Friday Feature – Pay Holds

Last week, I said that I would tell you all about pay holds. Good to my word, I am going to show you how easy it is in Escape Online to audit credentials, creating pay holds when the audit turns up irregularities.

As you know, in California, it is the COE’s responsibility to ensure that every person in an assignment for which the State requires a credential is filled by a person that has the appropriate credential. Every payday, the COE must check the employee’s credentials against the jobs they held. Escape Online calls this the Credential Audit process. And, with a little bit of setup, the audit happens automatically every payday with very little effort on the part of the payroll technician.

After payroll has been submitted by the districts, the COE runs the Credential Audit activity.* It only requires two simple steps: enter the pay date and click GO. Really! When you click GO, Escape Online reads the pay day information (online and offline) to determine if the employee holds the appropriate credential for their assignment. If the employee does not have the appropriate credential for their assignment as defined by the pay matrix, a pay hold is created.

Of course, there is the flexibility to take an employee’s pay “off hold.” But, if the pay hold is legit, the Payroll Processing activity automatically converts any ACH for that employee to a paper check so that you can literally hold it until the employee shows you the correct credential for the job.

Amazing!

Now, you may be asking yourself, how does Escape Online determine which jobs need credentials. That is a great question and I mentioned one way briefly above: the Pay Matrix. Actually, we have three ways to define what jobs need to be audited: at the person level, at the account level and at the job class level (using the Pay Matrix). Next week, I will give you a quick peek at how each one of these works.

* Districts and charters can run the audit, too, if they are set up with the proper permissions!