News and Blog
February 2007

Meet Escape's newest customer: Placer County Office of Education
Dateline: Roseville - February 2007 - Bob Towery

There is news, then there is NEWS! This is a huge and important announcement for us here at Escape Technology. Our company and our Escape Online 5 system has been selected by the Placer County Office of Education, for county-wide Finance/HR/Payroll/Credentials operations.  Placer COE serves over 60,000 ADA across 23 organizations.

In a letter to all staff at all the Placer districts and Sierra Community College, Gayle Garbolino-Mojica, Superintendent of Schools, announced:

It is my pleasure to officially announce our county-wide transition to a new financial and human resources information system provided by, Roseville based, Escape Technology. This new and functionally advanced system will provide compounding benefits for the payroll and finance disciplines and expanded capabilities for our Human Resource employees.

Over the past year we have gotten to know staff at the COE and all of the districts. We feel very proud to have been selected by this group of school business professionals. The implementation is already underway. Working together with PCOE's implementation team, we came up with another variation of "going live."

We will begin with HR, going live this July. Payroll will follow in January 2008. Finance goes live July 2008. This should spread the workload nicely, and is a logical progression. Training is beginning now for the HR staff, beginning with Position Control. We feel this phased approach will work at other large COE implementations as well.

This implementation is also personal for many of us who live in Placer County, and have students in several of the districts. We are confident this will be one of our best implementations ever! We once again thank everyone involved in the decision making process - we appreciate your trust in us and look forward to working with all of you toward a very successful implementation!

Countdown to going live at Dublin USD
Dateline: Roseville - February 2007 - Leslie Bailey


Escape's Kathy Carlson, Dublin's Cathy, Anne, Elaine, ACOE's Elsa

Escape had guests today, for payroll training. Dublin USD will be our first district live on all three main modules, Finance/HR/Payroll. Elaine is the CFO and has always been a fan of Escape. We really appreciate all they have contributed to the project as one of our pilot districts. It has been invaluable!

We shall continue to work together to have a smooth transition to Escape Online next month!

Escape for a Day - in Roseville
Dateline: Roseville - February 2007 - Bob Towery

Today we had the pleasure of visiting with about 35 current Escape Classic customers - to show them the new Escape Online system. Since the blog is new, we mentioned this to them, and we hope some of them will provide some comments.

From our side, the day was GREAT! Of course seeing everyone was wonderful. We also get tremendous feedback on Escape Online 5. People love the interface, the reports, exporting to excel.

The day was split, Finance in the morning, HR/Pay in the afternoon. Here are some of the comments overheard during the presentations:

I want it NOW. I'm going back to the district and telling them, let's get it NOW!
Thrilled about printer options -- Network printers and with windows option will save me a lot of time! No more setting up printers!! What am I going to do with all the extra time?
Exporting to Excel is the SO COOL!
Attachments is the best idea Escape has come up with yet!

Snapshots for every form is so wonderful!!
Viewing the documentation on line will make my job so much easier!! Very nice job!
Love the reporting and all of its functionality!
I love how I can now print only page 8 without printing the whole report!! Worth the wait!
My Reports is GREAT!!
Excited about the ability to use a mouse --- Can't wait!!
Forwarding reports will save us so much time and money! All I can say is WOW! I love it!
This is so cool how the account reports have all the account types together! YEAH! LOVE IT!
I just love the way OL5 budgets! They've thought of everything!
YEAH! No more rolling Position accounts into the new year!!! My job just got easier.


Escape's Carole Williams, North Sacramento ESD's Patty and Michelle, Escape's Gayle Lucas.


Sacramento City USD's Karen, Escape's Kathy Carlson, San Lorenzo USD's Sue B.


Fairfield USD's Kari, Ron and Bruce.


Sierra COE's Rose and Gary.


Gateway USD's Cathy, Redding USD's Kathy, and Gateway USD's Charlene.


Shasta High School's Jane, Kathy from Escape.

Account Magic
Dateline: Roseville - February 2007 - Bob Towery

Accounts are one of the primary building blocks of an integrated school business system like Escape Online 5. In one way or another, accounts are present in nearly all activities. But like the picture above, few accounts stand alone. New position accounts, in particular, cause other accounts to “sprout up all around them.”

We have just added an incredible new capability, which will save users hours and hours of time. Of course, that is one of the things Escape is best at – saving our users time.

Before we show you the new feature, we need to remind you that Escape Online 5 has a multi-year database. All data from all years is available continuously, with a single login.

Up until today, in any system we are familiar with, when you create a position account, you are then required to create 5-7 associated benefit accounts (i.e., a new classified salary account is going to require a PERS account, etc.).

After today, for Escape Online 5 users – creating the one 2xxx position account will automatically create the associated benefit accounts!

But we didn’t stop there. When “next year accounts” have been created, typically when budgeting begins, and you create a new salary account for this year, you will most likely also want to use that account in next year. No fear, Escape is here! If next year accounts have been created, all new accounts that are created automatically will be created for next year as well!

If you create any account where the first character of the Object code is 1 (certificated salaries) or 2 (classified salaries), Escape Online creates all of the associated benefit accounts (i.e., 31x1, 32x1, 31x2, 32x2, and so on) for you -- automatically.

The same is true for the "cash" account for every fund-resource-project year. When you create a new account, Escape Online checks to see if the cash account exists, if it doesn't, Escape Online creates it.

Checking it out

Want to see all of the accounts that were created? Easy, just go to the next tab on the form. It shows all of the accounts automatically created.

Linking to past / future years

When you are on the Account form, you can see the current year account numbers, previous year account numbers and future year account numbers. They are all listed on the Linked Accounts tab. So, even if you change an account number (or account structure!), that account is still linked to all previous/future fiscal years, regardless of the account number or structure!

Now, you're talking about an incredible time saver. Not only do you not have to create those half-dozen or so accounts for the current fiscal year, but you don't have to duplicate that effort for future fiscal years either.

Conforming to SACS

Since creating accounts from "scratch" is fairly rare, wouldn't it be nice if there were a few "guidelines" to help you along? Escape Online has got you covered.

When you define the account structure (during implementation), you can define the required components for the different account types. For example, you can require users to enter Fund, Object, Resource, Function and Goal for expense accounts; as opposed to a revenue account, where you could require just Fund, Object and Resource.

SACS has requirements too, though. So, you can import the SACS tables into Escape Online and have it warn you if you are not adhering to standards. Even if you make multiple mistakes, like the screen capture below, Escape Online displays all of the warnings in a roll over message that can also be viewed via a notepad editor.


Setting it up

Escape Online provides flexibility for both counties and districts. You can have multiple account structures with each organization (or district) selecting the one appropriate to their function.

The SACS warnings shown above are set up at the organization level with a simple lookup window. This allows districts to require SACS components only, validate structure or simply warn the user if there is a problem.

Summing it up

We have once again gone completely beyond the requirements, and made life better for Escape users. One positional account gets you all the associated benefit accounts in this year and next (when applicable). That’s going beyond!