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.