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Performance Enhancements - Reports - Update |
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Reports on fire! In addition to the information in the release notes, I'd like to provide some more detail on the performance increases of several reports. Keep in mind that what our development team has accomplished is much more than just making the reports available to the user more quickly. They are also no longer locking any data, thus causing contention/performance problems for other reports or processes. They are also being much more friendly to SQL Server so it can attend to other tasks. |
Let's take a look at the numbers...
| Report | Reads before | Reads after | CPU (secs) before | CPU after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pos03a | 165,432 |
28,676 |
15.7 |
.6 |
| Pos03b | 164,309 |
28480 |
14.2 |
.7 |
| Fiscal07a | 420,834 |
251,255 |
20.4 |
4.2 |
In the case of the first two reports, you can see that we are now reading only 1/6th as much data, and we are completing the read operation nearly 30 times faster. The third report is completing five times faster. Other reports that were updated in this release show similar gains. And keep in mind this is during a time when we are also developing new reports, and fixing non performance related issues in others.
These tests were performed on our own test server. What about in the real world? Ventura COE recently went live with version 08.06 on their production system. This means the important Ledger04 report performance enhancements are now available to their users. We have reviewed the statistics for this report before and after, and they show:
Average time to complete - before: 54.7 seconds, after: 3.4 seconds. That's over 16 times faster.
We know all users will appreciate both the performance gains of the reports themselves, not to mention that they are no longer causing locking issues. We thank you for your patience as we work through these issues.
We again wish to thank James Cordova, VCOE's SQL ace, for his valuable assistance troubleshooting SQL issues.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
This release included three new activities, a Save/New button and a re-introduction of the AP Payments activity. And, of course, performance improvements.
This release includes many report performance enhancements. We optimized the Fixed Assets List (FA01), the Depreciation Detail (FA05), Cash Transaction Summary (Fiscal07), Position Staffing by Account (Pos02), Position Staffing by Position (Pos03) STRS History (Retire08), County PERS History (Retire95) and County STRS History (Retire96).
In an effort to obtain meaningful user experience statistics, we have instrumented the Escape Online 5 client to record the actual timings of what users see. This means that we are recording the times for displaying search pages, getting lists, opening and closing forms, and so on.
This is necessary due to the wide range of user experiences that we see or hear about within our customer base. What we are attempting to do is gather data in a scientific style, that will enable us to review the user experience across all our customers, and share this with them. In addition, customers can monitor these statistics themselves since we have provided activities to view the data.
We expect to see a variety of statistics that will be helpful to us and our customers. There may be configuration or network changes that can increase response times as seen by users. There may be particular activities that we need to focus on to increase response times. These statistics will finally give us a way to measure response times of not only our system, but also network speeds.
We have accomplished this with what we believe is no measurable impact on performance. The statistics that we capture “piggy back” onto communications that are already occurring between client and server services. During “idle times,” the client packages statistics and sends them to a service for recording. The recording occurs in a separate database from the Online 5 database.
Customer statistics databases will replicate at intervals to a central database here at Escape. This database contains no data regarding actual customer data (like SSN of course); the only information that isn’t purely statistical in nature is the UserId of the user that requested a given transaction. Regarding the replication from customer networks to ours, Customers have indicated that they do not have any security concerns since this data is purely outbound. Escape is not sending any information to customer databases.
We do have a single on/off switch for these statistics, which is system-wide. The statistics gathering software and database are present in this release, but we are installing it with the stats gathering “turned off.” We will then turn them on customer by customer, to make certain there aren’t any issues.
An individual user can see the user statistics with the Client Statistics choice in the System module. System managers can review statistics with the new System Statistics activity, which includes numerous filter methods. The resulting lists can be exported to Excel for further analysis. We do not have any reports which address the statistics at this time. We will build these after we have gathered a meaningful amount of data.
We recently identified a flaw in the AP Payment batch entry process that caused records to not be created when the batch was saved. We determined that the best solution was to change to the standard approach of saving payments as entered. As a result we have enhanced the Payment activity to allow for payment entry.
To make this method as efficient as possible, we introduced a new “Save/New” button and rearranged the payment form. We wanted to make this available to you as soon as possible, while we continue to refine it, including the ability to edit payment accounts before saving the payment.
When we have completed enhancing the Payments activity, we will remove the Enter Payments activity. Until that software release, you may use either activity to enter payments. In a future release we will convert the Enter Direct Payments and Enter Employee Payments to use the new methodology.
Independent contractor reporting is now available in Escape Online. Using the new Ind. Contractor Vendors activity in the Purchasing group, you can quickly search for and report to the State independent contractors in accordance with the law.
The search allows you to find all Vendors that are flagged as independent contractors that have active requisitions within a date range with an aggregate total of $600 or greater. We have included a script with the release that will flag all vendors that currently are flagged as 1099 and have a federal tax Id that "looks" like an SSN (xxx-xx-xxxx).
From the form, you can directly modify IC vendor fields, including Contract Amount, Contract Dates and others.
A "snapshot" report updates the vendor records listed with the EDD information and automatically creates the file for EDD reporting.
Always looking for ways to save keystrokes, we have introduced the Save/New button. When you click this button, it saves and validates the record you are in and automatically opens a new form, ready for input!
And, if that wasn't enough, we introduced several new reports:
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
This release review, Terri covered 19 CRs. Attendance was high and so was the interest level. Almost every attendee group had questions. Here is a summary of the questions with answers.
Q: Will the copy function be on Budget Transfers also?
A: In this release, the copy button is displayed but unavailable. This functionality will be available in a later release (CR 7487).
Q: Do independent contractor totals get reset after they have been reported?
A: No, they get reset on January 1st of the next year.
Q: When you set the amount in the Independent Contractor Vendor activity to $600 does Escape aggregate the amount on all requisitions for the vendor that fall into the date criteria? For instance, if I have a vendor with three requisitions of $250 each between Jan 1 and Aug 14 will this vendor show up on the list because the total exceeds $600?
A: Yes. The software is totaling all vendor requisitions and will report the vendor as soon as they reach the $600.00 limit.
Q: Why doesn't the EDD script include the direct payments for the automatic update? The majority of our payments we report are direct payments and we have several hundred that we would need to manually update.
A: The answer to this question is two-part.
First, the script only updates vendor records. It marks all 1099 vendors with a Federal Tax Id like a SSN as independent contractors.
Second, at this time, direct payments are not included in the automatic totaling for reporting vendors. For this release users will need to manually update the Vendor record's Contract Amount to add these vendors to the EDD Report. This functionality will be available in a future release (CR 7410).
Q: When Terri was verifying the unpaid balance in the Enter Payments activity, we couldn't see how she was doing it.
A: Unfortunately, the Webinar software we use does not display tool tips or show how columns can be manipulated. Terri was moving the columns over to show the full Vendor message. She also hovered over the field to display the tool tip.
On any list in Escape Online, users can move columns by clicking and dragging. Tool tips are available throughout the system: on lists and forms when the entire text is not displayed and on search pages (at the bottom of the search dialog).
Q: What is the ‘Favorites’ showing on Search pages now?
A: Favorites is a new feature that allows you to save searches. This will be shown in the next Software Review on September 11th at 9am.
Q: Where can we find the Independent Contractors Knowledgebase Item that we saw during the Release Review?
A: Here is the link to our Knowledgebase item: Reporting Independent Contractors with Release v08.07
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If you missed this last release review, take heart we recorded it. Go to the webinar archive on our website to download the recording. Note that it is an hour long.
Please join us for the next Release Review. They are held every second Thursday of the month. If you would like an invitation or if you have any trouble registering please contact Terri:
It's our intention to continually improve Escape Online 5 based on customer requirements, such as those that are imposed on them by government agencies.
The California Employment Development Department (EDD) requires school districts to report vendor information to the EDD within 20 days of making payments or entering into a contract that in aggregate equals or exceeds $600 in any calendar year.
Our customers were manually determining who these vendors are, and creating the reports by hand. Several customers asked Escape to automate this report generation and we have done so.
The new Independent Contractor reporting activity is provided to all customers within the annual Software Maintenance Plan, at no further charge.
Independent contractor reporting is now available in Escape Online!
Using this new activity in the Purchasing group, you can quickly search for and report to the State independent contractors in accordance with the law.
The search allows you to find all Vendors that are flagged as independent contractors that have active requisitions within a date range with an aggregate total of $600 or greater. 
From the form, you can directly modify IC vendor fields, including Contract Amount, Contract Dates and others.
A "snapshot" report updates the vendor records listed with the EDD information and automatically creates the file for EDD reporting.
Here is a link to the article that contains detailed instructions and screen captures to walk you through the process: http://www.escapetech.com/kb/questions.php?questionid=82
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