Employee Spotlight: Dayna Kelsey

Dayna began working at Escape Technology in December of 2006. Previously, she was an  independent contractor for over 15 years, specializing in bookkeeping and accounting services. In addition to managing the Escape Team payroll and HR functions, Dayna is also a project analyst.

What is your favorite part of working for Escape? — Having been self-employed for so many years, pretty much working solo, not only do I love getting a regular paycheck but I really enjoy being part of a team! There has been a tremendous opportunity here at Escape to learn!  Each day brings a different challenge which (hopefully) leads to an accomplishment.  It’s also nice to work in a low key and friendly atmosphere.

Can you give us a quick play-by-play of your average work day?  — Every day is a little different since I have a few job titles:  Accounting, HR, and Project Analyst.  A day can involve anything from sending out billings to facilitating project meetings, running payroll or dealing with HR issues and/or planning the logistics of our next company meeting.

What have been some of the highlights of your career at Escape? — Prior to working at Escape, I had been self-employed for almost 20 years, so making the change to come to work full-time was one of the best decisions I’ve made.

What are your favorite activities or things to do when not working? — Without a doubt (shooting/editing) photography.  In fact, I just completed a photo book of my trip to Paris!

Where are you from originally? — I am from Santa Barbara.

If you weren’t an accountant/HR/project analyst, what would you be? —  I’d be a photographer, traveling the world.

What is your favorite food? — Chocolate anything!  It is fabulous.  There is nothing like it.  Leave out the fruit though!

What is your ringtone? — My ringtone is some generic ringtone that came with my phone.

If you could meet one person, who and why? —  An architectural photographer because it’s my favorite thing to shoot.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? — I wish I could take away the need for sleep.  Although I love sleeping, think of how productive we could be with an additional 6-8 hours in our day!

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Halloween Hunt

Happy Halloween to all of our Escape friends.  In the “spirit” of the day, we dressed up ourselves, our office and some baked potatoes (for lunch!).

We thought it would be fun to see if you could see through our ghoulish games.  The first customer to post the name of each person in the grid below will win a devilishly delightful prize (left to right, top to bottom).

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Friday Feature – Tracking Training and Licenses

School business is serious about education, and I am not just talking about the kids.  Most employees are also educated and continue to take courses and obtain licenses or certificates throughout their career.  This additional training is important for placement and salary considerations.

All types of training are important to track, specialized training and licensing is especially critical.  That is why Escape Online includes an Education tab in the Employee record.

This tab allows you to track degrees, licenses, units, NCLB requirements and all types of training.  It also includes expiration dates for those licenses that expire (like machine operator license).

But having the information isn’t enough.  You need to be able to use that info, so we have several options for searching for these records, and we include them on the Employee Snapshot.

And, of course, they are also included on the J-90 report for filling out the salary and benefit schedule for certificated bargaining units.

Now that takes education seriously.

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Chico Unified to go live in January…

I have been working with the staff of Chico Unified School
District to implement Escape Online 5 since May, in order to go Live in all modules in
January, 2012.

Chico USD is only an hour or so from
the office, a very pretty drive through the Sacramento Valley.  Chico, one
of several of our stand-alone implementations, has 12,000 students in a district that
covers 322 square miles, including all of the city of Chico and adjacent
unincorporated areas of Butte County.

Maureen Fitzgerald, the Assistant Superintendent of Business,
had worked with Escape Software at several other organizations, and is a great
leader.   So I was especially excited to be working with her
again.  She has a great staff working on the project, including Peter
VanBuskirk, who is the Manager of Fiscal Services when he’s not being the
project lead.    Scott Jones, the Director of Fiscal Services,
and Diane Martin, Account Technician have both put forth enormous effort to
learn the software and find ways to use it most effectively for Chico.

In my position as Project Manager for Escape, I spend a lot
of time working with customers to learn new software, and incorporate the
software into their workflow.  This is always my favorite part of an
implementation, and the group at Chico has been great to work with.

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Friday Feature – Time for Leaves

Fall is in the air, the leaves are changing color, and holiday plans are being made.  The first two parts are lovely and beautiful, but that last part (holiday plans) needs vacation time.

Employees love their vacation time (I know I do), and they are very persnickety about knowing exactly how much time they have.  The key to helping employees know their current balance is to have specific leave granting rules that they can rely on.

Escape Online helps you with that.  There are multiple setup records that control leave granting with finite controls.  One of the more recently added controls is the Mid Year Service Change field in the Leave Balance Profile.

The field has two options: “Month Change Occurs” and “Following Grant Period”.

The “Month Change Occurs” applies the change to the month following the leave date. That seems pretty self-explanatory: if you have a change, the change takes place almost immediately.

The “Following Grant Period” is a little more complex because it bases the change on the timing of the grant.

Let’s use the screenshot shown here as an example. The grant timing is monthly (right above the highlighted field).  That means if I have a midyear change in November, the new grant range (the table at the bottom) will take place in December.

Now, if the grant timing was annual, I would not see the change until the next fiscal year (July).

Allowing for all the different variations of bargaining units and person types (classified and certificated), leave granting can become a very automated process that allows everyone (payroll tech and employee alike) to know exactly what balances can be expected, making the holiday season just a little less stressful, allowing us that extra time to notice the changing of the leaves.

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Saving Trees

The ability to email employee ACH deposits was introduced in v10.05.  In early August I wrote an article to tell you all about this great new feature and at that time, Ventura County was piloting the project.  They started with a group of 40 employees receiving their ACH deposits via email and I am happy to report that they are now up to 350 employees!

We now have a total of 5 customers using Email ACH.  As of October 10^th, Escape Online 5 has emailed a total of 4424 ACH’s!!  September was our biggest month to date.  On the month end September payroll,  2559 ACH’s were emailed.

We are well on the road to saving a few trees, not to mention time and money for the customers using this feature.  If you are interested in using our Email ACH functionality, please contact your HR/Payroll Support Representative to schedule a conference call.  We will guide you through the setup steps and have you saving trees in no time!

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Love the One-on-Ones

Last week, I had the privilege of working with Sonoma COEs’ new Business Systems Support Analyst, Erin Graves. Erin is new to the position but not new to Sonoma.  She comes to this position with lots of payroll and school business experience.  Erin and I spent the morning learning how to troubleshoot support calls, research the problem and report the problem to Escape Customer Care.  It was great fun and very productive because Erin is such a quick learner. After lunch we then went through the Finance module of Escape Online as a County support person.  Erin is going to be a great asset to Sonoma and Escape. We’re looking forward to working more with her.

Good job Sonoma in hiring another STELLAR person!

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Let’s do this again!

Marysville JUSD has been using Escape Classic since July of 1996.  In fact, they were the first new implementation I was involved in, as I also joined Escape in 1996.  Barry Collins managed their implementation then and brought me in to help out.  (I learned from the best.)  Now they’re converting to Escape Online 5.  They are our last Classic Payroll customer so we’re very excited to get them converted.  The Project Team includes Nancy Henshaw, Yvonne Sanchez, Kathy Cartwright and Bryan Williams on the Marysville side and Jennifer Escamilla, Elen Meltonyan, Tom Henzie, Dayna Kelsey and myself on the Escape side.

 Marysville has completed the first step which is to get the equipment in place and SQL installed.  The next step is to complete the initial conversion.  This is one of my favorite stages of an implementation – I review how the district has been using Classic and fit their workflow into Escape Online 5’s design.  The initial conversion requires the setup of configuration files that will allow the conversion process to assign their Classic documents (requisitions, journals, etc.) to Departments in Escape Online 5.  We’ll continue to do monthly conversions so that the district can do their testing with up-to-date data.

 The Overview training will take place this week.  After that, the users will be able to go back to their desks and ‘test drive’ the new system.  And that’s when the real fun will begin.

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Friday Feature – Codes vs. Descriptions

In this new world of customization, with everything from the Starbucks coffee you are drinking to the playlists on your iPod, people want custom, well, everything, including their Escape Online reports.

Now, our “standard” reports and snapshots give users a lot of options, but so did the CDs of your favorite bands.  But you weren’t satisfied with their choice of options and you created your own playlist.

We give you a similar option with grids.  It is really simple.  Use the search page to create a list of records, then click the Grid button so you can “play” with the list and make a report that is custom-made just for you.

Say that you are a numbers person.  You don’t need no stinking descriptions.  You know that vendor #054035 is Amazon.com.  Why waste space on your report with all those descriptions?  Just give me the facts, ma’am.

On the other hand, say that you are a visual person.  You want descriptions, not numbers.  You know who Amazom.com is, but 054035, really? Why waste space on your report with all those numbers?  Just show me the data.

The way you create these custom reports requires only a couple of clicks of the mouse, right-mouse clicking on the title of any column and then selecting from a drop-down list which columns you want (only descriptions) and which ones you don’t (no codes, thank you very much). Then, click the Make Report option from the Reports task.

So, whether you are a numbers person or a visual person (or both!), you can get the data you need without the data you don’t!

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1099 time

Well, here we are again, time for 1099′s.  You say 1099′s aren’t due until the end of January?  That’s true, but Escape needs a bit of lead time to make the changes, test them and get the release into your hands.  Since there are no regulatory changes this year, we are focusing on 6 enhancements – and 1 defect fix.  Our process identifies all CR’s relating to 1099′s so they can be included in the correct release, this year it’s version 11.04.  Each CR is first tested individually to ensure the changes are made according to the customers’ request.

After the individual testing we do integration testing to see if the new changes play well with the exisiting software.  Integration testing is focused on the whole 1099 process.

• We import vendor 1099 files, fix missing tax id’s, verify any 1099 errors reported by the software are correct, and run all related reports and snapshots.
• Then 1099′s are printed and unprinted for individual orgs.
• Finally, we process all 1099′s for the county, including generating the 1099 file and rolling it back.
• All errors are fixed before the software ships.

Since 1099′s have to be accurate when mailed, we ensure if any problems are identified by the customer they are remedied immediately.

Finally, don’t forget the 1099 Webinar scheduled for December 8.  The Webinar will cover the whole process from setup to file generation, don’t miss it!

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