like which types support workflow definitions and what can you do with them.)

An “event” is “anything that triggers a history record.” This means that submitting a document, changing a status, even changing a field in a document can be an event.

Let’s look at an example from one of our customers.

For their vendor requisitions, they have specified that certain things should happen when an event occurs. So, using our definition of event above, when a requisition (document type) is submitted (an event), then it will be electronically routed for approvals to a site user (principal), a program manager, the assistant supervisor and the purchasing agent.

Then, when the requisition is approved, Escape Online will assign a buyer for the items in the requisition and it will send a notification to the budget director.

If someone changes the requisition, resulting in a change order, then all of the people in the purchasing group get a notification.

If someone denies the requisition, then the person who originated the document (the requisitioner) will be notified and so will all of the people who gave their approval.

Finally, when the requisition is complete, the requisitioner gets a notification. The requisitioner also gets a notification if the requisition is cancelled.

Cool! It seems pretty clear that workflows can engage the intricacies of a document winding its way from Open to Complete.

Friday Feature – Ad hoc Messages for Invoices

Way back in 2011, I talked to you about boilerplate messages in purchase orders. What I didn’t mention was that you can use those same messages your organization defined in the Finance-Setup-Department-Messages activity for invoices as well. It works exactly the same, letting you insert standard messages before and after a line item on an invoice.

But, what if you want to be free to type whatever you want? Lo and behold, Escape Online gives you that option. Check it out.

Let’s look at a LIVE example. What you see here is the line item of an AR invoice. Escape Online gives you the opportunity to enter a message BEFORE or AFTER the line item. This gives you a lot of freedom to write a message up to 200 characters or more, depending on your invoice setup.

If we open the message and take a look, we can see a conference name and check number. Obviously, this message was ad hoc.

The way this works is if want to create an ad hoc message, you just start typing in the field, entering whatever you want.

Or, you can use the “standard” messages like we talked about in that previous post. In that case, you use the lookup to get a list of “standard” messages, selecting one of them for immediate use or editing it. Either way, once a message is entered (ad hoc or standard), you can use the lookup to open a Notepad Editor, where you can customize it even more!

Here is an example of how it looks on an invoice. Click the invoice to see the entire PDF.

Nice. Let freedom ring!

The Top 10 Favorite Features of Time and Attendance Systems

A 2011 research study showed that more than 60% of organizations were using automated time-keeping. In just the last few years, that number has gone up even more due to the Affordable Care Act, budget pressures and an emphasis on improving efficiency in operations.

So how are districts using their time and attendance systems?

We took a look at the data we had from the time and attendance management tools (formerly VeriTime) in Frontline Absence & Time, and picked a few of the most popular and useful features to share. Here are some of the favorites!

Top Features of Time and Attendance

1. Timesheet Approval

Want to improve the accuracy of your employee time-tracking? Of course you do!

To accomplish this goal, most districts with a time and attendance management system are using a timesheet review and approval process. Most districts, at the very least, require a manager to approve timesheets before they go to the payroll department. Your system should allow you to set this process up just the way you want, determining the levels of approval needed. Managers can review employee time and then approve or reject the time.

Some districts are also using email notifications to remind managers to approve time each pay period, and others are using digital authorization options to eliminate unnecessary paperwork.

2. Weekly Overtime Rule

Districts love the ability they gain with a time-tracking system to accurately track overtime worked — and accurately pay employees for that time.

In your time and attendance management system, you should be able to create specific rules for handling overtime pay for time worked over the schedule, such as if employees earn time and a half, double time, or comp time (or a combination of these).

3. Master Calendar

Everyone has to manage district-wide events — holidays, days off, calamities, delayed openings, early dismissals — that impact employee schedules and pay. That’s why a Master Calendar is a popular feature of time and attendance management systems.

With a district Master Calendar in your time-tracking software, you can create your own events and apply them to everyone or to specific groups of employees. These events automatically show up on the appropriate employees’ schedules. That means the district doesn’t need to enter the events for each individual employee, and the employees don’t need to submit an absence for that day. Based on the rules you set up, the system will automatically apply the correct payroll rules for the event.

A K-12 time and attendance system should also handle days you have to unexpectedly reschedule. For example, if your district runs out of school days due to snow (something we’ve seen a lot of this year), you can create a “rescheduled day” on the calendar — a makeup day that is outside employees’ normal schedule (like a Saturday or day tacked onto the end of the school year).

4. Custom Payroll Report

One of the best benefits of a time and attendance management system is sending the accurate data you’ve collected to your payroll system.

The majority of districts with time-tracking systems are using a payroll extract report to pull employee time for payroll — including employee names, job types, accounting codes, wage options, locations, absence reasons and more.

A flexible system will offer pre-built reports and let you create your own custom reports based on your needs. These custom reports allow you to sort, filter and group data to easily view overtime and exception pay and to verify data for payroll.

Extracting and importing this data saves hours of manual data entry into payroll and reduces the risk of mistakes.

5. Tracking Substitute Teachers

Did you know you can track your substitute teacher hours with a time and attendance system, too?

While an automated sub-calling system tracks the assignments that substitutes accept, a K-12 time and attendance system captures the actual time worked by each substitute. School districts are using this feature to verify the time substitutes worked and to report on hours worked for the Affordable Care Act (especially for substitutes working multiple jobs or locations).

6. Employee Kiosks

With a time and attendance system, districts can capture time in a number of ways, including electronic timesheets and web clocks. One of the most popular ways is through a central kiosk where employees can clock in and out.

With a flexible electronic time capture system, you can choose your own hardware and set up the kiosks just the way you want them. Many school districts are using an internet-enabled computer or tablet (like an iPad) to let employees enter in their ID and PIN to sign in and out. Others use scanning devices for employees to clock in/out with barcodes, magnetic stripes, proximity cards, fobs — or even barcodes on their smartphones (with a special scanner).

7. Clock-On Portal

Some districts also like the flexibility of letting employees clock in and out right from their own computers rather than at a kiosk.

With a time-tracking “Clock-On Portal,” you can give your employees a URL or create a special shortcut for them to easily clock in and out with their ID and PIN.

8. Work Schedules

We discovered that almost everyone is using work schedules to manage schedules assigned to groups of employees or positions.

With this feature, you can set the start and end times and break times for specific schedules. Those schedules could include the same hours every day or different hours on different days of the week. You can also decide whether or not to auto-deduct scheduled unpaid breaks so that employees don’t have to clock in and out for them.

9. People Locator

Want to know exactly who is where and when?

With a real-time “People Locator” report in your time and attendance system, you can view a snapshot of where your employees are on that day. You can quickly identify who is missing, who is out for a scheduled absence, and who has already clocked in or out. Districts consider this feature one of their favorites because of the visibility and accountability that it provides!

10. Shared Absence Data

Another important benefit of a time and attendance system is having it connected to your absence management system. For Frontline Absence & Time users, for example, the sharing of select data is already built into the solution.

Specifically, Frontline Absence & Time applies absence data directly to the employee’s work schedule. Based on the absence type and reason, this time is matched on the schedule to the correct payroll rules to determine if the time is paid or unpaid.

The shared data also streamlines comp time tracking and leave balances. If an absence should be paid out of comp time, Frontline Absence & Time will associate the comp time wage code with the leave reason and will update the employee’s leave balances in both systems.

Friday Feature – Unencumbering Payroll Encumbrances

Last week, we talked about payroll encumbrances. The flip side to encumbering is unencumbering. That happens when you have spent the money and now you don’t want that money “set aside” any longer. Some districts want the encumbrance journal entry to be cancelled, just get rid of it. Others want the encumbrance to be reversed so they have a detailed audit trail of what was encumbered and what was actually spent.

Escape Online gives you all the options you to automatically unencumber payroll encumbrances during payroll processing.

The Payroll Encumbrance flag in the Organization record lets you determine how the unencumbrance of the payroll encumbrance occurs. You can set it to Cancel (the JE is cancelled each pay period and the detail is deleted), Reverse (the JE is reversed each pay period and the detail is kept) or None (don’t encumber in the first place).

Cancel Versus Reverse

Why do we give you a choice? Because there are costs/benefits to each of these options.

The Cancel option is what most of our customers use. The reason they choose this option is that they want their payroll encumbered, but once the money is spent, they are not that interested in those encumbrances. They have the pay detail and that is all they care about. Simple.

The Reverse option was introduced for those customers that want to run Fiscal reports for previous periods and have those encumbrances included. They are like my husband and I with the new house budget: they keep a VERY close eye on the money going in and out of their system.

But they pay a small price for this kind of detail. As you can imagine, school districts employ a lot of people and each one of those persons would be a line item in a payroll JE. That’s a lot of line items, for the original encumbrance, the payroll JE, and the reversal encumbrance, for each and every month. In other words, the price for this option is paid in the size of the database and the journal entries, which can make searching for journal entries a little slower. The customers who have chosen this option think the slight delay is worth the type of detailed analysis they can perform on a regular basis.

No matter whether your budget is big or small, keeping an eye on the flow of money is always worth the price of admission.

Friday Feature – Payroll Encumbrances

My husband and I just bought a home so we are on a very tight budget, and that means we have to know what expenses are coming and set aside funds for those expenses. It is kind of like encumbering but on a very small scale.

Obviously, school districts have a lot more money and a lot more people involved in the spending of funds, especially when it comes to salaries and benefits. We have all heard that 80% to 90% of school funds are spent on salaries and benefits, so most districts encumber their salaries and benefits to keep everyone on the same page. Makes sense.

Escape Online supports multiple options for encumbering salaries. Once you turn on the Payroll Encumbrance flag (in the Org record), you can pick and choose what type of pay gets encumbered. Check it out.

Positional Pay – This is for all your salaried employees. As each month’s payroll is approved, Escape Online automatically creates the salary encumbrances for the rest of the year and reverses or cancels the previous salary encumbrance (more about this next week!).

Position Changes – This is for your mid-month changes. Every time a user makes a change to a position or a timecard, Escape Online creates the adjusting encumbrance journal entry for that change. When payroll is processed again, the adjusting encumbrance JEs are handled along with positional pay (above).

Timecard Assignments – This works the same as positional pay but is for timecard employees. Escape Online computes default units for timecard assignments for “future” payrolls, defaulting the number of paid days for the pay period. The pay compute creates “future” records as pay detail. Everything is encumbered and unencumbered automatically as each pay date is approved.

Hourly Employees – This is a special flag for customers that import payroll encumbrances. Obviously, the imported JE has the encumbrance already spelled out. The automated part is in the unencumbrance, just like positional pay.

As you can see, there are many ways to keep your pay encumbrances up to date. Next week, we will talk about what comes next: unencumbering and the options you have for that!

Friday Feature – What’s Up with the Release Notes

The release for 14.01 is almost here! And, of course, you want to know what is in it. Who doesn’t? Aren’t we all avid readers of the Release Notes?
Well, if you are like me and read every word of the Release Notes, we give you two ways for you to see Release Notes in Escape Online.

The first method is from the Help menu. The Help menu always has the Release Notes for the release you are currently using. (The Help menu also includes user guides that are customized to your role. The Help menu you see here is for an Admin user.)

But, what if you want to see Release Notes when the new version is only on your test system? (Eager anticipation! I like it!) Or, you want to see the release notes for a previous version.

Or, you want to see the release notes for this time last year, maybe trying to refresh your memory on all of the Year End changes. We have got you covered there too!

All Escape Online Release Notes for the last two years can be found in the Release Information activity in the Online Resources module.

This module is available to EVERY user!

Not only does the Release Information contain Release Notes, it also includes Known Issues, the ever popular Top 10 video and, last but not least, Terri Hammond’s always informative video recording of the Release Review.

What fabulous news for all you avid readers and video watchers!

Friday Feature – Automating Mid-Year Benefit Changes

Benefit costs are a huge part of employee costs. Some like the costs to be taken in the month that they occur, while others like the cost to be annualized across the fiscal year, including arrears periods. Employees like the annualization of their benefit costs because they can then budget their pay accordingly. Districts like it for the same reason. But what happens when an employee changes benefit providers mid-year? Do you have to recalculate everything?
The answer is YES, the costs must be recalculated! The answer also is Escape Online will do this for you automatically!

Escape Online allows you to relate benefit providers through benefit groups so that if an employee with annualized benefits changes providers during open enrollment (mid-year), then Escape Online can correctly calculate the benefit costs.

Amazing! This is how it works.

Let’s say we have an employee that is on a 10 month pay cycle but their medical costs are paid in equal amounts every month, including summer months. Now, let’s say that this employee changes from Blue cross to Kaiser in January and that means there is a change in their costs.

Blue Cross monthly amount = $100 thru December
Kaiser monthly amount = $110 starting January

If they had stayed on Blue Cross, they would need $200 in a “summer bucket” to pay for the summer month’s premiums (2*100=200). So, from September through December an extra $20 has been taken from their paycheck to cover those summer premiums, but now their premium has changed and so has the amount required for the summer bucket. Now they are going to need $220 in the summer bucket for new Kaiser premium (2*110=220).

Escape Online uses the Benefit Group relationship between Blue Cross and Kaiser to help calculate what the employee has in the current summer bucket (4*20=80) and what the new deduction needs to be to have the correct amount for new summer bucket premium (220-80/6=23.33).

You can create a Benefit Group, like Medical, to create a relationship between all of your medical providers, like Kaiser and Blue Shield. You can do the same for Vision and Dental. Specifically, you go to the Benefits Group activity, type in the name of the group, and then go to the Benefit Providers activity and assign that code to a provider. Like this.

Now, when an employee changes providers mid-year, Escape Online uses the Benefit Groups to determine how much was paid to each provider and calculate/recalculate rates for the rest of the year and for arrears periods in particular.

Now that’s a calculation you can count on.

NOTE: It is best to implement Benefit Groups at the beginning of a fiscal year, but you can implement mid-year. To implement mid-year, please contact Escape Customer Care.

The Top 10 Best-Kept Secrets of Time and Attendance Systems

Want to get in on a few secrets?

Most people know the basic premise of time and attendance software systems: electronically capturing employee time, clocking in and out, reporting on employee time.

But we wanted to go further and find those “hidden nuggets” — little-known features that can bring a lot of value to school districts! So we pulled some statistics from our time and attendance management tools (formerly VeriTime) in Frontline Absence & Time, to see how districts are using the tools available.

The following is our list of the Top 10 little-known features that offer the biggest opportunity for increasing accuracy and efficiency in your time-keeping.

1. Integration With Payroll

Many districts, even those using an electronic time and attendance system, are still wasting effort on manual processes, especially re-entering employee time into their payroll system.

The good news is that many time and attendance systems offer the ability to integrate with your payroll system. For example, the Report Writer tool in Frontline Absence & Time allows you to export your attendance data in a format you can easily import into payroll. Most companies offer a variety of custom options, as well, that help you automate even more of the process.

Also underused, the Payroll Review report and other payroll checkpoints help you verify your data and reduce mistakes in payroll.

2. Digital Authorization

Most districts with time and attendance systems are using a basic approval process to reduce paper and improve accountability. But many are not using additional digital options that would maximize these benefits.

Some systems allow districts to require digital supervisory approval and signature — meaning supervisors must electronically approve or even sign electronic timesheets before they can move to the payroll departments. A robust, K-12 focused system will also offer many options to control visibility and set multiple levels of approval.

Some systems also provide the option to require digital confirmation or signatures from employees. This feature improves accountability from employees as they are reporting their time.

3. One-Click Kiosk

Without this feature, employees who work multiple jobs would have to go through a several-step process every time they clock in and out for various jobs throughout the day.

With a “one-click kiosk mode,” time and attendance systems allow employees to clock in once at the start of the day and once at the end — and the system automatically fills in the day’s events based on the employee’s expected schedule. This feature is an especially big benefit for employees who consistently work two or more positions per day that are charged to different account codes.

4. Rounding Rules

Using paper methods to accurately capture and pay for time actually worked is extremely difficult — and one of the reasons why many districts turn to an electronic time and attendance system.

However, even with a time and attendance system, district could be overpaying employees by not using proper rounding rules. Our data found that most districts have a rule to round time to the nearest 15 minutes, but this can result in districts paying for time that was not actually worked. For example, an employee may clock in before he or she is supposed to, have some coffee, and then begin work — and get overpaid as a result.

By using more specific rules, districts can accurately pay only for time actually worked. You can use rounding rules to do things like:

— Set different rounding rules for clocking in early or late
— Set different rounding rules for shift start or shift end
— Round time to the employee’s scheduled time

5. Comp Time & Leave Balances

Tracking comp time and leave balances is another very important (but sometimes overlooked) feature of time and attendance systems for K-12.

Whenever an employee accrues comp time, districts need to track that time and if it is accrued or paid as overtime. Districts also need to track absences taken against comp time and the remaining balance.

All of this can be managed electronically with a good time and attendance system. In addition, a system that integrates with your absence management system provides additional value by matching employee absences in one system to comp time balances in the other.

6. Affordable Care Act Reporting

By now, you’ve probably heard that the Affordable Care Act will require most districts to track and report on employee hours. Any employees working an average of 30 or more hours a week (or 130+ hours a month) could be eligible for benefits.

Thankfully, some time and attendance systems now offer special reports built specifically for this need in K-12. For example, the report below from Frontline Absence & Time allows districts to view employees’ average hours worked over any period of time (you can choose your own 3-12 month look-back period). It will even merge (for the report) employees who are working multiple jobs, in order to view their cumulative hours across the district.

You can toggle between both the 30 hour/week limit and the 130/month limit, and the report will show you employees who are under, over or near the threshold. Additionally, you can search for a date range in the future and review if employees’ scheduled hours will push them over the threshold.

7. Wage Options

It’s not easy to keep track of everyone’s specific pay rates. But a good time and attendance system, built for district needs, will allow you to keep all these “ducks in a row.”

A wage options feature will allow you to assign an employee or a group of employees to a specific pay rate based on job type, pay range and seniority step. This rate could be hourly, monthly or a fixed stipend.

8. Kiosk IP Blocking

Did you know that some time and attendance systems allow you to actually block users from clocking in from the wrong location?

This lesser-known feature identifies the employee’s IP address (the location of their Internet connection) and can actually prevent employees from clocking in from home, for example, when they are supposed to be reporting to another location.

9. Clock Exceptions

Do you know when your employees are clocking in early, late or not at all?

Our data shows more districts could be using the Clock Exceptions report to view anything outside the norm of the scheduled hours, whether it’s early/late clock-ins or a missed time punch. Plus, you can sort and filter by date range, location, job type and more.

10. Email Notifications

It’s hard to remember all the tasks you need to address regarding time and attendance. What some administrators don’t know is that many time and attendance systems can send both administrators and employees helpful email notifications and reminders.

For example, administrators may want to be notified when timesheets are submitted, when they are not submitted, or when they need to be approved. Employees may want to be notified when their timesheets are past due, have been approved or have been rejected.

Friday Feature – Automating the Initiate Pay Request

Paying school employees is complex. There are many, many factors that go into the payroll calculation, such as pay cycles and calendars. If these records are changed, you need to recalculate or initiate pay.
Of course, Escape Online does this automatically for you at the employee level, ensuring that as you make changes to individual employees, pay is ALWAYS computed for them.

But, if you make changes at the system-level, Escape Online makes it easy to run system wide payroll computes after hours. The Initiate Payroll Requests activity allows you to specify a time and a recurring option.

See how I set it to 10pm and daily?

That’s it. Seriously! It is as simple as that. Set it once and then forget about it. It will run every night at 10pm — weekends included — ensuring your changes to the system-level pay setup records are disseminated throughout the employee base.

Now that is an excellent example of making the complex simple.

Friday Feature – Importing Substitutes and Absences Through Leave Transactions

In releases 13.01 and 13.03, we added support for files exported from SubFinder and Aesop, streamlining the creation of leave transactions and addon adjustments for substitutes.

While there is some advanced setup required,* once you are ready to go, the process is effortless. Check it out.

All you have to do is select the file from your desktop or network and then specify what type of file it is (Aesop, Standard or SubFinder).

When you Save/Close the batch, Escape Online imports the transactions and validates for errors, displaying an Errors tab with an error message for each line with an error.

Of course, your file will be error free so you can go directly to the Adjust Payroll activity, where Escape Online has created the payroll adjustments for the substitute.

But that’s not all!

Escape Online also adds the substitute information to the employee’s Leave tab of their Employment record.

Fabulous!

The SubFinder and Aesop enhancements certainly make the Leave Transaction import worth a second look!

* If you are interested in importing leave transactions from your SubFinder or Aesop system, you will need to manually create a matrix converting the SubFinder/Aesop codes to Escape Online Leave Type codes. Please contact Escape Customer Care for this one-time setup.

Friday Feature – Finding Payroll Errors

The Payroll Errors report shows all errors for a pay date, pay cycle, pay period or even a date range of pay days. The selection criteria is really simple but effective. We suggest you run this report for every pay day, as part of your process.

You can also select a category for errors. For example, you don’t want to see all of the labor, general or STRS errors, just the PERS errors.

Nice!

The user options aren’t the only fancy parts of this report. The report groups the errors by employee and does math for you too! Check it out.

What you see here is for a single employee on a variable pay cycle who, for some reason, did not make enough money during the pay period to cover all of the deductions in her setup.

Notice that the message begins “deduction of $xx.xx.” This is the amount of the deduction for the employee’s pay. But the message ends, “($-xx.xx).” This is the magic math I was talking about. The amount shown in the first line ($-241.89) is the sum of the missing amounts for all deductions listed:

79.49 + 62.40 + 100.00 = 241.89
(the overage amount for the last deduction on the list) (for the middle deduction) (for the first deduction on the list) Total

The report also shows the employee’s name, ID, SSN4, pay cycle and pay date. Now that is extremely useful!

Friday Feature – Sort Options for W2s and 1099s

For the last few weeks, we have been focusing on W2s and 1099s. Now we are in the final stretch with W2s and 1099s needing to be delivered to their respective recipients in three weeks from today.
So, in this last article of the series, we will take a look at the sort options so you can print those W2s and 1099s in the way that best suits your workflow.

Let’s start with W2s.

The most common method for printing W2s is zip code for bulk mailing. But some districts prefer to print by Site for delivering directly to the sites. Some small districts just print by name because they know who everyone is and it is easier to hand them out that way.

The same type of options are available for 1099s.

Again, the most common method is to print by zip code for bulk mailing, but, again, Escape Online provides two other options: address name and Vendor ID. (The address name would be the name in the address that is marked as 1099 in the Vendor record.)

Both of these Print Sort Option flags are available in the Organization record.

As you have read over the last 7 weeks, Escape Online is dedicated to making the 1099/W2 process as straightforward as possible.

If you are interested, you can re-read the series using these links:

1099 Vendor Fields

1099 Addresses

Basing 1099s on Object Codes

W2 Addresses

Payroll Setup Flags for W2s

Suppressing W2s for ACA

Happy W2 and 1099 processing!

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