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Last Friday we discussed how to manually track seniority for employees. While this is a great feature, Escape Online has another great way to track seniority that is automatic. This automated method calculates and creates seniority records every time you process payroll. It is easy to set up and easy to use.  Check it out. Seniority granting is controlled through the employee’s assignments and addons and the job category to which they are associated.

The automated method creates detailed transaction records of an employees’s seniority based on the hours and days of assignments and addons, adjusting for time off due to leave of absences.

These are the seniority records for a Child Care Assistant.

They have these records because their job category (Daycare) is setup to track seniority by hours.

Notice how there is a seniority record for each month, tracking the number of hours worked in that month.

If this employee had two assignments that both tracked seniority, you would see two records for each month, one for each assignment.

There are several ways to define seniority:

• The Single and Academic Department methods calculate the earliest date for paid assignments.

• The FTE method calculates the earliest date and highest FTE for paid assignments.

• The Hours method tracks both assignments and addons. For assignments, it compares the pay cycle period dates to the calendar paid days to calculate how many paid days this assignment had during the pay period and then multiplies that by the hours worked. For addons, it checks the employee’s pay detail to get the exact time worked.

No matter which method you select, though, Escape Online factors time worked, cancelled assignments, assignment changes, and backdated assignments.

Every time you process payroll, these records will be created and posted to the Employee record.

No manual intervention necessary!

The fabulous news this year is that some school districts are hiring again! So, for the next couple of posts, I am going to talk about the Employee record. Escape Online provides great flexibility in the Employee record. As you can imagine, with over 300 organizations tracking over 100,000 employees in Escape Online, we need to have a variety of ways to accommodate employee management tasks.

In particular, we have several ways to track seniority: automatic granting based on assignments and addons or manual tracking by employee, job class or FTE.

In this Friday Feature, we are going to discuss the manual method. Check it out.

The simplest way to manually track seniority is to use the Seniority Date field on the Employment tab of the Employee record. You can search and report on this date.

But what if you hired 10 people in one day?

No problem. You can use the Seniority Rank field to qualify each employee for that date.

But what if you want to differentiate between different classes (Teachers versus IT staff versus Administrative Staff versus Management)?

Again, no problem. If you wanted to manually track seniority by job class, then you would bypass the fields on the Employment tab and go straight to the Seniority tab of the Employee record. Check it out.

As you can see here, the Seniority tab is chock-full of options. I can base seniority on position, FTE, addon, job category/class or academic department.

Then, within those options, I can add a ranking. So if the district has around 500 high school teachers, I can rank the teachers from 1 to 500, using a random or matrix methodology, whatever is defined by the district.

Of course, the manner in which a district implements and uses seniority is unique to each district. It is up to your district standards which manual method you use.

On the other hand, if what I have described here sounds like too much manual data entry, have no fear!  Next week, we will be discussing the automated seniority feature of Escape Online.

Testing, testing, testing. Escape Online gives you the ability to generate PERS test files for this month, and next month, and the month after that. And, they let you create test files in both the XML format and the older “standard” format. Check it out!

All you have to do is select the Generate Test task in the PERS Processing activity and Escape Online is going to prompt you for a reporting period month and organization (optional if you are an all-org user).

As you know, PERS is currently supporting two file formats (XML and standard). So, Escape Online does too! See how Escape Online wrote two history records for my single request, one for each format.

That means you can use either file, or both, depending on your needs. Nice!

The old saying, “Measure twice. Cut once.” applies to more than just carpentry. It can apply to W2 processing too! As you probably know, the Social Security Administration provides employers with the AccuWage software to identify the most common format errors in wage submissions. And, as you also probably know, Escape Online includes a task that generates a test W2 file you can upload to AccuWage, ensuring that you have “measured twice” before handing out W2s to employees. Check it out!

Of course, the testing of your file is at the tail end of your processing.  Once you have verified all of your information is complete, you are ready to select the Generate Test task from the W2 Reporting activity.

It is that easy!

Now you can upload that file (copied from \escapeserver\ InputOutput\ PayrollTaxes\ TEST_EFW2-CalendarYear) to the AccuWage software.

And as the old saying generally works in real life, that second measurement is the same as the first, but now you have the peace of mind to make that final cut (of W2s!).

Shakespeare wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  But would Shakespeare be able to find that rose in a database if the rose changed its name? He would if he was using Escape Online!
Ok, English major humor aside, let’s seriously take a look at the copious ways you can search for employees by name.

In the Employee Management activity, there are four ways to search for an employee by name.

First, there is the employee Id. While at first glance this does not seem like a name field, in reality it is because it is driven by the employee lookup which allows you to enter a few characters of a last name and get a lookup of all employees with a last name beginning with those characters.

This handy-dandy little feature could save you a bunch of time by allowing you to make sure the people you want are in the lookup BEFORE you click GO to create the list.

Of course, last and first name are pretty obvious.  The true genius is in the Include Previous Name flag. It works in conjunction with the Last Name field.

So if we enter Hathaway in the Last Name field and set the Include Previous Name flag to YES, Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Shakespeare (previously Anne Hathaway) would appear on our list because Hathaway was entered in the comma-delimited list of previous last names in her employee record.

Huzzah!

I am a big fan of automation. It makes my job easier because I can be more productive with less effort. That is a win-win for everyone. I especially like automatic mathematical equations. I set them up all of the time in Excel.
That is why I am so excited about the new automatic account distribution for payments. Now, I am not just talking about AP payments to vendors,  I am also talking about payments to employees and direct payments (to a vendor or not!). Check it out.

Here is a requisition with 15 accounts. Yikes! Now, I am no fool.  I could do the math.  But why? With the balancing capability, all I have to do is enter a payment amount, and Escape Online automatically distributes the account amounts to match the payment amount.

That may sound awesome in and of itself, but that’s not all we did.  We also created specific distribution logic for the different payment types.

For employee and direct payments, the accounts are distributed based on the ratio of that account’s current amount to the total of all account amounts.

For AP payments, the distribution method is slightly different. First we subtract non-requisition accounts to determine the amount to distribute, then we use the liability accounts (if they exist), and finally the expense accounts.

Now, I know I said there was no reason why I wouldn’t want to use the auto-balancing, but we all know better.

Indeed, there are reasons why I might want to distribute those amounts myself.

If that is the case, all you have to do is set the Manual Account Distribution flag to YES, and you can enter account amounts the way that you think is best.

AMAZING!!

But that’s not all that is amazing.

This change was  voted by our customers as one of the top CRs for Finance for version 12.03, proving that with Escape Online everyone is a winner.