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A week and a half ago, I picked up my mom’s car from the mechanic. She wrote a check to reimburse me.  I stuck it in my purse and promptly forgot about it. Honestly, I don’t write checks, I don’t deposit them, I don’t even think my checks have my correct address. Seriously. The point is, in this electronic wonderland that we live in, there are a lot of people out there like me. And that is why school businesses need the ability to stale date checks. (FYI. A “stale” check is a check that has already been reported, but has not been cashed for some period of time, usually 6 months.)

Check it out.

I went into a LIVE (scrambled) database and looked at their list of stale dated checks for last year. For one organization, for one bank account, there were 40 stale dated checks. Now, a third of those checks were for less than $50, but it added up. Indeed. It added up to $11,076.18. That’s not chump change.  It is a book order, a district cell phone bill, or a district water bill.

Thankfully, Escape Online gives you two ways to stale date checks: one at a time or by creating a list.  Both are really easy to use. Let’s look at the option for stale dating checks using a list.

All you have to do is click GO.  Escape Online automatically searches for all checks that were printed earlier than the Stale Days Count* and have not been cleared. (Of course, there is a ton of search criteria for those of you that do not “clear” your checks. Using the search criteria, you can create a perfectly stale list!)

Once you get your list, you can see that the “action” defaults to Stale Date (in green in the screen shot), but just like all of Escape Online’s other lists that perform actions, you can defer the action using a lookup.

Once you have reviewed your list, you can click your mouse and stale date all of those little checks people forget about and save yourself some big money by crediting the stale date account and debiting cash.

The ability to stale date checks is essential to recapture those funds that are sitting out there unspent, and that is something no one wants to forget about.

*Escape Online lets you define the time lapse for determining if a check should be stale dated. The number of days is set in the Stale Days Count field in the Bank Account record. Note that the stale date account and cash object used for the offset are also defined in the Bank Account record.

I recently mentioned that I just moved. Well, that included selling my house. During the process, we were required to give our fingerprints. It made me wonder about the fingerprints. Of course, school employees are required to give their fingerprints and Escape Online helps you track this requirement in several ways. This week I am going to discuss the fields related to fingerprints in the Employee record, and next week I will cover the reporting requirements. As you can see, there are a lot of fields you can use to track fingerprints.

The first three fields are pretty basic. They let you define the type of fingerprint, the date of the fingerprint and any comment you need to make about the fingerprint. The type of fingerprint is defined at the time of implementation. This can be custom to each implementation. At a minimum, most of our customers differentiate between classified, certificated, and volunteers.

The DOJ and FBI Clearance fields are date fields, where you can enter the date the employee received clearance.

The last three (NLI fields) are for No Longer Interested Notification. Here is a snippet about NLI Notification from the State of California’s Attorney General Office:

California Penal Code section 11105.2(d) states, in part, that any agency which submits the fingerprints of applicants for employment or approval to the Department of Justice for the purpose of establishing a record of the applicant to receive notification of subsequent arrests, shall immediately notify the department when employment is terminated or the applicant is not hired.

It is the responsibility of hiring/approving authority to notify the Department of Justice, Bureau of Criminal Information and Analysis when employment has been terminated or when an applicant or volunteer is not actually retained to the position for which they applied.

Pretty serious stuff!

That’s why Escape Online has over a half-dozen fields dedicated to the tracking of your employees’ fingerprints. And, of course, all of these “fingerprint” fields can be exported and searched upon.

Next week we will talk about the reporting of these fields to the DOJ.

The 2013/14 budget for California provides many schools (K-12 and Community Colleges) with a little bit of breathing room. Of course, much of the new funding will go to smaller class sizes, additional teachers and programs, but many of our customers are also eyeing increasing current teacher salaries, including retroactive pay raises. Escape Online makes this easy. It automates the retro process for you, including retirement reporting.  And, it gives you two ways to perform the change: by salary schedule adjustments or by percentage.

Check it out.

As you can see, this is a retro for last year (7/1/12-6/30/13) based on the new salary schedule dated 7/1/13.

Escape Online automatically searches for pay cycles that have a pay period that falls within the effective date range, finding all employees with pay that matches the criteria you specified. For example, you can see that this retro was for employees in the CLAS (Classified) bargaining unit.

Then it puts those employees on a list on the second tab (Retro Pay Lines) of the form, where you can delete employees, if necessary. This retro was for 3,947 employees.

Once you have finished reviewing the list, you can run a snapshot (a report that is like a screen print, only better) and then if everything looks good, you can post the pay.

Escape Online reviews all existing Earnings records based on your selections, computes the proper retro amounts, and generates the retro adjustments.  It does not change previous payroll periods.  It adds the retro pay as an adjustment in a future payroll (either the employee’s primary pay cycle or the pay cycle/period specified on the form).

Then you are ready to process payroll as usual, where you will see the retro adjustments (in the Adjust Payroll activity) and have an opportunity to review, edit and add as needed.

School business produces thousands of journal entries every month. There are encumbrances, expenses, accruals, budget, cash, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And, district offices need to review those journal entries on a regular basis, so Escape Online has numerous ways to filter JEs, but my two favorites are type and source. The type of the JE tells you how it affects account balances. For example, some common types are cash receipt and encumbrance. As you can see from the screen capture of the JE Type lookup, Escape Online supports more than a dozen journal entry types.

For the sake of time and space, let’s focus on encumbrances.

The encumbrance journal entry type is used to encumber (or hold) amounts until the account amount is ready for expensing. Encumbrance journal entries are created by Escape Online automatically as part of requisition and payroll processing.

In other words, an encumbrance can be created by a vendor requisition, department requisition, stores requisition, payroll processing, and position control. And, you could import an encumbrance too for hourly employees.

That’s a lot of encumbrances, and that is where the source comes into play.

The source of the JE tells you what process created the encumbrance.

So if we look at a list of journal entries, the Source column allows us to readily see where the encumbrance originated: a stores requisition (SR), a vendor requisition (VR) or payroll. And that is helpful information!

Yes, Escape Online has over two dozen ways to search for and filter your list of journal entries, but this two-step approach (type and source) really gets to the essence of the JE.

People are complicated. That means that their employee record is complicated. You have over a dozen tabs (or topics) that relate to an individual employee: demographic information, pay cycle, retirement, dependents, benefits, leaves. I could go on and on. And that’s another thing about people: they like their jobs so they stay at them for years and years.
All of this complexity and longevity adds up to a lot of information. Too much to wade through on a daily basis. Now, don’t get me wrong, all of that information is important. It needs to be accessible and quickly, like right now. But I don’t need it to be on my screen every day.

That is why Escape Online supports archiving employee records, tab by tab. This gives you some powerful control. Obviously, you want to see all of an employee’s dependent records no matter how long ago they were created, but you absolutely do not want to see every single assignment they ever had since they started with the district 27 years ago.

The setup is easy. In the System – Setup – Organization Archive Config activity (or System Config for all orgs), all you have to do is say how many months (or years in the case of assignments) you want to see.

The result is elegant in its simplicity.

You see only the number of records that match your setup. (This screen capture is of the Seniority tab with archiving after 24 months.)

Want to see more? Of course, you do. Those records are important.

Simple, they are only a task away. Let me explain. On every tab that has archiving defined, there is a task called Load All History. Select the task and all of the records from the beginning of time for that tab appear.

Not sure if archiving is turned on? Again, easy to determine. Notice the tab and list count (the red arrows in the first screen shot).  When they are different you know you have hidden (or archived) records.  The top lets you know that there are 41 records for the employee, but the bottom lets you know that only 22 are shown on the list.

Like I said, simply elegant.

Note: Employee archiving only affects what you see on the screen. It does not affect reports or what is saved in the database.

Sometimes you just want to pay the bill. Escape Online supports this through direct payments. With direct payments, you don’t have to create an invoice.  You can just pay the bill.
Then, sometimes the bill comes as an online invoice with a bunch of line items that screams for an import. Escape Online supports this too! The Direct Payment Import is a very handy tool for quickly importing multiple payments. For example, we have one customer that needs to pay child care providers and they use direct payments.  Another uses it to pay vendors contracted by sites through their ASB accounts.

Check it out!

Here are the items from a CSV file.

Once I receive the file from a vendor (or enter the data in Excel myself), all I have to do is select the import file, specify whether my file has account numbers or alias and save/close.

Really, that is it.  Escape Online automatically verifies the import items.

Now, I can quickly review (and fix if need be) the items and with a single click of the button import those payments.

Escape Online is going to treat these like any other payment, so they are included in AP reports, 1099 processing, you name it.

Now that is some awesome efficiency!