Friday Feature – Prepay Vendor Requisitions

My son is going to start college in the fall, so I am in the midst of paying for things that aren’t going to arrive or be used for many months. This happens to everyone, even school business AP clerks. Just like freshmen orientation, school business conferences want their payments in advance.

No worries. If you receive an invoice for a next year requisition and that vendor must be paid prior to July 1, Escape Online has got you covered.

Actually, we have you covered twice!

Both the AP-Payments activity (where you enter payments one by one) and the AP-Enter Payments activity (where you enter payments in a batch mode) produce the same results. There is only a minor difference between the two on how you handle the fiscal year.

• The AP-Payments activity automatically knows the fiscal year of the requisition when you create the new payment.
• The AP-Enter Payments activity requires you to enter the fiscal year of the requisition at the top of the form.

Since Escape Online knows TODAY’s date, it can compare it to the fiscal year of the requisition and create the appropriate journal entries, automatically.

When the check is printed, see how there are two journal entries created. One with a transaction date of TODAY and one with a transaction date of the first day of the next fiscal year.

• For the base year, the JE (EX13-01548) debits the account specified as the prepay account and credits the cash account.
• For the next fiscal year, the JE (EX14-00002) credits the prepaid account and debits the expenditure account specified in the requisition.

Then, if you take a closer look at the second or “next year” journal entry, you will see how the money is moved. (The prepaid account is debited by the beginning balance journal created during the year-end roll-forward procedure.)

This automated prepay process can take a load off your mind and your To Do list.

Because, sometimes, paying for things in advance can be a very good thing.

Remember, this process works for requisitions created for next year, meaning you have multiyear processing turned on for your requisition.

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Friday Feature – Closing Cash

There is no denying it: cash is king. Really, at any time, but especially at year end. When it is time to stop spending cash, cash must be closed (by order of the king or COE or district). Escape Online gives you an easy-to-use tool to enter cash-close dates and a cascading hierarchy for COEs and districts to work in tandem.

We actually give you two activities to control the dates: the Fiscal Year Status (System) activity for COEs and the Fiscal Year Status activity for districts. Of course, the system activity takes precedence. But they both work on the same premise.

The dates entered control when each accounting period stops allowing changes to cash (no journal entries – manual or system – can post to cash), and when the period is completely closed (no transactions can be posted).

Check it out!

See how you can enter separate dates for cash and close. I took a peek at how our customers are using this and there is a wide variety of philosophies.

Some COEs enter the dates in their activity and then their organizations enter even more restrictive dates. Other COEs don’t enter any dates, giving their organizations complete control.

One of our stand-alone districts only has close dates for interim reporting. Another stand-alone district only has close dates for the end of the year.

As always, Escape Online provides tons of flexibility!

Let’s take a closer look at the live sample shown here, particularly the June dates, marked with the red arrow.  Notice how the dates are different. Let’s talk about what that means.

The June Close Cash date is 7/31. If a user tries to post a journal entry (manually or through a system process) that affects June cash after July 31, Escape Online is NOT going to post that journal entry. Instead, it is going to give the user an error message, put the journal entry on hold, and write a history record to the journal entry stating why the JE did not post.

The June Close date is 9/30. This works the same as the close cash date, except it goes past worrying about affecting cash. It simply won’t allow any journal entry transactions to post for June after September 30.

Now that kind of control is worth a kingly sum.

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Friday Feature – Cash Roll Forward Journal Entries

It is the first week of May and Year End Closing is on everyone’s mind. Therefore, I am dedicating the month of May Friday Features to year end. The first in this series is about the Cash Roll Forward JE task in the Fiscal Year Status activity.

This optional task is very powerful. It allows you to roll forward cash independent of other year end processes, providing users with cash in the next fiscal year before the fiscal year is closed.

Of course, accounts must exist, especially resource components, in the next fiscal year. Otherwise, this amazing feature is as easy as a click of the mouse. Check it out!

This simple task is available for individual organizations (e.g., districts) or for the whole county.

Once you select it (with a verification prompt), Escape Online writes a journal entry line item for each resource / cash object combination. (The Cash object and its Offset are defined in the Ledger tab of the Organization record.)  Obviously, the date of the journal entry is 7/1 of the next fiscal year.

Easy!

While this feature is not for everyone (we also support tentative budgets that provide money for the next fiscal year), we have several customers using the Create Cash Roll Forward Journal Entry task with great success and little effort.

Beside the creation of the JE, there is one extra step required: you will need to roll back the cash balance JE (another click of the mouse) before you create the starting balances for the next fiscal year.

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Friday Feature – Budgeting Addons

Here we are on the last Friday of March and the last feature regarding budgeting. But don’t be sad. Spring is in the air so we shall rejoice in the budgeting of non-positional pay or what we like to call Addons.

In Escape Online, addons define any employee pay that does not come from position assignments. Examples are stipends, longevity, furloughs, bonuses, coaching, and substitute pay for non-regular employees. Obviously, addons affect an employee’s pay and retirement. And, obviously, addons need to be considered when budgeting.

As you probably guessed, Escape Online automates the budgeting of addons. Check it out.

Here is an example from a LIVE database. The graphic shows the line items for a Teacher that gets one stipend for acting as the Department Chair and another for having a master’s degree.

The Department Chair is an addon that is associated with the EMPLOYEE, regardless of position. You can see that because the position number is zero (0).

The Master is an addon that is associated with the employee’s POSITION. You can see that because the position number is the same as the teacher line item.

The Budget Management activity picks up all of this information when you load from HR/Payroll. Very easy; a simple task selection is all you need.

But what if there are addons that are associated with employees that you do not want to budget? Addons like bonuses and coaching, addons that lend themselves to a single budget line item instead of employee line items?

No worries!  Escape Online has you covered there too.

Check it out. Here is a LIVE example of a Coach addon.

As you can see, the “Include in Budget” flag is set to No. This tells Escape Online to exclude this addon from budget calculations. Then districts can manually enter a figure for all of the coaching stipends, which is much more appropriate.

This level of control let’s your budget blossom beautifully!

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Merry Year End Closing!

How’d that lil’ Christmas ornament get nestled amongst my summer vacation gear?

Can you imagine what it’s like for a musician to make a Christmas album?  In order for it to be available to the masses in time for the Christmas season, they’ve got to be singing away in the recording studio in June or July.  It must be really surreal to be belting out the words to ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ when it’s actually 100 degrees out there!

Well, I know how they feel.  It’s only March right now, but I’m ensconced in the season of Year End Closing; I’m already thinking about rolling forward those reqs and invoices to 2014 and creating closing journal entries.  And even though 13.1 cut into programming time for this release, we are still getting out some helpful enhancements to you to make your year end a little brighter.

For example, CR 11519 ensures that manually added accounts in Closing JEs are assigned the appropriate Trans Type.  And you can see that Trans Type now, thanks to CR 11260, because it added Trans Type to the JE form.  Even better, you can see who added or changed those accounts (or amounts) because of CR 11339, which displays the Created/Edited By and Created/Edited Dates for the JE Items.  And yes, these changes affect all Journal Entry types!  Finally, when you go in to post those closing journal entries or create your starting balances, you won’t have to wait for the history records to load all those account roll forward messages anymore, because CR 11411 introduces a history snapshot that makes loading those records faster than Rudolph can fly!

You know what?  I have it better than those musicians trying to get in the Christmas spirit in July.  Because, ultimately, I get to think about summer vacation!

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Friday Feature – Budgeting Benefits

It has been a whirlwind of budget this month. The last three Friday Features have been focused on budgeting vacancies. This week we will talk about benefits for vacancies and next week we will wrap up our budget discussion with a focus on budgeting addons (or non-positional pay).

Ready, set, let’s look at vacancy assumptions for benefits!

Once again, let’s look at that same simple example of a vacancy that started this Friday Feature budgeting journey.

Now let’s look at the benefit budget line items that make up that amount.

Notice the total at the bottom of the graphic.  It is the same amount we saw on the budget account screen.

The rows above the total detail each benefit’s amount. The majority of them are related to retirement (PERS) or statutory contributions (OASDI, Medicare, SUI, Workers Compensation), but the ones in the middle (in the red box) are related to district defined benefits.

And, now we are back to the topic for the last few weeks: vacancy assumptions. Indeed, we need to go back to the Vacancy Assumption record for the job class to see what kind of assumptions were made for these benefits for this job class.

We can see that the figures match exactly! (Of course, this is a simple example. There are more complex equations for benefit assumptions available.)

We can also see that there are many more contributions that could have been added to the vacancy assumptions, up to 12!

Now that’s a nice benefit!

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2013 Accounts Payable Webinar Highlights

The Accounts Payable webinar had over 72 connections and some of those connections had serveral people watching together! That is so AWESOME!

A HUGE thank you to Arin Simonyan! She was typing her little fingers off answering all of your questions and comments through the chat box.

I love polling questions and here are the results to the polling question from the webinar:

Which activity do you use to enter your Vendor payments?

A: Payments – New 52%

B: Enter Payments – Batch 48%

It was pretty close to half and half – just a few more of you enter Vendor Payments via the Payments activity rather than use the Batch process of Enter Payments.

For those of you who couldn’t join us, remember that the training materials and recording can be found in Escape Online 5 under Online Resources – Webinar Information.

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Friday Feature – Budgeting Vacancy Assumptions

Continuing on our budget journey, let’s talk some more about vacancies. In the last two Friday Features, we discovered how Escape Online “creates” vacancies based on the available FTE of certain assignment types (paid, timecard, extra and paid LOA).

Our next step is to discover how Escape Online automates the budget calculation for salaries and benefits for vacancies. This week we will step through the salary calculation and next week we will focus on benefits. So, let’s check out the vacancy salary calculation.

To do this, let’s use our LIVE example from the Budgeting Vacancies Friday Feature of two weeks ago.

Ah, the memories. Okay, now let’s walk through how Escape Online calculates the salary amount by reviewing the records that define the budget equation for this very simple vacancy:

SALARY * DAYS * HOURS

Escape Online uses the job class (Data Entry Clerk) to define the “assumptions” for the available FTE.

So, let’s look at the Vacancy Assumption record for Data Entry Clerk to see the assumptions.

Here, we can see the Salary Placement ($13.03 an hour) for the job class.

This is the SALARY part of our equation: $13.03.

You can also see that the Calendar is CLASS-SY.

The Calendar holds the DAYS part of our equation.  So let’s take a peek at the calendar record to see the number of days:  207!

Now we need the final part of our equation: HOURS.

For that, we need to go to the Position record. From the header of the graphic, we can see that we are in the right position (pos #1455 for a Data Entry Clerk). We can also see that the available FTE is an hour a day.

Now we have all of the parts of our equation:

SALARY * DAYS * HOURS

or

$13.03 * 207 * 1

or

$2,697.21

Amazing!

Escape Online performs all of this research and calculating automatically, saving budget gurus tons of time, making their journey to next year’s budget that much easier.

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Friday Feature – Budgeting by Assignment Type

Last week, we went over how Escape Online determines vacancies through available FTE. That is perfect for some assignments (teachers) but not so much for others (volunteers). And, that is why Escape Online considers the type of assignment when determining budget figures for salaries and vacancies.  Check it out.

Escape Online supports six different types of assignments, some of which are included in determining FTE for budgeting purposes:

• Paid – (Included) Employee is assigned to a position for a period of time. The assignment has a salary.
• Timecard – (Included) Employee is assigned to a position for a period of time. The assignment is paid from a timecard. The hours are entered through the Adjust Payroll activity.
• Extra – (Included) Employee works over 1.0 FTE. For example, this is used for a teacher that is working an extra period (6/5 of a day).
• Leave of Absence Paid (LOAPaid) – (Included) Employee is on a paid leave of absence from a position. The assignment has a salary.
• Leave of Absence (LOA) – (Excluded) Employee is on unpaid leave from a position. The assignment does not generate pay.
• Unpaid – (Excluded) Employee or volunteer is assigned to a position for a period of time. The assignment does not generate pay.

Looking at a typical district on one of our LIVE customer systems, we can see how this automation really makes great sense!  This particular district is a Joint Union High School with 905 paid assignments, 314 timecard, 52 extra, 2 paid LOA, 12 unpaid LOA, and 2 unpaid.

Using these figures, Escape Online will budget for 1,273 assignments (paid, timecard, extra, paid LOA). Escape Online will NOT budget for the other 14  assignments (unpaid LOA and unpaid). Perfect!

This type of flexibility gives you the freedom to create employee assignments for all of your changing needs without forcing you to manually include/exclude certain types from your position control budgeting for salaries and/or vacancies!

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Fixed Assets Made Easy

After being at Escape for only a month, I was ecstatic to see the Escape resolution process come full circle.

I came to Escape from the business office of a local school district.  Year after year, wrapping up fixed assets was an interesting adventure.  As an Escape user, it seemed to me that asset reports should provide a capital assets summary that would allow for an easy transfer of information into the SACS Form Asset and a quick summary of capital assets for the district’s financial auditors.

FA09 – Asset Annual Value Summary, looked like it should provide the needed information; however, it did not.  I contacted the district’s county Director of Integrated Fiscal Services for support and discussed my ideas with him and that is when the ball started rolling on some big changes for the FA09 report.   

During my first month at Escape, the FA09 report popped up on a Customer Care agenda and I had the opportunity to review the change request.  I saw the emails that went back and forth between the county, Customer Care, the Developer and the Testing Department (my original example was in the CR!).

Through an intense coordinated effort, the FA09 report was revamped and I am happy to report that last month Escape released big revisions for the FA09 report in the 3.12.04 SP2 patch bundle.  Beginning balances for the current year now match ending balances from the previous year and accumulated depreciation now calculates according to reporting guidelines.  The FA09 now summarizes capital asset data in a format that makes it an invaluable tool for SACS reporting and a district’s end of year audit.   

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