Friday Feature – Quick Accounts in Addons

This is the last Friday of 2011.  Monday will be a new year and I am making my New Year’s resolutions.  I am vowing to use the Pay Detail window in the Adjust Payroll activity more often.

Why the Pay Detail window you ask?  Because it is so easy to enter information for addons so quickly, especially accounts.  For example, let’s talk about addons for substitutes.

Every pay date tons of addons have to be added for substitutes, and most organizations set up a nice, clean, generic addon that can be used for all of the subs.  While this is great for reporting, it makes for a bit more data entry. Specifically, you need to enter units, rates, but most importantly the account.

Now you could use the Additional Pay activity because it has a nice batch feel to it, but accounts are more advanced and not covered by that activity.  Really, the fastest way is to use the Pay Detail window.  All you have to do is select Addon from the Detail menu in the Adjust Payroll activity.

See how it just shows me the addon info. AND, I can totally take advantage of this by rearranging my columns so that the addon’s units and account are in the forefront of my workspace.

Now all I have to do is enter the info and press F8.  Escape Online automatically saves my work and brings up the next record.  What an awesome way to work my list.

Now that’s a New Year’s resolution I can keep!

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ReqPay 18 – faster and smarter

   ReqPay 18 - Vendor Check Detail was enhanced for version 11.04 to flag for review differences in Vendor checks paid, and the amount reported for Vendor 1099′s.

Each time our report developer, Susan, has to make a change to a report she looks for ways to increase its performance, always trying to make the reports more efficient.  As a result, report completion times are decreasing; the difference from one release to another can be as much as 10 or 15 seconds.

For version 11.04, ReqPay 18 finishes in half the time as it did in 11.03.

A report that runs 100% faster than the last release is a big deal.  In an effort to verify the improvement wasn’t just the result of a hardware upgrade or some other change I’m not aware of, I compared the report completion times with 5 of our internal copies of customer systems.  The method I use is rather simple, but it works.  First, I run the report on a previous release to get an average completion time.  Then I install the report software for the current release and rerun the report to get an average for the new release.

The average times for all 5 systems show the same 100% improvement.

Customer 1
11.03  0:27
11.04  0:10

Customer 2
11.03  0:21
11.04  0:14

Customer 3
11.03  1:28
11.04  0:41

Customer 4
11.03  1:00
11.04  0:31

Customer 5
11.02  0:40
11.04  0:21

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The Year of Implementations

Now that December is coming to a close, it’s interesting to look back on all the implementation work for  new and existing customers in 2011.  We have one county office that went live in Escape during the year and two more COE migrations in progress. We’re also working on the migration of a single district where the customer is going to go live in January. One of our Escape Classic customers converted to Escape Online 5 last July and another is in the testing phase for a live conversion next year. Not a bad schedule if you like to stay busy!

Shasta COE completed the final phase of a three phase implementation in October. They are now live with over 20 districts in HR/Payroll and Finance. As the primary developer for data conversions, I personally worked with a number of people at Shasta to complete the transfer of records from their previous system. We imported hundreds of files, analyzed results, dealt with data exceptions and designed a number of post-import updates to the database. I know there were many involved at Shasta but I extend special thanks to Kelli Roberts and Ruth MacDougall for all of their help!

The San Joaquin COE implementation is scheduled to go live next July. I’ve completed just a few data transfers here as their technology team has completed much of the conversion work themselves. When I have received imports, the data is exceptionally clean and is formatted in the structure of the database tables. This makes the data transfer extremely easy to monitor. My hats off to the San Joaquin team!

Monterey COE is our latest county implementation. They will have two phases with the first 11 organizations going live next July. The data transfers are just beginning but we’ve already completed test database imports for accounts, employees, payroll setup, positions and assignments.

Chico USD will go live in Escape Online 5 with all modules in January 2012.  We’ve done a number of imports to their system and there will be many more to come. Since training is ongoing, we’re prioritizing so users can view their true data as much as possible. Chico is a single district so the amount of data will be smaller but the attention to detail is the same. A migration should be used as an opportunity to ‘cleanse’ data so problems are not inherited from the previous system.

Finally there are the conversions from the Escape Classic system to Escape Online 5. For this type of project, we export data from Classic system to build the Online5 database.  A number of test database ‘refreshes’ are done before the customer goes live. Cupertino USD made the move last July. Marysville is scheduled for July 2012.

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Release Process

At Escape we have a standardized release process that produces four releases a year.  When we started the process in 2008 we actually had monthly releases but based on customer feedback we scaled it back to quarterly releases. Since we increased the duration between releases it allowed us a larger window of time to add steps to the process that ultimately made it more comprehensive.

But a broader scope means more people, so now we have every department involded in the process!  Development, Support, Documentation, Training, Testing and I.T.   With the help of the whole team we are able to complete the following steps for each release:

-          Pay compares for all payroll customers
-          Budget compares for JEs and loading from HR
-          Full integration testing
-          Release notes explaining each change in the release
-          Updated user documentation for every module
-          New tutorials
-          Top Ten powerpoint presentation to highlight key features in each module
-          3 hour webinar demonstrating most popular changes in each module

We even took it a step further by putting some of this information directly in the software so it’s accessible for all users.  The releases notes, Top Ten presentations, tutorials and a recorded version of the webinar are available via the Online Resources activity.

Once customers receive the new release they install it on their test system so they have an opportunity to complete testing in their environment.  Once they are satisfied with the new release, they install it on their production system.

Below are the statics for the releases in 2011.  As you can see, we completed nearly 750 change requests during 2011 and came pretty close to hitting all of our planned dates.  In fact, 11.02 was available as scheduled.  While not perfect, we have done a great job making new features and fixes available to our customers!

Release	# of Change Requests	Planned Release Date	Actual Release Date
11.01	160	02/25/11	03/14/11
11.02	195	05/16/11	05/16/11
11.03	217	08/26/11	09/02/11
11.04	176	11/18/11	12/02/11

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Friday Feature – Paycheck History

While county office payroll and retirement users make up a small percentage of our overall users, they perform a vital function, so we have quite a bit of specialized functionality for these users.  The Retirement activity group that includes the Person record and editors for both PERS and STRS is just one example.

For those unfamiliar with retirement processing, the “person” record is the way Escape Online keeps track of retirement, allowing one record to see all employees and their assignments, even if they are at different organizations.

Definitely, my favorite tab in the Person record is Paycheck.

It is sooooo cool!

If you  need to see pay info for a person, you can click on this tab and peruse the list or get a snapshot of the paycheck itself.

If the employee works at more than one district, like the one in the screenshot shown here, then Escape Online lists both sets of checks.  Nice!

Now, I know there is a dedicated activity that shows payroll history (Payroll – Payroll History), but that is at least three mouse clicks away and this tab is only one.

And saving those two clicks is worth investigating!

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11.04 – Now Available on a System Near You

On Friday, December 2^nd we released v11.04.  This release contains the 2011 changes for W2’s and 1099’s and it’s also our final release of software for 2011.  As usual, this release was chock full of CR’s.  A little over 170 CR’s in fact!

As you may have read in Leslie’s article at the end of November, the 11.04 release is special because it was the first release that we polled our customers to find out what their top 5 changes for Finance, HR/Payroll and Reports were and we made those CR’s our priority.  We did pretty darn good and got 13 out of the 15 top rated CR’s completed in 11.04.  This new polling process was such a hit that we will continue to poll our customers for each upcoming release to find out what changes are important to you and make those our priority.

If you don’t have the new 11.04 release installed on your Test System yet, please contact your Customer Care Representative to schedule an upgrade.  To find out more about all of the changes in 11.04, tune in for Terri’s 11.04 Release Review tomorrow, December 15^h!!  You can link to all of the 11.04 information right from the Escape Online 5 software, just go to the Online Resources module and click on Release Information.

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Marysville Is Moving Forward

Now that we have the Setup Training under our belt, Marysville has started the daunting task of setting up their users and Finance approvals.  This can be a little overwhelming and even though we reviewed these activities during training, it’s hard to know where to start when the task is at hand.

With that in mind, we’ve scheduled a webinar for next week to jump start that part of the project.  This is a nice solution since it gives the district and me a little more one-on-one time without committing to an entire site day.

For these types of things, webinars are the way to go.  We at Escape are using this approach more and more since it makes more efficient use of everyone’s time.

Once Nancy and Kim have a handle on setting up their users and approvals, we’ll schedule the Core Training, hopefully in January.  Go Nancy!  Go Kim!

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!  Cheers!

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Friday Feature – Easy Receiving

Now is the time for giving, so equally it must be the time for receiving. If an individual or company gives money to a school, obviously that money must be received and Escape Online makes this very easy in the Enter AR Receipts activity.

The activity is set up for batch data entry with just a few fields to enter.  So if several wonderful community members decide to give to gifts to your school, you could enter all of their donations at one time, in one form.

Check it out!

I can enter a default account number that would be used for all of the donations.

This is a great time saver for one of the busiest times of the year!

As you can see, using the Enter key, I can key-data-entry these donations very quickly. And, I can enter up to 50! (Nice community, huh?)

Escape Online automatically creates the individual records for me, showing all of the receipts I just entered on a list.

From there, I can edit the receipts or submit them.  It is that easy.

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v12.01 Survey Results

Since the feedback from the “Version 11.04 Pick Your Top 5″ survey for Escape Online 5 went so well, we decided to do it again.

For that reason, a week ago, we conducted a survey to help us prioritize the change requests for our first release of 2012, version 12.01, due just before spring arrives.

The majority of our customers participated in the survey, and we are so grateful for their participation.

There were three voting categories:  Finance, HR/Pay, and Reports.  Customers had two weeks to vote for their top 5 in each category.

Here is each category with a list of the CRs with the most votes.

Finance

This category was a little difficult because after the first four CRs with the most votes there is a tie with three CRs getting two votes each.  Just like the last survey, Escape Customer Care will break the tie.

CR#	Subject	Votes
7306	Add various selection criteria to Approve Requisitions Search screen, list screen	4
7638	(YE) – Stores returns for prior fiscal year reqs should post in the current fiscal year.	3
10739	Expired Accounts – Payments: check for expired accounts when a payment is submitted and provide a warning	3
11472	(YE) Starting Balance JEs are being posted even if out of balance by Fund-Resource-Year	3
7043	Change Roll Forward tasks to be run from current fiscal year into next fiscal year	2
8973	Add  AR Invoice Comment to System Generated JEs	2
10136	Stores item lookup not correct when down arrow is used	2
10144	(YE) – Change Year End Closing list to display each account line on a row, for separate accrual	2
10351	(YE) – Ability to process Work orders through YE Closing activity list	2
11168	(YE) – Fiscal Year Status: add warning when closing JE includes non-end balance accounts	2

HR/Payroll

The votes were definitive for this module.   Escape Customer Care will be adding all of the following to the list for 12.01.

CR#	Subject	Votes
9312	Change leave granting to work on each position for an employee, or flag an assignment to not grant at all	4
10780	(YE) – Ability to create supplemental STRS files in any given month	4
7560	Rate1 needs to recognize ‘use adjusted rate’ during entry	3
8737	Add flag to get hard error when assignment FTE entered exceeds 1.00	3
10303	Retro Position Account activity – remaining programming	3
11350	The system should not allow a user to setup an assignment to a closed position from the Employee Management activity	3

Reports

Again, the votes were very clear.  All of these CRs will be put on the list for 12.01.

CR#	Subject	Votes
10935	Budget07 – GASB 54 – Changes to End Fund Balance components	5
11438	ReqPay20 – not adding invoice amount correctly or calculating expensed amount if liability account is used in payment	4
7891	Pos04 – Report Changes	4
9052	Pos02 – Add new option to show EmpId and other enhancements	3
10824	Cred01 – New Report, Holders with Credentials	3
11477	Pay51 modify column heading of existing FTE to ‘Total Assignment FTE’ and add a new column for Acct FTE	3

This process has been fabulously successful.  We are really excited about it.  We even added an element this time around so that customers could identify their number 1 CR (of the 15 they voted for).

This kind of information is like gold and we couldn’t do it without the help of our customers.  Thanks for participating.  And, if you didn’t get a chance this time, contact Escape Customer Care to ensure that you can vote in the next survey.

And now for the caveats.  Of course, we cannot guarantee that every one of these CRs will make it into 12.01.

There are unforeseen circumstances, like a new government regulation, a particular problematic programming issue, or difficulty finding consensus on exactly what the change should be (watch out for more surveys in this case).

Remember though, these CRs are marked in our process as your priority and ours.  Accordingly we will try our best to program, test, and document the change for inclusion in the 12.01 release.

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Friday Feature – Fulfilling Unique Needs

Having been involved in the analysis of the CR voting project here at Escape, I was astonished by the unique needs of our customers.  While 80% of their procedures are the same, that 20% is daunting in its diversity.

That is why Escape Online has Extended* columns. Extended columns allow you to add custom fields to a variety of records, including department requisitions, employees, persons, benefits, positions, position detail and assignments.

These records allow you to create and name fields that appear right on the form AND the list AND the search.

So if your district or organization has a specific set of information that you keep track of that other districts using Escape Online do not, then we have got you covered.

The examples are endless, but let’s review a few:

• Typing requirements for an employee
• Accounts verified flag in a requisition
• Dental eligibility date in a benefit

Pretty specific, huh?  But that doesn’t mean that they are not mission critical to the district that uses them on a regular basis.

* Note that Extended columns are considered custom programming, so there is a charge for setting them up.  

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