Blog

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!

I have been going on and on about the new document viewer in Escape Online. Now, I am going to tell you about my favorite feature, emailing. Of course, you can forward Escape Online reports from the My Reports activity. And, of course, you can distribute reports, taking advantage of user-based filtering. But, nothing beats the convenience of email.

There are two ways to do this. You can email the report in its native format, EODF (Escape Online Document File), or you can email the report as a PDF.

Let’s talk about the EODF format first. Undoubtedly, this is the easiest. All you have to do is click the Email icon. Escape Online automatically launches your email software, creates an email, and attaches the report.

One click. Easy.

The only downside is that the recipient of the email must also have the Document Viewer. This means that at some time, they installed Escape Online. The upside is that they don’t have to have Escape Online open. They just click the report and it will open in the Document Viewer.

The other method is for your recipients that are not and never have been Escape Online users (like a vendor maybe). In that case, you want to send it as a PDF.

Select the Open in Adobe Reader from the File menu. This is going to do exactly what it sounds like.

Escape Online launches the Adobe Reader with the report open.

Now, you click the Email icon in the Adobe Reader and then click the Attach button.

Once you click those two buttons, the Adobe Reader automatically launches your email software, creates an email, and attaches the report.

Not exactly one click, but still pretty darn easy.  And, it gives you the flexibility you need to send reports to non-Escape users.

All in all, that is something to write home about.

Last March, we replaced the Adobe Reader as our primary report viewer with a more stable proprietary document viewer.  Now that I have used it for a few months, I have to say I just love it.
The original reason we went to the new Escape Online Document Viewer was to put reports in a separate window so you could look at your report and the software AT THE SAME TIME.

While this is most awesome, this change was more than just window dressing, so to speak.  For the next few weeks, I am going to break down the great new document viewer features (export formats, printer preferences, and emailing).

Let’s start with the export formats.

Now, you can export your reports in so many different ways, the data is simply available to ANY other software.  Some packages, like Microsoft Word and Excel, we support outright, but others can use one of the many export formats.

Check it out.

This is quite a list! Some of these you are already familiar with, like the Excel (looks just like the report but is in Excel) and Excel Data (in a spreadsheet format with only one header and no totals or subtotals).

Of course, there is PDF (which is just like you had before) and Word and RTF which both import nicely into word processing software.

Next are the XML, HTML, CSV and Text options.  These are great for all of those “other” programs. For example, say that I want to display Escape Online data on a web site.  The XML and HTML data would be perfect.

On the other hand, maybe I want to manipulate the data in iWork.  The CSV or Text options may be the best way to get the data ready for import.

The thing is, for the majority of reports, we have all of the output formats you need to get the data where it needs to be in the format it needs to be in.

But, of course, that’s not all. Next week, we will talk more about displaying the reports in the viewer and emailing reports to others (Escape and non-Escape users)!

One of the things I love about Escape Online 5 is how it has features that cover both small and large districts. Case in point, the Approval Dollar Max in workflow approvals for vendor requisitions.
Of course all districts want to approve requisitions, but some really really big districts divvy up that chore by dollar amounts. Let’s take a look.

This is an example of a workflow approval path for vendor requisitions. It contains many levels, which the requisition works its way through before the item is ordered and the money is spent. The levels are in order, but contain room for growth (notice now the levels jump from 20 to 40) in case new processes need to be put in place.

So let’s walk through it. The first workflow approval level is 10.  This is where the budget people take a look and see if it is okay. Then, the purchasing people take a gander to make sure that the item prices are realistic. Now we get to the meat of the approval process.

First, the principal approves everything for less than $1K. If it is more than that, the department managers need to take a look at it, up to $5K. If it is more than that, then the Assistant Superintendent needs to get involved and ultimately, if it is $15k or over, the Superintendent needs to give their stamp of approval.

So if you have a requisition for $3K, it will need approval from Fiscal, Purch, and Dept Manager. It will not route to the Principal because it is over the maximum, and it will not route to the Asst. Superintendent or the Superintendent because it is below the minimum.

This type of leveling helps everyone focus on what is important, and frees them from having to review and approve requisitions that others can safely approve.

Of course, this is a fairly complex approval setup and many districts won’t need to go this far, but that is the beauty of it.  The workflow approval path can be for only one level and one person for all amounts for those smaller districts, or it can take into consideration the involved budgeting of large districts.

Life doesn’t always fit nicely into a fiscal year. Sometimes you think you are ordering just what you need, but you come to find out it is more than you need. If the items you order come from your stores warehouse, how does Escape Online handle that return during year end?

Well, that is up to your department’s standards. Escape Online gives you two ways to manage the process. You can force all stores returns to post to the current year. Or, you can allow stores returns to post to the year from which they were ordered.

Obviously, forcing all returns to the current year means that if I order an item in May 2011/2012 and return it in July 2012/2013, the return will be posted in 2012/2013.

But, what if 2011/2012 is still open?  Why not have that return to post to that prior year?  Why not, indeed!  That is what the Prior Year Returns flag in the Department record is all about.  Check it out.

If you set this flag to Post to Current Year, the reversing expense journal entry is created in the current fiscal year.  But, if you set the flag to Post to Prior Year, the reversing expense journal entry is created in the prior fiscal year, as long as it is still open.

This flexibility at the department level is awesome because while purchasing may want to have stores returns  journaled to last year, the food services department may not.

And, that fits nicely into any organization’s standards.