News and Blog
January 2009

Questions and Answers from Release v08.11
Dateline: Roseville - January 2009 - Sue Vroomman

Our recent Webinar was very well attended.  This was the biggest audience so far.  Thank you to everyone who attended. 

This was a jam-packed release review with 28 CRs demonstrated. We also enjoyed having lots of first-time attendees.

Here are the questions from this release:

Q:  If I do not have any employees that have dual retirement setup, do I need to change all the add-on’s and Position types?
A:  No. This is only for dual retirement reporting. It doesn’t hurt having the setup in place, just in case.

Q:  Is a check printed for the "petty cash" example?
A:  Yes, it will print from the Petty Cash Bank Account.

Q:  After importing the list of assets into Escape, if you close the activity without posting what happens with the imported file? Do you lose the import?
A:  The import file is saved on your network and you will not lose the import file. If the user closes the form without saving, no assets will be updated and the user can re-import the file.

Q:  What does the term, "Model ID" mean and where does it come from?
A:  Model ID is a system generated number for a Budget Model that’s been saved in Escape Online 5. Original Budget Model Id’s begin with OBFY and Revised Budget Model ID’s begin with BRFY.

Q:  Did CR7840 fix the problem with the initial month of actual pay for timecard assignment being missed when budget is loaded from HR?
A:  Yes. CR7840 fixed the problem with timecards being loaded multiple times into budget during the Load Salaries from HR task.

Q:  The new feature to for searching Budget Transfer & JE’s by account component is really cool, will it match our current account structure?
A:  Right now, the search only shows Fund, Object, Resource, Project Year, Goal, Function, Location, and Program. We have created CR8092 to address this. look forward to showing you that in a future Release Review.

Visting VCOE Districts
Dateline: Roseville - January 2009 - Barry Collins

Happy New Year to you! I hope you enjoyed the holidays and are ready for an eventful 2009. With no State budget and challenges on every front, school business will certainly have a busy year! We at Escape are determined to provide assistance as we can, with both our product and services. Toward that end Ramona Marshall, our COO, and I made a visit to Ventura County shortly after the start of the year, to meet with some of our Online 5 users there. Our primary purpose was to visit not with County staff or District Business Managers, but to meet with end users from the various departments in the Districts. Ramona and I visited with six groups of users over three days, coordinated by the County. VCOE support staff attended each session, and the folks that met with us were gracious and well prepared.

We wanted to hear what end users have to say about Online 5, acknowledge that we have work to do, share what we are doing today to improve the product, and exchange ideas. I have a unique background that allows me to function well at this level. Before joining Escape 20 years ago, I worked in school business as a tech professional, working on a daily basis with folks just like the people we were meeting with at VCOE. And for most of my 20 Escape years I worked on site implementing systems and training users, although in recent years I have moved off of the “front lines” of customer care, to an executive position.

So you might say that Escape users are my “people”, and I truly enjoy the challenges we face together. I am able to listen with some expertise in both our product and the user’s business, to provide insights into why our product works as it does and where we are headed with our continuing development. And I am in a position to influence product development priorities. As we moved from meeting to meeting, and people came in with their laundry lists of questions and concerns, Ramona and I listened, advised, brainstormed, took notes. We left with a long list of action items, but here is a short summary list:

  • We must focus first on making the software faster.
  • Classic is a tough act to follow – we must continue to add in the great Classic features as we can.
  • Additional reports are desired, as is a more robust report delivery mechanism.
  • Some activity work flow can be streamlined.
  • Training doesn’t end when users go live, follow up training is critical.
  • The exchange of information with customers is vital to our success.

We did receive many compliments about the software. Users love the ability to run multiple activities at once, the look of printed reports, the export feature, attachments, approvals, real time payroll calculation. They were happy to learn about search favorites, the upcoming quick links, the release reviews, and many little tips that we shared. They acknowledged that there is incremental improvement in performance. They were complimentary of our support staff, and that of the County. They see progress and remain committed to working with us to continue the evolution of this product, for which we at Escape are very grateful.

The good news is that we are, and have been, hard at work addressing issues that were reported during our visit, as well as those we receive every day through our normal support services. We release monthly software updates, each with up to 100 software enhancements. We have two developers dedicated to report development. We have a major update to our application and its underlying platform that will address performance and stability issues. And we continue to seek feedback from users on functionality, which helps us to improve the usability of the product.

Thanks to all the VCOE district staff for your hospitality and your continuing support of Escape.

Another Escapee!
Dateline: Roseville - January 2009

Many of you know that Julie has been out of the office for awhile. That’s because she had a baby! He arrived a little early, but Mom and baby are both doing fine.

As of Monday, January 19th, he weighs 7 lbs 12.5 oz. He is a doll, mixing the good looks of both Mom and Dad.

Julie will be rejoining ECC in early February. It’s been a little bit crazy without her, but everyone has pulled together to pick up the slack.

All of us are very excited for the Leaman family.

Introducing Tom Henzie, Data Technician
Dateline: Roseville - January 2009 - Tom Henzie

I’m happy to join Escape Technology and have the opportunity to work with such a great group of people. After many years at a large software development firm it’s a welcome change to return to an environment where all efforts are appreciated and the customer comes first. After learning of Escape Technology’s service to school business since the 1980’s, seeing the quality of the Escape Online 5 product and having the opportunity to join the team, the move was easy.

My previous work was with billing software and although I was part of many types of projects my concentration was always database conversions. Conversions were the priority as they were highly visible and a major concern for the customer.

I received satisfaction being part of and leading small development teams that carried projects from beginning to end. We worked side by side with customers and did everything possible to smooth their transition from one product to another. I can see this is also the case at Escape Technology.

I’m ready for the new challenges of learning the Escape Online 5 application and how it addresses the necessities of California school business. I’m going to start by working at the database level and again with conversions! I’ve been converting data since the days of ledger cards so I’m confident I can apply past experience here at Escape Technology. I know customer expectations are high and I look forward to working with many of our customers in the future.

Welcome to 2009
Dateline: Roseville - January 2009 - by Bob Towery

Welcome to our first news item of the 2009 calendar year. Regular readers of the Escape news and blog know that there was a falloff in the amount of our communications last Fall. Most of you know that Ramona and I were each battling some health issues. So we focused on getting the most important things done in our working hours, and let go of some others, including our running commentary.

One of our plans for this year is to get back to regular news, for our customers and friends.

Speaking of plans, that’s really the main purpose of this news item, to let you in one some of our plans. At Escape, my two partners and I have an offsite meeting each Fall to do strategic planning, work through our budget, personnel issues and so on. Here is a picture from this year’s Yearly Planning Session, which was held last October:


You’ll note that Ramona Marshall, our Chief Operating Officer, is now included. When we got started, Barry reminded me that this was our 20th year of doing the YPS. We are each thankful for our successful business, and the role that each employee and customer plays in it. And now adding Ramona to the management team is both exciting and invigorating.

We came away from the meeting with a solid plan and a big list of action items. I won’t bore you all the details, but I think a couple of them are significant and I want to share them with our customers:

  • Job number one is to focus the company on making current customers happy with our system. It’s a brand new system, and it’s a very large and complex one. And everyone knows we make a great deal of progress each month. But the fact is there are performance and other issues that are affecting our users. So this is our number one focus. Besides all the monthly fixes and enhancements, we are doing well on our .Net 3.5 conversion, which will be released in a couple of months, which we believe will cure the client memory leak problem and add other performance improvements.
  • The second item is additional staff. By bringing on the new customers, that have been waiting for us to get the Online 5 system live for quite some time, we are now having our best year ever, financially. So these funds will be put to work with several new employees. One has already been hired, and an upcoming news item will introduce him. We are interviewing for new staff in the testing and support areas. And we are putting another resource into payroll development, which we will also talk about in detail later.

These are the highest important takeaways from our planning session, and of course we have already begun. Obviously the next few years are going to be difficult in California school business. We know that we have the opportunity to help every user do their job better, with our system. This is the year the system realizes that potential. That’s what the management team and everyone else at Escape Technology is committed to.

Release v08.11
Dateline: Roseville - January 2009

This release focused on Budget. Fourteen changes to be exact, with a special emphasis on budgeting for vacancies, budget transfers and routing JE and budget transfer approvals by account components. We implemented five performance enhancements, introduced dual retirement support, fixed asset inventory import/export and a new activity specifically designed for pay managers. On the report side, there were 17 new/improved reports included in this release. We also resolved 15 known issues.

This release included 79 changes that apply to all of our customers and 37 more that are custom (generally, checks and purchase order changes or implementations). Here is a summary of the changes, but for a complete overview, listen to the recording of the Release Review we are holding on Thursday, January 22nd.

Performance Improvements

The area where Escape Online has seen the greatest performance enhancements is in reports. As we make changes to a report, we review the code and apply our new optimized standards. This release includes many reports that run substantially faster:

  • Object Summary (Fiscal01)
  • Employment Notification Letter (Employee10)
  • Employee Compensation Letter (Employee11)
  • Labor Distribution Detail (Pay10)
  • County Retirement Differences (Retire90)

Budget Time!

Budget time is here, and Escape focused this release on making sure you have all the budget tools you need. Specifically, we greatly simplified the process for budgeting HW benefits for vacancies. Now you can define budget assumptions in contributions and relate those to a job class. This makes it much easier to update assumptions (one place vs. several). When vacancies are loaded into the budget model, Escape Online will use this amount, factored by FTE if the vacancy is not for the entire year.

Plus, you can now include vacancies for pay periods that have been closed. (While this is a bit unusual, many districts have requested it.) And, we fixed some known issues with vacancies and timecard assignments not loading correctly. Finally, we changed the way you copy from accounts: Escape Online will now create a 0.00 budget item if there is no activity in the account or if the entries offset each other, resulting in a total of 0.00.

For budget transfers, we added several new fields to the search: account components and the ability to search for Escape Classic budget transfers using the batch number.

Copying Requisition Line Items from One Requisition to Another

Now you can copy line items from one vendor requisition to another: just specify the requisition number using the new Copy Line Items task available from the Items tab in Vendor Requisitions. The copied line items will be added to the current list of items. You can even execute the task multiple times to combine items from several requisitions.


And, of course, if the copied line items generate a change notice, Escape Online will automatically prompt you for the change notice message.

Import/Export Asset Inventory

Now you can import/export an asset inventory list to/from Microsoft Excel. The completely revamped Asset Physical Inventory activity allows you to import/update fixed assets from any third-party system that supports a CSV file. Using this activity, you can import/update the most common fields in the asset, including location, room, tag number, description, serial number, model number and others.


You can even use the activity for batch updating. For example, if you ordered a roomful of computers and want to update the assets using a spreadsheet. Once imported, you can review and modify the data before posting. All changes will be written to a history record.

Route JE/Budget Transfers by Account Component

Now, just like requisitions, journal entries and budget transfers can be set up for account component approvals. The approvals work just like requisitions with responsibility levels and may/must logic. You can specify which types of documents you want to set up for approval: budget transfers, budget revisions, cash, interfund cash, and general journal entries.

Of course, now that you can route budget transfers and journal entries for approvals, you will also need the ability to allow users to override those approvals. The new Approval Override task bypasses the component and organization approvals when the JE/budget transfer is in the Open or Submitted status.

The override DOES NOT bypass county-level approvals. In fact, county-level approvers will see no change to the way they work, regardless of the organization’s setup.

Employee Pay Management

Introducing an integrated Employee Pay Management activity, designed for Pay Managers. This new activity was created for organizations where pay managers need to create and set up employees.


The Employee Pay Management activity (for Pay Managers and above) provides full access to the employment, assignment, addon. Leave, benefit, pay cycle, taxes, retirement, ACH, deduction, and contribution records for an employee.

Dual Retirement

Now you can set up employees with dual retirement plans. Escape Online allows an employee to be a member of STRS and PERS simultaneously. So, if you have an employee with a secondary retirement plan, Escape Online allows you to define which system to use for an assignment or addon. Of course, this can be overridden in the assignment or the addon, except if the addon adjusts positional pay rates.

For your convenience, we updated the Adjust Payroll summary section to display SINGLE or DUAL, the retirement system name (PERS or STRS) and the member status, and whether or not the retirement system is primary or secondary for the employee.

New Reports

With every release we try to introduce new reports, new sort options and new filtering methods. Along with updating 9 Finance reports and 5 HR/Payroll reports, this release includes four brand new reports:

  • County AP Check Summary (ReqPay93) report – This report provides a quick way to verify the checks that were run for a date range. It can be grouped by organization or check date.
  • First Aid Expiration Letter (Employee15) report – This report produces a standard letter to notify employees whose certification has expired or will expire soon. Employees can be selected by a variety of criteria, and the letter can use a customized signature, plus other information.
  • CPR Expiration Letter (Employee16) report - The report produces a standard letter to notify employees whose certification has expired or will expire soon. Employees can be selected by a variety of criteria, and the letter can use a customized signature, plus other information.
  • Labor Distribution Detail (Pay10) report – This report has new sort and filter options. The new filter option allows you to select data by bargaining unit. The new sort option (called Employees with Units) groups the report by employees and includes three new columns for addons: units, days and other.

Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.