Friday Feature – Creating a Custom List of Accounts

As the last blog in the Searching for Accounts series, we now understand the different ways in which we can search for accounts (series, wildcard, range). To celebrate our new found knowledge, let’s put what we have learned to use by creating a custom list of accounts. I’m going to show you the search page from the Fiscal-Accounts activity, but you could do this anywhere. You could print requisitions with certain accounts, manage your budget by looking at accounts in custom groupings, or check payroll journal entries. The list is endless.
For this example, I want to search for benefit accounts for certificated employees that work with special needs children in a supervisory or administrative capacity. (Told you I could get a customized list!)

Here’s my search criteria. Let’s go through it line by line.

Fund – I am only looking at the general fund so I can use the lookup or I can type it since I know it by heart.

Object – I am using a wildcard (*) to “mask” part of the component. My account structure uses the last digit of the 3000 series object to designate a certificated benefit. So, I need to “mask” the two middle characters, thus 3**2.

Resource – I am using a range to focus the list of accounts to special needs resources.  The list will only include accounts that contain a resource within my range.

Function – I am focused on only two functions: Supervision of Instruction and School Administration. I use the comma to indicate a series. The list will only include accounts that have either 2100 or 2700 as the function.

When I press GO, out of the 25,396 accounts this district has for fiscal year 2015, Escape Online returned my customized list of 23 accounts in 1 second.

Perfectly manageable! Perfectly customized! (And, of course, if this is a list I want to review on a regular basis, I could save it as a search favorite!)