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Friday Feature – Journal Entry Types and Sources

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.

Time and Attendance Quiz: What Is Your District Spending?

School’s back in full swing — and we’ve got a quick quiz for you!

Time and Attendance Quiz:

#1: What percent of your district budget is made up of labor costs?
#2: What’s the average percent of errors made in payroll?
#3: How much did the Department of Labor collect in FLSA backwages in 2023?
#4: How much do districts spend on paper timesheets?

Answers:

#1: Labor costs make up 70-85% of the average school district’s budget
#2: The average organization overpays their employees by 1.2%
#3: The DOL collected $156 million in back wages in 2023 due to FLSA violations
#4: Multiply your number of employees x number of pay periods x $0.03

Now that you know the answers, think about your school district. Are you overpaying employees due to payroll errors? Are you in compliance with FLSA? Are you wasting time, paper and money tracking, approving and calculating time?

With labor costs making up the majority of your district budget, knowing the answers to these questions — and ways to increase your savings — is crucial!

Here are a few of the ways districts are using automated time and attendance systems to cut labor costs!

Reduce Expensive Payroll Errors

To err is human, right? And according to the American Payroll Association, those errors in payroll translate into $120,000 worth of overpayment for every $10 million in wages. That adds up!

The good news? Electronic time-tracking systems eliminate much of the manual entry where mistakes can happen. From collecting and approving employee time, to calculating and processing payroll rules, electronic systems can eliminate up to 95% of payroll errors.

Owen Hurt, the Personnel Director at Sealy Independent School District, realized their previous time clock system, which was not Internet-based, allowed for significant human error.

“That was one of the biggest reasons for us to look for an Internet-based clocking in and out system,” Owen said.

He said they were concerned about the impact of these errors if they were to be audited by the Department of Labor, so they moved to an online system that makes it easier to share data with payroll and their absence tracking system.

Eliminate Unnecessary Overtime Costs

One of the toughest challenges in managing your labor force is preventing unnecessary overtime. Without the ability to view schedules and track hours in real-time, districts often find out after the fact that employees went into overtime.

Jeremy Thompson, Superintendent at Era Independent School District, said tracking overtime was especially challenging because of the large number of employees serving in multiple positions across the district. They now use a time and attendance system that allows managers to check electronic timesheets throughout the week and monitor potential overtime situations.

“We now have that data in real time and can make those decisions during the week instead of finding out after the fact that they worked 42 or 43 hours last week,” Jeremy said. “It’s not always possible to eliminate the overtime, but we at least can make that decision now ahead of time, instead of after the fact.”

Improve Compliance With Labor Laws

As any district that’s been audited can tell you, keeping in compliance with state and federal labor laws is nothing to take lightly. However, tracking all the unique and complex laws associated with K-12 can be a real challenge, especially without a tracking system and automated calculation of payroll rules.

In the past decade, 178 school systems from 36 states were audited for FLSA compliance. Of those school systems, 56% were found to be out of compliance, amassing 1,619 overall violations totaling $1.3 million in back wages and penalties.

School districts are making sure they’re not caught off-guard by using a K-12 system that can track and apply specific rules based on your bargaining units, school district rules and state and federal regulations. Many systems can also help districts attach funding codes to employee time in order to track it against federal funds, such as Title I.

Save Hours of Personnel Time

Time is money, right? And a lot of time sure is spent on labor management at the school district. Patti Polensky, Human Resources Director at Odyssey Academy in Texas, used to manually process the district’s paper timesheets.

“At the end of the month or the pay period, I would have to go find the teachers who forgot to complete their timesheets, so it took a lot of running around on my part,” Patti said. “Once I got the timesheets, I had to look at 70 pieces of paper, scanning each one, so you’re talking a half a day just flipping pages one at a time, making sure that I got the data right. And then I had to physically type that information, one employee at a time, into a spreadsheet and then send that spreadsheet to our payroll department, and they had to manually input it into our payroll system. It was crazy!”

That does sound crazy! That’s why Odyssey Academy moved to an electronic system, where employees now clock in right at their desks, supervisors approve the time with just a few clicks and send the data off to payroll.

Eliminate Unnecessary Paperwork

If you’re trying to be more “green” at your district — and save time and money — take a look at your time-tracking process! Once you factor in all those timesheets for each employee each pay period, the amount of paperwork is astounding. Plus, you have to process and store the paperwork, probably in a big filing cabinet, which doesn’t make for easy tracking or reporting of the data.

Karen Mowbray, the Business Officer at Odyssey Academy, said tracking time and attendance manually was very paper-intensive.

“Sometimes the timesheets just ended up non-existent, so you had to have the employee recreate them or find them,” Karen said. “Now it’s all compiled into the computer, which makes it much easier for us.”

These are just a few of the ways districts are taking control of their labor budget and finding ways to improve efficiency and save time, even in the midst of budget cuts.

Explore how Frontline Time & Attendance can support compliance

Friday Feature – Line Item Comments in Receipts

Last week I was working on a new tutorial for the Enter AR Receipts activity (scheduled for v13.03) and I came across a little tidbit about line item comments that I thought was pretty darn neat.
Here’s the scenario: you get a lot of parent donations. I mean a lot of them, and they are all personal checks. Most school districts use a two-step process to deposit the checks. First, they deposit the checks into a revolving or clearing fund. Second, when the checks clear, the district writes a check to deposit into the county office of education bank or treasurer.

Depending upon the school district’s procedures, the receipt for this revenue can be created in the software at either step. Some create the receipt in step 1, while others create the receipt in step 2. In either case, the line item comment is for you!

Check it out.

You can write a separate comment for each line item. (Of course, Escape Online defaults the comment from the receipt to the the line item comment where you can customize it or not. This is a nice feature that allows you to customize how you want the receipt and subsequent journal entry line items to look.)

Here we have an example of how you could customize a large donation receipt with the individual information about each check (or line item).

And, here is the really cool part. Those comments are going to transfer straight over to the line items of the journal entry.

Check it out.

As you can see in this Journal Entry snapshot, the line item comments we entered into the receipt have been transferred to the line items of the journal entry, giving us the ability to search for individual donations and find them in the larger receipt deposit.

Now that is a nice and tidy way to manage your small item revenue!

Friday Feature – Archiving Employee Information

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.

Friday Feature – Direct Payment Import

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!

Friday Feature – Searching for Employee Notes

Last week, I talked about hiring new employees. On a related note (pun intended), I would like to talk specifically about employee notes.
Admittedly, I wrote about Using Notes for Productivity before, but employee notes are really in a category of their own. (Now, I am getting really punny!)

Employee category is just one of the unique features of Employee Notes. In fact, employee notes are the only Escape Online notes that support categories. That’s because there are so many distinctly different types of information that HR personnel want to keep in the employee record — health and welfare, termination, general, physical, leaves, and payroll, just to name a few.

The other unique feature of employee notes is that those categories can be used to control access to particular information. For example, notes concerning health and welfare are very often restricted to a few users.

But wait there’s more!

Another great feature of employee notes, and the topic of this Friday Feature, is that you can search by them.

For example, I have access to the GENERAL category and I use that category to track AmeriCorps volunteers.

I can search for all employees with a Note Category of GENERAL and the Note Contains “AmeriCorps.”

The “note contains” means that AmeriCorps can appear ANYWHERE in the note.

So, when I press GO, I will get a list of employees with the word AmeriCorps in a note with a GENERAL category (and that match all of the other criteria I entered).

Fabulous!

NOTE: Employee categories are defined in the HR/Payroll-Setup-Employment Codes-Employee Categories activity.

5 Things Your Teachers Want You To Know

Can you believe it’s almost back to school time? As administrators work feverishly to get ready for another year, teachers are also gearing up for school — and in a recent survey, gave us some insight into challenges they expect in the 2013-2014 school year.

Do you know what challenges your teachers are facing — and how you can help? We asked nearly 500 teachers what they find most challenging about lesson planning and material preparation for the classroom, and here’s what we found out.

Not Enough Time

Not surprising, 55% of respondents said they struggle with time to prepare lessons and materials for their classrooms.

Overwhelmingly, teachers said they do not have enough time during the day to prepare for lessons and often work in the evening and on weekends to get ready.

Stumbling blocks to lesson planning during the day included:
• Meetings
• Paperwork
• Grading
• Parent Communication
• Data Assessment
• Student Behavioral Issues
• Interruptions

As one teacher put it, “With more demands from state and district assessments and increased testing (hence grading), there never seems to be enough time to focus on planning and preparation.”

Specifically, teachers said they would like more time for differentiating lessons for different learning levels, collaborating with their team, researching and finding relevant materials.

Questions to Think About:

Are any teachers getting “burnt out” with lack of adequate planning time?
Do our teachers have uninterrupted planning periods during the school day?
Are unnecessary meetings pulling our teachers from their lesson planning?
Are we giving teachers flexibility to develop plans that meet the needs of students?

Varied Student Needs

Districts are increasingly focusing on meeting the needs of students at many different levels, and accordingly, 33% of teachers mentioned addressing varied student needs as one of their greatest challenges.

This area is challenging due to the extra preparation time required and also the lack of resources addressing each learning level.

Here’s how one teacher explained it: “I teach classes that are learning the same material, but are at different ability levels and filled with students with various learning styles. Trying to create lessons that meet the standards while meeting each student where they are can be difficult, but doable!”

Questions to Think About:

Are our teachers trained to address students at various learning levels?
Do our teachers have resources to help them differentiate lessons?
Do our classroom sizes allow teachers to effectively instruct all students?

Lack of Resources

A third of respondents also cited lack of resources as one of the most challenging aspects of preparing lessons.

One teacher explained she has trouble “finding materials that help my students understand the concept being taught,” adding that her students are usually learning below grade level.

The most common frustrations revealed that relevant materials were unavailable, too hard to find or too expensive. Many teachers said they also struggle to find resources that are aligned to district and state standards.

Questions to Think About:

Are we providing our teachers with adequate teaching materials?
Are our current resources aligned to mandated standards?
Can we curate or recommend resources to aid our teachers in lesson preparation?

Aligning With Standards

Out of the teachers surveyed, 21% struggle to address the many requirements of the Common Core, as well as district and state standards.

Problems included:

Feeling the need to “teach to the test”
Textbooks, assessments and curriculum don’t align
Losing time on too many assessments
Lack of flexibility in lesson planning

One frustrated teacher explained it this way: “Lesson planning in my district is not functional for the teacher. Rather, it is designed for principals to “keep tabs” on what teachers are doing in the classroom. It is more time consuming than it should be to write a district lesson than if I were to write one that would really help me as the classroom teacher.”

Questions to Think About:

Are our textbooks and assessments consistent with our curriculum framework?
Do we help teachers see the value in assessments and support them in this process?
Do our principals support teachers in creating relevant plans that align to standards?

Technology

Technology: we love it and we hate it. Most of the time, teachers love it — but 17% said they struggle with technology in their classrooms.

For some, technology is still too unavailable or unreliable.

“Some rooms have great technology set ups and some don’t,” one teacher said. “It makes it difficult to teach the same lesson to all my students fairly.”

Others don’t feel properly trained on new technologies.

“I feel overwhelmed by the inundation of technology and my ability to implement it effectively,” one teacher admitted.

Questions to Think About:

How can we prioritize updated technology for our classrooms?
Are our teachers adequately trained on new technologies?
How can we encourage teachers to use technology for lesson creation?

What other challenges do teachers face – and how is your district addressing them?

Friday Feature – Employee Requirements

I am happy to report that many of our customers are hiring new employees. Yay! And, I am happy to report that Escape Online helps you enter all of the data a new employee requires.

First, if you are in a COE-wide implementation, you get to piggyback on the data already entered by other organizations in your County Office of Education. (Often times, even though an employee is new to your district, they have worked in another district within the COE.) Second, even if you are a district-only implementation user, we have lots of helpful features.

Let’s start with the COE-wide user. You have the benefit of others already having entered credential and retirement information. So, when you create a new employee record for a teacher, if that teacher already has credentials in the system, Escape Online is going to “hook” into that and display those credentials automatically in the record you just created.

But that’s not all.

If the teacher has an employee record in another district, Escape Online is going to “hook” into that teacher’s retirement record and download a ton of fields for you, like (take a deep breath because this is quite the list!) first name, middle name, last name, address, home phone, cell phone, birth date, gender, emergency contact name, contact phone number, contact phone extension, contact relationship, emergency doctor, doctor phone number, doctor phone extension, and PERS member Id.

It is all based off the individual’s social security number.

When you enter the SSN for the first time, Escape Online searches the database to see if any Person (retirement) records have that SSN, and if there is one, Escape Online loads the info.

(BTW, you can tell this is the first time I entered the SSN because (1) you can see the whole thing, and (2) the header of the record doesn’t have a status or type or pay cycle or anything.)

But what about you district-only implementation users? Well, we have some helpful features for you too!

We know school business, so we know what information simply must be input. We make those required fields.

Hiring new employees is always joyous. It’s great that Escape Online can help make the data entry pleasant too!

Friday Feature – Following the Blog

As of this week, every Friday Feature ever written is now on our blog. We took the time to put the “archive” Friday Features on the blog so you can search through all of the Friday Features in one fell swoop.
Now if you want to read the Friday Feature on Saving My Reports, written in August of 2009, you can!

Our blog is a great resource and we are always working (writing) hard to post more content that matters to you. We have more employees blogging too. You can get technical updates from John and Mike, and learn more about testing from Robin and Stephanie.

I am so excited about the growth and direction of our blog. I want everyone to benefit from it. So, I am urging you to follow our blog. It is really easy.

At the bottom of your browser should be a “follow” button. Click on it and enter your email address.

It is that simple.

Then, every time we post a blog — be it about a feature, a release, a training synopsis, a change to our installation process — you will be notified through email with a quick summary and a link if you want to read the entire article.

Sweet!

Friday Feature – An Abundance of Attachments

Almost every record in Escape Online now supports attachments. And, almost every type of file can be attached. Here is a comprehensive list of the types of files you can attach to a record:

Adobe PDF
Microsoft Word (rtf, doc, docx)
Microsoft Excel (xls, csv, xlsx)
Report/Documents (eodf, rpt, xps)
Text files (txt)
Graphic files (jpg, gif, png, bmp)
Video files (swf, flv, mpeg, mpg, mpe)
Audio files (mp3, ra)
Emails (eml)
HTML files (htm, html, css)
Script/App files (xap, xbap, js, vbs)
XML files (xml, xaml)
Help files (chm)

Now that’s an ABUNDANCE of file types.

But, that’s not all.

Attachments are smart, too.

Attachments can be viewed by anyone (except for employee attachments, which have permissions), but only edited by the user who attached them. They can be deleted and updated. They can be generated automatically (like change notices for vendor requisitions or using the new Mass Attachment feature for employees).

Our customers love the ability to attach files. Every single one of our customers uses this feature, no exception!

And, just like the Superintendent at Placer COE, our customers keep giving us great ideas for how to improve them. So, we are currently looking into adding the ability to print and email attachments, and to provide a “quick-link-like” access for easy viewing from a list.

Now that’s an abundance of smart thinking.

Friday Features – The Beauty of Snapshots

July is a beautiful month. The sun is shining and life is green. And Escape Online snapshots keep our world shiny and green. In case you are new to Escape Online (welcome!), a snapshot is a “quick” report of an individual record (e.g., a vendor requisition) that is generated by clicking the Snapshot button or selecting a task within an activity. Snapshots are shown immediately, a great time saver. They can also be saved to your workstation as a PDF or emailed.

What makes them so beautiful is the depth of information you can get with a click of a button. Check it out.

Here you have a list of requisitions that are awaiting your approval.

There’s some great information on the list but you want to know more, like who has already approved these requisitions and what accounts were used.

With a click of the Snapshot button, you get a choice of running a report for the whole list (All Requisitions) or just the one you have highlighted.

Snapshots can also be run from a task. For example, in the Year End Closing activity, if you run the Year End Processing Report snapshot from the Task menu, you get a big picture of all the items on your list, including account information for each requisition, invoice, etc.

Sounds great, but there’s more.

Snapshots can be smart, too.

There is logic built into the Year End Processing Report snapshot. So, if you run the report and there is nothing on it — meaning you have completed your review of all finance documents — then the snapshot unlocks the the Close Fiscal Year task, letting you move forward in your year-end processing activity.

So, snapshots are quick and smart and green, giving you lots of information fast without wasting time or paper.

Now, that’s a beautiful thing!

Friday Feature – More on Crossing Fiscal Years

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Friday Feature about how the journal entry list crosses fiscal years. Today, I wanted to take that a step further and talk about how Escape Online gives users the super-power ability to see across multiple fiscal years in almost all areas: searches, lists, and reports. In particular, I want to talk about the Journal Entry Detail (Ledger01) report.

This report is designed to print detailed information about journal entries. The account number, comment, line sequence number, debit and credit amounts print for all journal entries selected.

It includes totals for debits and credits for each journal entry and a grand total.

Here is a screen shot of the report parameters. Notice how I “cleared” the Fiscal Year field and entered a requisition number.

Obviously, I could have entered more requisition numbers or filtered by accounts or any one of the myriad of other options, but let’s just take a look at one requisition so we can see the incredible usefulness of the report.

And, this is the report that our criteria produces. (Click on the graphic to open a PDF and see the whole report.)

The report shows the journal entries for a requisition that was created for a summer school program. The first page shows the encumbrances and the “year end closing” journal entry that brings the requisition into the new fiscal year. The second page continues showing the year-end journal entries and, finally, the expense JE.

The ability to see across fiscal years is almost as cool as a time machine, allowing you to see the past, present and future all at once.

Now that’s an awesome super power!

Explore by ROLE

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MEET FRONTLINE

Time and Attendance Quiz:

Answers:

Reduce Expensive Payroll Errors

Eliminate Unnecessary Overtime Costs

Improve Compliance With Labor Laws

Save Hours of Personnel Time

Eliminate Unnecessary Paperwork

Not Enough Time

Questions to Think About:

Varied Student Needs

Questions to Think About:

Lack of Resources

Questions to Think About:

Aligning With Standards

Questions to Think About:

Technology

Questions to Think About:

What other challenges do teachers face – and how is your district addressing them?