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Staying balanced is an important part of life, especially when you are talking about budgeting. While it might seem like a good idea to spend all of your money on books and chocolate, in the long run you need to be more judicious in your spending habits. You need to keep an eye on your budget to make sure you have enough money for all of the different items you need to purchase.
And, this is especially true for schools. In fact, the State of California requires that your money be balanced by fund, resource and project year. Considering the constant movement of money and the fast-paced process for year end, you need an automated way to ensure that your starting balances are indeed in balance.

Escape Online has got you covered.  Check it out.

When you post your starting balances using the Post Starting Balance Journal Entries in the Fiscal Year Status activity, Escape Online gives notification if there are any unbalanced entries.

Specifically, if any fund/resource/project year combination in a starting balance journal entry is not balanced, a history message (like you see here) is written, detailing which combinations were out of balance. Each combination that is out of balance will be written on a separate line, making it easier for you to wrap up your year-end and start your new year.

Now that’s a nice balancing act.

This week marks a special occasion for me: I showed Terri something new. Amazing!  We were talking about searching for ranges and I mentioned that you can search for an open-ended range. Literally, everything from this day forward, or, conversely, everything from this day back.

For example, say you want to find all requisitions on or after March 1 of this year. All you have to enter in the date field on the search form is “3/1..” What a time saver! Check it out.

As you can see, I didn’t have to enter an “end” date, nor did I have to enter a year. Escape Online is so smart, it knew I meant this year and the dot-dot (..) told it that I meant until right now.

If I pressed GO, I would get a list of every requisition that has a requisition date of March 1 until TODAY.

And the really cool thing about the dot-dot trick is that it can go backwards too.

Very tricky!

For example, say you want to find all employees hired on or before March 1 of this year. All you have to do is put the dot-dot first. Like you see here.

If I pressed GO, I would get a list of every employee that was hired on March 1 or before.

While it is always exciting to show something new to a colleague, it is even more exciting to have such great keyboard shortcuts!

We have this really slick feature in Leave Transactions that automates adding substitutes to the Adjust Payroll activity. From the Leave Transactions activity, you can specify a substitute on the exact same line as the employee taking the leave. You can do this when you are entering the leave (or if you import your leave transactions, you can include them in the file).

Check it out!

When you are entering (or importing) the leaves, you can also enter the employee Id, addon and account for the substitute.

The addon data entry works just how you would expect from Escape Online. You can enter an addon rate (if it is not locked) and you can enter a specific account or you can default to the addon’s account or you can let the account default to the employee-on-leave position accounts.

But wait there’s more!

You have the option to put in ONE of the employee’s positions for the sub or you can leave the employee’s position Id blank and assign the substitute to ALL of the employee’s positions.

And here comes the automation! When you post the leave transaction batch, Escape Online automatically creates the payroll adjustments for the substitute, AND adds the substitute information to the employee’s Leave tab of their Employment record.

See here in the employee-on-leave record, there is the substitute employee Id kept with the leave information.

Now that is some serious automation.

Apparently, I love lookups. I have written seven, count ’em, seven Friday Features about them. But they are so amazing that I still have more to say about lookups.
What I want to talk about now is how they are more than just codes and descriptions. We have several “specialized” lookups that provide you with some great information, making them all the more useful.

There are two in particular that I want to focus on:  the From Account in the Position Account Retro activity and the Vendor Address lookup in the Vendor Requisition activity.

Let’s start with the From Account. When you are creating a retro, you need to specify which accounts to retro.  Seems intuitive, but there can be multiple accounts for a single position.  How’s a gal to choose?

Easy, use the lookup!  (You saw that coming, didn’t you?)

See how it shows all of the position accounts, each with a percentage and begin/end date.  Now, you can be sure that the account you are selecting is the one that you want.

The same is true for vendor addresses.  For example, Office Depot can have many, many addresses. Let’s check that out!

This lookup gives you a ton of information, everything from the address name to the remit flag.

You get to this lookup from the Vendor Address field (as opposed to the “regular” Vendor Id field).  It is super handy when you have a vendor that has an address name that doesn’t alphabetically match the vendor name, like the one in the screen shot that is marked with an arrow. See how the Address Name is “Tech Depot” instead of Office Depot.

It may seem like a simple luxury, but it is the simplicity of lookups that make me love them so much and keep writing about them.

Believe you me, nothing lasts forever. At my house, we are in a constant state of repair: a sink clogs, a light bulb needs to be changed, the kids play ball in the house and put a dent in the wall. School districts are the same, but on a much larger scale. They need a way to manage all of these small (and large) jobs.
Work orders in Escape Online are a great tool for this type of management. The part of work orders I like best is the ability to manage the work line-item by line-item.

Say there was a terrible storm and a tree fell into the girls’ restroom. The work order for this is going to require many line items: install a new sink, fix the hole in the wall, install a new window, fix the last stall on the left. Obviously, not all of this is going to happen in one day, but it is all interrelated and should be tracked as a group, but allowed to be tracked individually too.

Check it out! You can track each action required to repair the storm damage. Each line item can have its own purchase order, material cost, labor cost (including overtime and doubletime), asset tag, account, and comment.

All of this gives you the ability to complete line items individually; like you see in the screen shot, the plumber is done with the sink, but the carpenter and repair work still need to be done, in fact haven’t even started.

Of course, not all work orders are this complicated. For those simpler projects, you can complete all line items with a simple mouse-click (selecting the Complete task).

Now that works for me!

There are many reasons why you would want to know the hourly, daily, annual or pay period rate for an employee. Say you have set up an addon that has the Rate 1 set to hourly, how do you quickly find out what an employee’s hourly rate is? In the employee’s assignment record, Escape Online automatically calculates the information for you.  Check it out!

No math required! This makes discovering the hourly, daily, pay period and annual rate for the assignment super easy.

Now, I must admit that these numbers are not factored by FTE, but I prefer that.  I don’t want any extra fancy math that I have to back out of. I want the whole number so that if my addon IS NOT factored by FTE, I get the correct number for checking my setup. And, if my addon IS factored by FTE, well then I only have one more part to perform for the equation; Escape Online has still given me a great starting place.

So you’re saying to yourself, this is fabulous, but I want to see more than one assignment at a time.  Terrific  idea!  And, I have a terrific response.

Because this information is in the Assignment record, you can export the detail of those assignments from your list of employees.  So if I want to see the hourly rate for all of my teachers at a particular high school, I could create a list of those employees and then export those assignments to Microsoft Excel.

From there, it is just a few key strokes to filter my list to only current positions.

Now that’s first rate!

Obviously, taxes must be paid, so when you are ready to make a payment, Escape Online automatically calculates the state sales tax, the county sales tax and the local sales tax. But knowing how much needs to be paid is not enough. You also need to actually pay the amount.
So what do you do when a vendor does not collect sales tax, but you still need to pay it?

Escape Online makes this a non-taxing effort with the Unpaid Tax Amount. (Love those puns!)

When you are entering a payment that has unpaid sales tax on it, all you need to do is put that amount in the Unpaid Tax Amount field. When the payment is processed, Escape Online automatically credits the amount in that field to the sales tax account(s).

Seriously, everything happens behind the scenes in the journal entries.

You don’t have to figure out the taxes, and you don’t have to figure out the tax account, AND you don’t have to enter the account in the payment. Amazing!

But that’s not all!  Escape Online isn’t finished making this super simple.

All of this figuring out of accounts is directed by your simple setup of three fields in the Ledger tab of the Organization record.

Escape Online uses these object codes to determine the account: the fund from the expense account, the object code listed here and resource 0000. Escape Online then charges the full amount to the expense account from the req/payment.

Obviously, the check to the vendor is cut for the INVOICED amount which does not include the Sales Tax. For the sales tax, Escape Online credits the sales tax account (based on the codes entered above) with the sales tax amount.

Finally, at the end of the year, your only task is to cut a check to the State Board of Equalization for all the sales tax collected out of these fund-object-0000 (resource) accounts.

Now that is not taxing at all.

As we all know, SACS accounts can sometimes have a very short life span.  In fact, I looked up a random district and found some interesting statistics, like they had 6,674 accounts for the fiscal year 2010/11 and 3,962 of them were expired on various days throughout the year.  That’s a lot of churn.
And, as we all know, requisitions can sometimes take awhile to move through the approval process, onto purchasing and receiving, and finally to AP for payment.   Using this same random district as an example, they completed 2,475 requisitions in 2010/11.  A quick review shows that the majority of them took months to complete.  Again, that’s a lot of churn.

How is an AP user supposed to know if the numerous accounts entered three months ago (or more!) are not expired without having to go into each and every one of the dozen (or more!) records on their list?

Escape Online has got you covered! (You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?)

When a user creates a payment, submits a payment or approves a payment, you get a warning if one or more of the accounts associated with the payment have been expired.

Here is an example of the warning when I tried to submit a payment with an expired account.

Notice that I have the option of continuing.  This is just a warning and not a hard stop.

This gives the user the  necessary knowledge about the account, but also the flexibility to manage the account in accordance with their district standards.

Now the user can either go and unexpire the account (or ask someone else to do it if they don’t have rights) if it was expired in error, or they can push the payment through so the account is charged, this one, last time.  No matter what they do, Escape Online posts a history record to the payment, indicating that the payment was processed even though there were expired accounts.

Knowledge AND flexibility: now there’s a winning combination that never expires.

Since time began, there have been disputes about who “owns” vendor records. Is it purchasing? Is it accounts payable? Is it payroll?  School business is complicated and unique. Each customer has their own strategy for the maintenance of these important records. As we all know, user-based permissions answered the AP versus Purchasing question, but the payroll access was still a sticking point.  Until now that is.

The new Payroll Vendors activity is a sure fire way to make everybody happy!

The way it works is Finance and HR/Payroll work together to determine which vendors are “payroll” vendors. Once they have identified those vendors, someone goes into each of the records and enters an agreed upon “payroll vendor category.”

Really, it is that easy!

Now you can “split up” the management of vendor records, with vendors associated with Payroll being managed separately from those associated with Finance.

You next step is to “turn on” payroll vendors by changing the Payroll Vendor Category flag in the Organization record.

Escape Online will only display vendors with the designated payroll vendor category in the Payroll Vendors activity exclusively. All other vendors will display in the Finance Vendors activity.

Of course, you can still create requisitions and payments for payroll vendors from the Finance module, but the management of the vendor record itself is now controlled by payroll users with user-based permissions.

Another bonus of this new functionality is that it will limit the lookup windows in contributions, deductions, benefit providers, employee payroll setup and adjust payroll to only payroll vendors.

NOTE ON INSTALLING: There is a caveat for setting up this new feature in county-wide implementations: all orgs must agree to a single name for the payroll vendor category. Once the name has been decided, that name can be entered into the System table. 

With up to 60 characters in a SACS account, it is no wonder that users occasionally make mistakes entering accounts.
Now you could try to train everyone in your organization on the SACS account structure and then have follow-up trainings every couple of months. Or, you could put in place some complex bureaucratic set of rules that no one would remember. Or, you could simply enter the funds and objects that users are allowed to enter in a control field and be assured that users will not enter accounts that don’t match those funds/objects.

Now that sounds easy!

It is easy. You can control what accounts users enter into vendor requisitions, department requisitions, stores requisitions, work orders, invoices, direct payments, employee payments, journal entries and payroll. Wow!

Let’s take a look at an example for a vendor requisition.

The Account Fund Code Filter is empty. That means that users can use accounts from any fund.

The Account Object Code Filter is not empty. In fact, it lays out a pretty specific set of object codes. The first (4-5699) defines a range. That means that users can enter any account with object codes 4000-5699. The second is also a range and then we have specific objects.

Pretty cool and easy to set up! But what is the general user experience?

In a word: transparent.

When a user uses a lookup to enter the account codes, only those that match are displayed. If the user just starts typing their account code and it doesn’t match the filter, they are given an error message.

If the user likes to use account aliases (six-digit, short-cut account numbers), Escape Online automatically translates the alias to the full account number and validates against the filter, providing the same result.

AND, these same rules apply to all of the other document types mentioned.

Nice and easy!

TIP: The funds and objects that can be used in vendor, department and stores requisitions, work orders, invoices (fund only), and journal entries are set in the Department record. The funds and objects that can be used in direct and employee payments and payroll accounts (object only) are set in the Organization record.

Favorites are one of my best productivity tools. As you know, you can have up to 20 favorites per search/report. And, if you are like me, you are definitely taking advantage of that. But now that the fiscal year has changed, you may need to revisit some of those favorites to make a few changes.

No problem!

Let’s say I have a favorite for vendor requisitions that includes the fiscal year, finance department and my buyer Id. This is what I do:

1. Select the favorite you want to change in the Vendor Requisitions activity.

2. Change the fiscal year in the search.

3. Select Manage from the Favorites task.

4. Click Replace.

5. Click Save.

These five simple steps apply to any change to any favorite on any search page or report request.

Amazing!