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.

Not with Escape Online!

When we first started supporting school business back in 1992, we knew that creating new calendars each year was a task that begged for automation.

So we made it automatic!

When you copy a calendar from one fiscal year to the next, Escape Online automatically sets the new fiscal year and “moves forward” the contract begin/end dates and any “exception” dates you defined.

But that’s not all.

We also knew that some dates move and some dates don’t. So, we created a copy option for you to decide how to implement the logic for what will move and what will not.

• If you put a zero (0) in the last column of the date, Escape Online keeps the same month and day in the next calendar year.
• If you put a one (1) in the last column of the date, Escape Online moves the date to the closest same day of the week in the same month for the next calendar year.

To truly see the power of this, let’s take a look at a Classified 10 month calendar, a basic calendar in most districts.

Let’s review the  highlighted lines:

• Staff Development – This is a one. This is always on a Monday.
• Thanksgiving Break – Now this can go either way. You can enter a one to keep it always a Thursday, OR you can enter a zero to keep the same date because it moves from one week to the next and you will have to fix it anyway.
• Christmas Day – This is a zero. Christmas is always on December 25, period.

Now you may think this doesn’t have enough days for a calendar, but that is because we know that every school business calendar relies on the work week.  You only need to create “days” for the exceptions!

Now that’s some smart year end automation.

To truly take advantage of this automation, we teach customers to use a naming standard that does not include fiscal year. This way they can enter the name of the calendar in all job category and class records only once!

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.

Making a change to a position account is easy and, of course, Escape Online will use the new account from that time forward.  But, how does an HR Technician update the position accounts that have already been paid?

Easy!

They use the Position Account Retro activity. Check it out.

The Position Account Retro activity allows you to make changes to positional accounts for prior periods that have already been processed through payroll.

This means that you can correct positional accounts without having to create manual journals!

Yay!

As you can see, you can define which accounts to change and what they should be changed to, as well as the time frame.

When you post this, Escape Online fixes the accounts for assignments in the most recent fiscal year. Escape Online then searches for employees with those assignments. Then, Escape Online creates a journal entry to correct the general ledger AND payroll detail.

This means that you will see the changes in payroll labor and fiscal reports, AND you can load them into budget as actuals for a Revised Budget Model.

Now that’s change you can embrace.

Keeping the house clean sure can put a damper on all of the other work we all need to get done every day.  The same can be said in computer environments.  The tools we use to keep our PCs and networks clean from foreign programs and network traffic can have a dramatic impact on overall performance.  This exact scenario played out recently here at Escape.

In an effort to protect ourselves and our customers from malicious attacks, Escape implements a strict network security and antivirus policy.  Recently a major update to our anti-virus software had an extremely negative impact on our Escape Online 5 software product.  The scanning engine of the new anti-virus software was scanning all of the data as it was transmitted between the application servers and the clients.  This resulted in a 200% decrease in performance.  Once the culprit was identified as the system security software, action was taken to eliminate the issue.

The first step is to add the Online5.exe to the safe processes exclusion list in your security/anti-virus software.  This is normally done from a centralized security management server and pushed/pulled down to the clients.  Second, you will want to add the following processes that run on the application servers themselves:

EscapeTech.CrystalWindowsService.exe

EscapeTech.Online5MgrSvc.exe

EscapeTech.OnlineCoreService.exe

EscapeTech.ServerServices.ServiceGroupManagerHost.exe

Online5.exe (for the client application)

The Escape Online 5 application (both server and client) only has the ability to pass information to and from itself so there is no real risk of the application contracting and/or passing along viruses to other systems.  The exception to this is if you upload an infected file from your PC to a server via the client.  This being said, if you don’t have system security software installed on all of your systems you really should consider it.

*It is very important to not only add these files to the file exceptions list, but also to the process exceptions list.  This will ensure that work is being sent and received over the network and locally on the system without the interference of antivirus software scanning.

But, the longer answer is that HR is already entering the employee’s name, address, social security, and everything else on the planet. Why not allow them to enter the CalPERS Id too (if they have it) and save the county personnel the extra step of entering the data?

Escape encourages and supports this type of cooperation with some special logic for the PERS Member ID field in the Employee record.

The look of the Employee record when entering a NEW employee. (Note, the Social Security Number will be “masked” once this record is saved.)

See the red arrow pointing to the PERS Member ID field in the Employee record. Normally, this is a read-only field (marked with the lock icon like you see in the field above), but this is a new employee, not just a new employee for the district but a new employee for the county, so the field is unlocked and available for editing.

How does Escape Online know whether or not to make the field editable? Excellent question. In a county-wide system, Escape Online tracks retirement at both the county and district level, ensuring that all earnings at all district locations are tied together in one easy county record.

So, when the HR technician enters the employee’s Social Security Number, Escape Online checks the database to see if that employee already exists. AND, if that employee does exist, Escape Online loads information for that employee, saving the district data entry effort.

And, that’s the point!

By using special logic, the district can save the county time by entering the PERS Member ID, and the county can save the district time by automatically pre-filling fields for employees that are already in the system.

Now that’s some automatic and purposeful cooperation.  Go team!

If you want to know more about how Escape Online connects district employees to county retirement, see the Friday Feature – Managing Your People.

We took the headache out of setting up benefits for employees! We had over 64 connections and multiple users at some of the connections for the 2013 Benefit webinar.

The webinar guided users through how Escape Online 5 offers so many variations for calculating benefits and the hierarchy of the setup records. We learned how changes to the Employee Record overrides setup. We learned quick ways to search for employees with benefit providers and as with every webinar, we also looked at which reports to use to reconcile benefit provider invoices and employee benefit setup.

Our customers had the chat box smoking with questions and sharing good tips.

I would like to thank Julie Leaman for managing the busy chat box during the Benefit webinar.

Can you believe it, our next webinar is 2013 Year End Training on May 30th? Time flies when you’re having fun. I’ll see you there.

That is why Escape Online gives counties the ability to create a supplemental STRS file, holding back an organization (or two!) from the regular file and submitting to STRS as a supplemental. (While this Friday Feature focuses on moving an entire month for a single organization, the ability to “move forward” also works for pay cycles — using a flag — and for retiree line items — from the STRS editor.)

Check it out!

To move an organization’s retire info forward one month, is as easy as selecting the Move Forward task from the STRS Processing activity. You will be prompted for the organization to create a supplemental file.

Once you process the month, there are two ways to see quickly that a supplemental file has been created. We show an asterisk next to the month.

If you want a more detailed look, you can open the year and see the list of organizations. The org you moved forward (or created a supplemental file for) is also marked with an asterisk.

Nice!

This feature is great for keeping the county on track for reporting retirement, saving time and money, and reducing penalties!

Seriously, the beauty of a specific sort/group option for a report really is in the eye of the beholder. While some reports have multiple hard coded sorts, dozens upon dozens need to allow the user to define this at run time. To accommodate this, we have created a feature we call “dynamic sort groups.”

To see how this works, let’s take a look at the Pay34, which is used to build a list of deducts/contribs for payroll reconciliation.

Here are screenshots of the report parameters and the lookup for the sort/group options.

As you can see, this is a very powerful report.

Since it is used to reconcile pay, it is also quite important for it to be as flexible as possible.

Thus, the numerous parameters and the dynamic sort options, which you can see at the bottom.

This particular report has four sort options. That means you can define four different sort/group options at run time.

So, if you pick bargaining unit for sort/group 1 and deduct/contrib group for sort/group 2, your report is going to be sorted first by bargaining unit and then by deduction/contribution group.

Then, you could run it a second time—picking pay date and person type instead—producing a completely different report!

The ability to dynamically define the way you need a particular report to sort/group so that you are more efficient on a daily basis truly is a work of art, beautiful to all who behold.

Just wanted to let you know I did a mass add on evaluations for classified employees and it worked PERFECTLY! I pulled the batch and deleted those employees that had already had an evaluation submitted because I did not want to double up and I checked that probationary employees were not in the batch, added my criteria and finally posted the evaluations. It worked!!! This is going to make my job so much easier every year!!!

~ Nancy, Personnel Clerk

Thanks Nancy! We are working on several more “Mass Add” features that we are sure you are going to love.