Friday Feature – Accounts Come and Go

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.