My, how time flies when you are having fun.  Not only has the Friday Feature grown, but access to the Employee record has been completely redesigned, a great advancement.

Now users can be given access tab-by-tab. Think about how great that is. The Employee record has almost two dozen tabs, and it is a rare user that needs access to every single one of them.  More often than not, a user needs access to only some of them. So if Patty Payroll only needs access to the Pay Cycle tab and a handful of others, then the system manager can set up her access to be just that.

The setup is easy, too.  Here is a shot of a typical setup:

The tabs that are highlighted have edit or read access, based on the dialog in which they are selected. (Obviously, you cannot select a tab in both!)

The left dialog shows the edit tabs and the right dialog shows the read-only tabs.

In this example, you can see that the user has edit access to Addons (red arrow in the left dialog) and read access to Assets (red arrow in the right dialog). Finally, you can see that this user has no access to deductions (see how the yellow arrow points out that the Deduct tab is not highlighted in either dialog).

It is great improvements like this and users like you that take the time to learn more about Escape Online 5 that keep the Friday Feature going week after week, year after year.

Thanks for reading!

We will see you right here next week.

The process is tedious and exhausting at times, but the outcome is well worth it.  We do our best to make sure that the payroll changes we make to fix one thing don’t end up having a negative effect on systems with different payroll setup.

And what do you know, IT WORKS!  And it’s pretty cool.  First you plug the scanner into a USB port on your computer.  Then, while updating assets that have been received, you just have to put your cursor in the Tag Number field, point the scanner at the bar code on the Tag and pull the trigger.  The Tag number is magically entered into Escape Online 5 without me having to type a thing.  And it works with ANY bar code number.  So if I’m in the Serial Number field in the asset record, I can point to the bar code line of the item’s serial number, pull the trigger and, Voila!, it’s there.

The best part of this is that you’ll never have a typo again.

Introduced in 11.04, this new task puts you in the fast lane for calculating starting balances for projection years.  With a single click of the button, you can calculate (or recalculate) one starting balance line item for each projection year for each fund/resource/project year.

What a great idea! In fact, it was so great that many of you seconded that by making it one of the top 5 CRs in the customer-driven finance vote for 11.04!

But that’s not all.  It is fast.  And it is durable.  It can go around the track (so to speak) as many times as you need. You can use this task multiple times.  If you are using it for a second (or third or fourth) time, Escape Online creates another budget line item for the difference between the existing starting balance and the recalculated value for the projection year.

Budgeters, start your engines.  Go!!

 Jennifer and I enjoyed working with Alicia and Tim and appreciate their responsiveness and willingness to work with us directly.   

Paradigm’s Executive Director, Constance Laflamme, says of the endeavor, “We were thrilled to partner with Escape on implementing a standard query that enables our clients to easily extract the data needed for Medicaid billing and reporting purposes. This report only enhances the services Paradigm and Escape offers its clients, and more importantly eases the workload for school personnel who work to make their Medicaid billing programs successful. Escape staff were great to work with and were impressed with their responsiveness to the project.”

San Joaquin County’s Escape implementation is cruising along! We have completed all of the Overview training and 95% of the Core Training and users are now attending Working Sessions at the county where they are doing data entry and testing scenarios in Escape. The County and District staff are picking up on our software very quickly and really taking to it well. In fact, I was incredibly impressed at all the trainings and especially the most recent ones we had at SJCOE as all the users were performing their hands-on exercises with very little assistance from myself or other members of the Implementation team!

There’s also some really amazing stuff being done in this project on the IT side…but that will be my next blog!!

2011 retirement earnings (over 3 billion):

    $938,306,949               PERS

$2,552,601,955                STRS

$ 3,490,908,904               Total

2011 EE/ER Contributions (over half a billion):

$165,630,833                    PERS

$416,137,986                    STRS

$581,768,819                    Total

2011 Retirement report file “lines” including adjustments (over a million):

   522,936                           PERS

   642,291                           STRS

1,165,227                           Total

2011 Employee Paid (W2s) and Employee Paycheck/ACH

  79,312                              Employee Paid W2s

759,898                              Paycheck/ACH

These figures do not include our Escape Classic customers.  Next year we will see more growth with Marysville JUSD converting from Escape Classic to Escape Online 5. Monterey COE and San Joaquin COE will also be joining the Escape family!

Sometimes cents matter.  Each district or organization needs to make that determination. Do they include cents in the budget account totals or not?  (Now, of course, budget items include cents, because that information comes from salaries and expenditures and rounding at that low level could skew the total for the account.)

Do you want your budget account amounts to round?  Actually, the question is two-fold.  If you do want to round, how do you want to round?  Escape Online gives you three options.

Let’s use the example of an account with budget items that total $57.31:

• No rounding – Allow pennies at the budget account total: $57.31
• Round up – No pennies.  Round to the next nearest dollar: $58
• Standard rounding – No pennies. Round to the nearest dollar: $57

Plus, if you choose one of the rounding options, your budget reports will show the rounded figure without the cents!

Now that makes sense!

NOTE: Changing the rounding in the middle of budget development should be done with care and consideration, especially if you copy from previously created models.