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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!

Is There a Substitute Teacher Shortage Crisis?

Across the country, districts nationwide have noticed an issue ~~this school year~~ in recent school years: a substitute teacher shortage.

Theories circulate about why fill rates and sub shortages are a bigger issue in recent years:

Districts limiting substitute hours ~~for~~ because of the Affordable Care Act
An improving economy and more competitive job market
Increased teacher absenteeism
Effects of the pandemic on applications to schools

But what’s the real reason?

We dug into data from Frontline Absence & Time and other sources. While we found that there is indeed a substitute teacher shortage, we looked into what’s really causing it — and what’s not — to find real answers and solutions for school districts.

What’s Not Causing the Substitute Teacher Shortage

1. Districts Limiting Substitute Hours because of the Affordable Care Act

Many districts are concerned about the Affordable Care Act — and the potential that substitute teachers, who’ve never previously qualified for benefits, could become eligible under the new law. Out of concern for the financial impact this could have, some districts have already taken the precaution to limit the number of hours substitutes can work. The most common is limiting substitutes to no more than 30 hours per week.

Not long after, the media, districts and teachers alike began to wonder if fill rates for teacher absences would take a hit from this precaution. Surprisingly, the data from Frontline Absence & Time shows that, on average, districts limiting substitute hours per week have identical fill rates to those not limiting hours.

Most likely, districts generally ~~in reality~~ have very few substitutes who routinely work more than 30 hours a week. Of course, the full impact of the law has yet to be seen and the number above is based on an average. Districts should monitor their own data carefully and make informed decisions about whether or not to limit hours for substitutes.

2. There Are Too Many “Inactive” Substitutes

Another theory is that districts with a higher percentage of inactive substitutes in their sub pool experience lower fill rates. It turns out that, at least for districts using a web-based sub-calling system, this is not a major factor.

Our data shows that even districts with a large percentage of inactive subs (those working less than 1 time per month) have similar fill rates to those with a lower percentage of inactive subs. Most likely, this result is because the vast majority of absences are filled by proactive substitutes accepting jobs online or the district assigning a specific sub.

~~Also,~~ Importantly, this result may be vastly different in a district manually calling substitutes, where the sub-caller is wasting time every time he or she contacts a substitute who doesn’t want to work.

Either way, best practices do still recommend taking the time at least annually to remove substitutes from the list who no longer intend to work. The effect on fill rates varies for each district, and a cleaner pool of active subs will allow you to accurately report on your sub to teacher ratio and other fill rate-related data.

What Is Contributing to a Substitute Teacher Shortage

1. Economic Improvement and a Lower Unemployment Rate

While a lower unemployment rate is good news for the nation, this improvement has had some impact on the number of substitutes available for school districts. As the economy improves, more potential substitutes — including new college graduates — are taking full-time teaching jobs or working in other fields.

Our data, as well as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, show that as the unemployment rate is steadily decreases, the substitute-to-teacher ratio also decreases.

Since 2011, the unemployment rate has gone down from 8.4% to the current 7.2%. Consequently, the sub-to-teacher ratio has decreased from 1 sub for every 3.22 teachers in 2011 to 1 sub for every 5.98 teachers so far this school year.

The substitute to teacher ratio has a direct impact on fill rates. Data shows that the average fill rates stay at 90% when districts have a 1:3 ratio, but fill rates slip to an 89% average when the sub to teacher ratio approaches 1:6.

2. Increased Teacher Absenteeism

While ~~also~~ not a new issue, districts should not overlook the effect of increased teacher absenteeism on the shortage of substitute teachers. Teacher absenteeism rates have definitely increased — often due to increased professional development at the district. If you’re looking ahead to next year’s professional development (PD) programming, consider planning it with teachers’ time out of the classroom in mind. Additionally, with the pandemic changing perceptions around staying home when feeling under-the-weather, teachers may be calling out at higher than pre-pandemic rates. In some cases, absenteeism is also up due to teachers using up days that they will otherwise lose.

What Your District Can Do About Substitute Teacher Shortage

1. Understand Your District’s Data

The #1 thing districts should do is collect and analyze their own data to drive decisions. Districts can be looking at information like:

Substitute pool: What is your districts ratio of total substitute to teachers?
Fill rates: What are your best and worst fill rates when you consider school location and skills required?
Teacher absenteeism: What are your highest absentee days per week? What role is PD playing?

Austin ISD is a perfect example — they used the real-time dashboard and reporting tool in Frontline Absence & Time to determine that they needed to double the size of their substitute pool. The online tools and resulting changes they made allowed them to hit 100% fill rates.

2. Improve the Substitute Hiring Process

For some districts, recruiting and hiring substitutes requires a huge amount of time and effort. One big potential for improvement is to integrate your absence and substitute management system with payroll.

Before they integrated their systems, the personnel at Garland ISD were spending three days every six weeks hand-keying information for new substitutes into payroll and their substitute management system. The Substitute Office Manager said substitutes often had to wait a week or more before they could start working as the office entered all their information.

Now that they integrated their systems, substitutes can begin work immediately after orientation — and the office saved hours of manual entry.

3. Make Substitute Teaching More Attractive

Many districts are increasing substitute pay to attract more substitutes and compete for the best substitutes. Some districts are increasing pay only for harder-to-fill positions, like special education. ~~If this is not an option, o~~Other districts are offering incentives, such as free or discounted tickets to school events or even discounts in partnership with local businesses.

Keep communication with substitutes frequent and positive. You can use tools like the Letter Writer in Frontline Absence & Time to communicate more frequently with all of your substitutes, whether it’s providing reminders and tips or asking for feedback.

4. Manage District-Wide Absenteeism

Last but not least, see what measure you can take to reduce the time teachers are out of the classroom, especially for professional development.

Careful management of the district calendar — and coordination with building-level administration — can help avoid excessive absenteeism. Holland Public Schools in Michigan, for example, started moving their teacher training to specific in-service days and after-school sessions to minimize teacher absences.

“It’s about looking at the calendar and time differently,” the superintendent said. “I would much rather have our teachers in front of them than a guest teacher.”

Try these approaches to curb the substitute teacher shortage in your district, and see how Frontline Absence & Time can help.

Friday Feature – Suppressing W2s for ACA

According to the new IRS regulations for Form W-2 Reporting of Employer-Sponsored Health Coverage, as of 2013, an employer is not required to issue a Form W2 solely to report the value of the health care coverage for retirees or other employees or former employees to whom the employer would not otherwise provide a Form W2.

This means you now have the option to suppress the printing of W2s for employees that only have data in Box 12, Code DD. Good news for the new year! Escape Online is always moving toward more “green” solutions, so we added a flag that automates the suppression of these W2s.

The new “Issue W2s for employees with only Box 12 Code DD” in the W2 Overrides section of the Organization record allows you to turn this feature on/off by organization. (There is a matching flag in the System record that defaults to Yes (print) for the system.)

If you set this flag to NO, Escape Online will NOT print those W2s, nor will it include them in the W2 file generated for delivery to Federal and State agencies.

Of course, you will still be able to see the W2s on your list in case you want to make adjustments and print the W2 anyway.

Fabulous!

You can save a lot of paper and processing by suppressing the printing of these W2s, and that makes for a very happy new year!

Friday Feature – Payroll Setup Flags for W2s

For the last Friday Feature of 2013, Escape Online gives you the gift of simplicity and flexibility. Escape Online presents to you the payroll setup flags for W2s. In the W2 loading process, the pay detail records for the entire year are reviewed with Contribution, Deduction and Addon records playing an important role in placing earnings on the W2s. To help you comply with the ever-changing IRS and State regulations, Escape Online provides W2 flags in all three: Contributions, Deductions and Addons. Let’s take a look.

First up is Addons. They have a W2 Box and a W2 Category flag. The W2 Box specifies in which box the earnings generated by this Addon are reported on the W2. If the W2 Box is 12 or 14, the IRS requires you to specify a category, thus the W2 Category field.

These fields can be changed at any time during the W2 process. Simply go into the record, change the flag and reload your W2s. It is that simple.

Next, we see the same fields in the Contribution and Deduction records with a bonus field, called W2 Pension. The W2 Box and W2 Category fields in the Contribution and Deduction records work exactly the same as the ones in the Addon record. Notice how the W2 Category field has been filled in because the W2 Box is 12.

Now the W2 Pension flag is truly a gift to behold because it saves you a ton of work. If the person has reportable amounts for PERS or STRS or the W2 Box is 12 and the W2 Category is D, E, F or H, you don’t have to do a darn thing! Escape Online automatically puts those amounts correctly into Box 12. You only have to concern yourself with alternative retirement plans.

Now that’s a gift that keeps on giving!

Friday Feature – Basing 1099s on Object Codes

The 1099 and W2 fun just never stops! Continuing our Friday Feature journey on 1099 processing, this week we focus on how Escape Online uses the object codes from the accounts used to pay vendors to determine if the dollar amount is 1099 worthy.
As most of you know, in the Vendor record, you can specify the 1099 box for all payments. But, what if you want to have amounts loaded automatically to the appropriate box? Well, Escape Online has got you covered.

If you want Escape Online to determine which box to put the 1099 amount in based on the object code of the account, set the 1099 flag to YES and leave the 1099 box field as N/A in the Vendor record.

Next, you tell Escape Online which object codes go to which 1099 boxes.

Notice how the highlighted object code of 5803 is coded for box 14 and the object code of 5809 is coded for box 7.

Now, when you load 1099s, Escape Online reads through vendor, check and journal entry data files for the calendar year you are reporting — searching for payments made to vendors based on the object codes you specified with a form 1099 box in the Account Components activity.

When it finds checks paid (or prepaid) with accounts that contain those object codes, Escape Online writes those amounts to the 1099 box.

Now let’s see how this works using a LIVE example.

In this example, you see a 1099 that has system-generated amounts in the Non-Employee Payments (box 7 at the top) and Attorney Fees (box 14 at the bottom). Obviously, this vendor (who is a lawyer that also conducts training seminars) could not have the 1099 box set in the Vendor record because there is more than one box that needs amounts.

This is a perfect case for the reading of object codes to determine the 1099 box!

When the lawyer was conducting seminars, those payment accounts had the 5809 object and they were summarized in the Non-Employee payments (box 7).

When the lawyer was dispensing legal advice, the accounts used for payment had the 5803 object and those amounts were summarized in the Attorney Fees (box 14).

Defining 1099 boxes by object codes really makes the 1099 process easy. All you have to do is click a button to load the 1099s and almost all of the legwork has been done for you!

Friday Feature – 1099 Vendor Fields

For those of us that prepare the forms, tax time is here. It is time to start reviewing your records, your lists and prepping for the printing of 1099s and W2s. Over the next month or so, I will be focusing on several features in both processes. Today, I am going to talk about the 1099 fields in the Vendor record.
The Vendor record has several 1099 fields. Of course, you have the tax ID fields and the address to where you will send the 1099, but Escape Online also includes some great fields that help you manage your 1099 process.

These fields can be changed at any time, so if you are itching to get going on your prep work, you can look at these fields right now!

Your first step would be to search for the vendors that you need to review. The search page has several fields that can help you limit your list to just the vendors you want to see. As you can see here, I am searching for only those vendors that have the 1099 flag set to YES and that have received a payment this year.

Cool! Now that we have a list to work, let’s take a look at what fields Escape Online has that help you track 1099 vendors.

Of course, every 1099 vendor has submitted a W9 to you. So, Escape Online has fields to say whether you have received it and when. (And, notice that those fields were also on the search!)

Notice that this vendor has the 1099 flag turned on, and the 1099 Form Box set to 7 – Nonemployee. This means that regardless of the accounts used in a requisition or payment, all monies paid to this vendor will appear in that box on the 1099 form. (If the box was left blank, Escape Online would read the account components of the selected payments to determine what amount is supposed to be reported in which box. But, we will talk more about that in a later Friday Feature.)

Also, let me remind you about the lookup for the 1099 Form Box. Sometimes those of us that have been using Escape Online for years forget how incredibly helpful those lookups can be.

I especially like how I can see the code (or box on the 1099 Form) and the English explanation.

Stay tuned for more on 1099 and W2 features after the break.

Have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving!

Friday Features – Email ACH

Last week I was talking about this wonderful electronic age and I mentioned that I never deal with checks. That is because I receive my paycheck electronically. Actually, it is an ACH that is emailed to me, letting me know that Escape Technology has transferred my pay into my bank account. Escape Online can do this too! We have several customers using this setup and they love it.

As you can read, this is an awesome feature. It is secure, safe, reliable, and saves you money. Let’s look at some of the setup.

In the Organization record, each organization in a COE implementation can define their own email information.

Of course, organizations can default to what is set up for the system, or they can get personal, like having a unique subject and an individualized intro for their emails.

Also, depending on how your system is setup, the file that goes to the bank can have several organizations combined or each delivered separately.

On the employee side, HR can individualize employee settings: turning on/off the email ACH, identifying which email address it is delivered to, and specifying what the PIN is.

This gives HR a ton of flexibility for those employees that keep forgetting the PIN option set up for the district.

I know I love getting my paycheck electronically and based on customer feedback so do district employees. And, that is wonderful!

NOTE: Obviously, it requires Escape Support, system managers and other technical/business support staff to ensure a secure and smooth rollout. If you want to implement the email ACH functionality, please contact Escape Customer Care.

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