Friday Feature – Journal Entries by Site Users

One thing you learn pretty quickly in life is that you cannot do everything yourself. You have to delegate. School business has been embracing this philosophy as much as the public sector. One of the most recent examples of this is the numerous requests we had from customers to give site users (Admin role) the ability to create journal entries for their own sites.
We brainstormed the concept, asked customers for their feedback, and came up with a pretty slick way to help you help yourselves to a hearty dose of delegation. The idea has two components: access and simplicity.

How to give access seemed pretty straightforward, because Escape Online is built with the hierarchy of school business in mind. First, departments are in charge of their journal entry access. So, if the Purchasing Department wants everyone to be able to enter journal entries, but the Food Services Department does not, they just have to set the Available to All flag for the journal entries as they see fit.

Second, most districts already have a lot of Admin (or site) users set up for access to a single location (site). Thus, the Admin users have a simple set of activities, usually requisitions and accounts and a few others that are restricted to that location. If the Available to All flag in the Department record is set to YES, then a Journal Entry activity will also be displayed on the Admin user’s activity tree.

This means that if you want to give site users the ability to create journal entries for only those locations specified in their User record, all you have to do is flip the flag for journal entries in the Department record.

That brings us to the simplicity.  When we first created Escape Online 5, we understood that site users are not power users. They need simpler software that meets their needs without overwhelming them. So, in Vendor Requisitions, site users see a different, simplified form. We thought, “Why don’t we do the same thing for journal entries?” So, we did.

For Admin users only, we made two changes to the Journal Entry form. First, the Location field defaults to the first location listed in the User record and is required, and if they try to use the lookup, only locations listed in the User record will be shown. Second, there is a single Change column, instead of the Debits and Credits columns other users see. Simple!

Stay tuned! Next week we will discuss real-life examples and routing for approvals.