News and Blog
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Last week we talked about how Search Favorites can really increase your productivity. Now, let’s talk about another great time saver: My Reports. Similar to the concept of My Documents in Windows, My Reports allows you to organize, save and forward your reports from one easy location. There is a My Reports for the Finance module and one for the HR/Payroll module. It lists all of the reports that you have requested (but not snapshots, that would be just too many reports!). |
My Reports is like your own personal report spooler.
Basically, this means that you don’t have to print your reports as soon as they are done. When you send the report request, a line item is written to your My Reports. You can check on the status, see where it is in the queue, and, of course, view the final output.
Think of it as your own personal spooler. You can wait until you have time to print the report. In fact, you don’t even have to print the entire report. You can print only the page or pages that you need. Are you kidding me? I can run a 473 page report and print only pages 234-252. No kidding.
Or, don’t print it at all! In other words, you can capture a moment in time. Since Escape Online is a real-time system, the data is constantly changing. You can run a report, save it, and review it later, without ever printing a page.
Check out how I don't have to print every report or every page - what a great money saver.
And, I am going GREEN at the same time!
But, wait, there’s more!
Most organizations are set up to keep your reports for two weeks. But, you can change that for a particular report. No need to run the Birthday Report week after week. Run it once for a month and change the deletion date to have the system automatically delete it at the end of the month. Need to keep something longer term – like last year’s fixed assets report? No problem. You can change the deletion date to the desired date within your organization’s standards.
What about reports that you run for the same people month after month and then have to give it to them again because they misplaced it? Do I hear Board Report? You can run this once and then forward to a handful of users or even a distribution list that your system manager set up for you. The report will automatically show up in THEIR My Reports.
Distribution groups allow you to run a single report for numerous people.
Like to keep a tidy camp? Me too. I run lots of reports, and I don’t want to wade through them every time I go into My Reports. So, you can delete the reports right away, or push up the deletion date instead of extending it. But what if you forwarded that report? That’s okay. Escape Online uses pointers to make sure deleting it from your My Report doesn’t affect another user’s My Reports.
(Remember there is no filtering on forwarded reports. Users will get an exact copy of the report. If you want to filter a report by user-based permissions, you need to specify the distribution list when you RUN the report.)
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
This release saw the last of the preparations for the code catch up for .Net 3.5. The preparations including converting all activities to the new services, from which the code can then be translated or "caught up" with the new standards for .Net 3.5. Five CRs were dedicated to this task, including the very large report request services.
But, those CRs are all behind-the scenes. What are users going to see?
One of the most anticipated features is the additions to the Employees, Benefits and Employee Pay Management search pages. This enhancement included date range functionality (03/01..03/31) and the use of "as of" dates for assignments, addons, pay cycles, contributions, deductions and retirement.
The Employee and Employee Pay Management activities also had Permanency, Seniority, Ethnicity, and Email added to their lists.
Under certain circumstances, requisitions can be within the threshold but still over-expense an account. Escape Online will now warn you if an account exceeds the requisition amount or the account balance.
We did this by adding three new fields to the Payment Account List tab. The fields will let you know what the amount was from the requisition, what payments have been applied and the actual account balance.
The new Vendor History (ReqPay08) report details vendor activity, gathering data through journal entries where a requisition or check has the vendor Id in it. You can filter the report by a variety of criteria, including 1099, vendor Id, name, category, status, activity date. You can sort the report by vendor Id or vendor name.
The Payment Register (ReqPay05) report has a new sort method, by approval batch Id. This will sort the report by the approval batch Id for the checks, with the approval batch Id shown in the header.
We also added some cool new features to pay setup. Now districts can control whether or not negative net pay is allowed when gross pay is positive, earnings for SDI can be flagged by bargaining unit and you can backdate any payroll setup, including addons, as long as the pay date is still in the Open status.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Welcome to the second issue of the Friday Feature. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a productivity hound. If there is a way I can perform a task faster, better, more efficiently, I am all over it, especially if it is a task I am not too thrilled about: like entering data in a search form. Most activities in Escape Online 5 begin with a search containing tons of options: so I can get just-the-right list. Look at the Employee activity - I can find just one employee, searching by name, SSN, Empid, etc. But I can just as easily create a list of employees with nearly any attribute: hire date range, certificated/classified, those with a particular benefit setup - almost any combination of over 100 different fields. That's amazing! |
So how can I possibly be fast and efficient with 100 fields? I don't want to enter the same information over and over again when I have some common searches I run consistently. That's where Search Favorites come in!
Search favorites are a way that you can save the field entries of your search criteria. There is a Favorite button on every search page in Escape Online, and you can create up to 20 per activity. Each favorite can be set up to Auto Go, too. That means that when you select that favorite, the search is automatically launched, just as if you had pressed the Go button.
Now, I must admit that I don’t use the auto launch feature as much as our customers. What I like to do is create basic searches that I can build upon. For example, I just rewrote the Budget User Guide. I went through the entire process to create an original budget for next year. This meant that EVERY time I went into the Budget Entry activity, I had to enter the Fiscal Year and Model Id, regardless of any other search criteria I may need.
So, I created a favorite for that. It was a hundred times quicker. Okay, I exaggerate, but it was a lot quicker. Now I could use my mouse to quickly select my favorite, or press Alt+C, F, Enter (the keyboard equivalent for the Action menu, Favorites option, favorite 1). Voila! I had my basic criteria from which I could enter an account mask, look for vacancies or any other number of options. (Just think of what I might have done in the Employee activity!)
But enough about me, what about that Auto Go feature that customers love? Auto Go works great for favorites that contain all of the criteria you need. The example below shows a favorite that looks for business department requisitions that have had a PO number assigned during fiscal year 2009. The search is self-contained. It is a perfect candidate for Auto Go.
That’s the Search Favorites feature of Escape Online. If you have an example of a Favorite you would like to share, please contact me at the email address below.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
In my short tenure here at Escape, I have come to realize that unlike many software companies, Escape does a really good job of listening to our customers. We have an enormous system that takes on incredible challenges and does some pretty amazing things. It's relatively new, so like all complex software systems, it’s expected to have some issues that need to be worked through. As readers of the News page know, we have been working to steadily improve both functionality and performance, with a great deal of success.
This news item is about REPORTS. We probably have some of the best looking reports of any accounting system available for any industry. And as you know, with some input from key customers and hard work by our developers they have gotten increasingly fast and efficient to generate. But they are not perfect - yet. Different customers are having different issues with reports. Some report requests are not successfully completing, others are receiving errors between the Crystal report engine and the SQL server and still others are getting internal errors when a particular set of filter parameters are selected. One big piece of the puzzle is that we know the Crystal reports engine that is embedded in the .Net 1.1 platform is old and is no doubt partly to blame. But in the spirit of continuous improvement, we are not waiting until the upgrade to 3.5 is complete to start a systematic review of the issues our customers are having.
Escape Online has hundreds of reports and snapshots. The Budget Summary Analysis (Budget07) is just an example
with its easy-to-read pie charts designed to "explain" your budget to board members and the general public.
In meetings with customers and feedback we get from email, it seems these problems have become more frequent, especially since last fall. Besides the performance oriented .Net 3.5 conversion, reporting has become the number two area that we are focusing on. Thus we have formed the Report Task Force, a group of Escape employees and selected customers, to accomplish the following:
We understand how critical reports and their accuracy are to each customer given the kinds of difficult budgeting you are now facing which demand timely, accurate and consistent results. The goals of this task force is to give you exactly that. This is a very high priority for the company and for me personally. You will be hearing more from me on the Report Task Force as we make progress.
Want to know how to help? Click on the Comment link below and let us know how you would like to get involved. Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think. A brief review for any new readers.... The Escape Online 5 system is developed in a language and platform called .Net (pronounced "dot net"), provided by Microsoft. (Read about it on Wikipedia's .Net page). We began with the 1.0 version, and first went into production on the 1.1 version. Unfortunately, Microsoft chose to completely revamp major portions of the platform in the 2.0 release. We (and many other companies and public development projects) were unable to both completely rework our code, and develop the system for going live at our customers. We have initiated projects to get up on the newer versions a couple of times, but the needs of our customers trumped these efforts and consumed all our developers. Last Fall we initiated another effort, with a new plan, that we felt would be pretty efficient and have a good chance of success. Success being defined as ongoing releases of our system - based on the 3.5 platform, not the 1.1 platform utilized thus far. Our scheduled first release was planned for April 2009. And it is looking like we will be making that. It has really been a tremendous effort, internally. Thousands of programs have been converted, nearly ten thousand, to be more precise. We have remaining just a handful of programming tasks, and then a heckuva lot of testing. If the schedule holds, we will be releasing an alpha version in March to a couple of COE customers, for their assistance in testing.
Besides being on the current technology, and being able to utilize many enhancements to the platform made available by Microsoft, we are highly interested in performance and memory utilization improvements. Once again, there is good news here. Currently with our .Net 1.1 based system, some users (depending upon their exact version of Windows), experience a slowdown after 1 to 1.5 hours of usage, and have to restart the Escape client. This is due to "memory leaks" inherent in the .Net 1.1 platform. We did months of effort and got around their problems the best we could, but it was not a total fix, on the 1.1 platform. Our preliminary testing with the 3.5 system shows no client slowdown.
We don't have any hard statistics on other performance improvements, although everyone involved in the testing says it feels moderately faster, in several areas. And this is before having researched any ways that improvements in the C# (pronounced "C Sharp") language in the .Net 3.5 platform could increase our performance.
There have been many improvements to the development environment, known as Visual Studio 2008. Our developers will enjoy a more productive toolset.
The Crystal Reporting engine embedded in .Net moves from Crystal 7 to Crystal 10.5, and with it we hope much more stability in the reporting area.
Releasing our system on the 3.5 platform is by far our most important effort of 2009, and the whole company is focused on it. Our customers have been waiting too long for a fix to the memory leak issue, and everyone will be pleased when this is behind us.
Once again, I'm happy to report that the conclusion to this massive effort is at hand! We will keep you posted, you can count on that.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think. Starting today, every Friday I am going to profile a feature that I think is really cool. I am the technical writer and in-house cheerleader for Escape Technology. I have been here for almost nine years. I have watched Escape Online grow from an idea to a web-based product to its current county-wide, cutting-edge status. I love our software and the company. I get to learn about every feature because I have to produce the release notes and documentation. Sometimes I just want to shout because an activity, feature or function is so remarkable; I want everyone to use it! Silly, perhaps, but true.
My first article is about the Employee Pay Management activity. If you want to send in ideas for topics you would like to see covered, please feel free to contact me at the email address below.
What’s the difference between a district with 158 ADA and a district with 48,446? The answer is a great deal. Kidding aside, smaller districts are obviously going to have a smaller number of staff members and those staff members are going to have to use a broader spectrum of Escape Online activities.
Managing employees is an area where the difference between small and large districts is very apparent. In a large district, HR is often divided up among HR, leaves, benefits, and other divisions, with specific users performing limited data management, on a large number of employees. In a small district, one person could be charged with employee and payroll processing.
When Escape sold to individual districts, they tended to be larger and have multiple types of HR users. Now that we are working a great deal with COE's, we find lots of small districts where one or two users do the entire spectrum of HR and Payroll. Sitting down with these users, we realized the three activities we had built was not an efficient way for them to work.
That is why we recently introduced the Employee Pay Management activity. It is designed for those smaller districts where one person enters all of the information for an employee. It takes the best of the Employees, Employee Benefits and Employee Payroll Setup activities.
The Employee Pay Management activity is designed for pay managers, providing full access to the employment, assignment, addon, leave, benefit, pay cycle, taxes, retirement, ACH, deduction and contribution records. That means that using a single activity, you can quickly setup all the necessary records for an employee. Your only follow-on tasks would be for seniority, education, and evaluations.
The new activity has been very well received. Lynn, an HR/payroll technician from a district with 1,789 ADA, had this to say:
I really like the employee management activity. It puts it all in one place...very nice! The balance between small district, large district and county needs is always on our mind. We strive to create activities that can serve all the needs. If that cannot be done in a single activity or task, we put on our thinking caps, query our customers and use our extensive school business background to come up with the best solution possible, just like the Employee Pay Management activity.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think. During 2008 we had another large COE project take shape - our county-wide implementation at Sonoma County. Managing the project for the nearly 60 districts is Sonoma COE. Our Escape Online 5 system was selected after a rigorous RFP and subsequent evaluation that lasted several months. It's really been a pleasure to work with the highly qualified and motivated staffs at both the COE and the districts. They are quickly becoming Escape pros!
And we are happy to report that the first target was hit, namely taking these organizations live on January 5th, 2009:
These organizations are the first of four groups to go live on the Finance system. The remaining groups are going live on staggered dates throughout the 2009 calendar year. The HR/Payroll implementation will begin this summer, with several groups of districts beginning January 2010.
One group of people that are really contributing to the success of the project are the system analysts, Rosalie Sulgit-Shay, Tina Rodriguez and Kimberly Williams I work closely with all three, and they are responsible for training and support of the districts as they go live. We have been working with them all the way back to the RFP process and they are very thorough.
The overall leadership of the project on the SCOE side belongs to Daniel Bienkowski, Director of IT. Daniel reports:
So far, so good. We have a long way to go, with so many districts and users. We are encouraged by our first success, and Escape's response to our requirements. During 2008, there were about 25 changes, enhancements or new functionality required to go live with the Finance module. Nearly all of these were delivered on time. The only real hiccup was the interface to our county treasurer, which didn't become operational until a few days after we went live. Given all that Escape has going on, they did quite well for us, and are working on another set of enhancements as well. Escape has come along way in terms of managing their projects compared to when we first started looking at them in 2006. Also, the addition of their Business Analyst, Jennifer Kenney, was a big help with our data conversions. I am very encouraged. Due to the efforts of everyone, all has gone relatively smoothly, at least for projects of this size. I'm looking forward to the remaining districts going live on Finance, as well as the HR/Payroll conversions we will begin working on later this year.
As most people reading this news page know, conversions are difficult and most people would prefer to not have to change their system. So when we get feedback like this, it's quite exciting!
On January 30th, we got this quote from Anne Barron, Director of Business & Fiscal Services, Cotati-Rohnert Park USD
By the way, since I only ever send you problems, I thought I should tell
you we are all getting more comfortable in the system. I really love the
reports. They are so easy to read and understand. My staff is getting
braver about figuring things out on their own. LeeAnn has even done PO
changes to reduce encumbrances. I am using My Reports to send reports to
Jean to attach to entries, and to sites to show them things. So, we are
coming along. I can already tell we are going to be very happy with
Escape. On February 5th, another comment from Anne was passed along to us by Sonoma COE's Tina Rodgriguez:
I am thrilled with how fast the [SACS] extract runs! I wanted to get everything
in the Board adopted budget balanced, including fixing PERS reduction,
by the entry cut-off last night. Since we are qualified, I know we will
get more scrutiny than usual and I want the reports to look
professional. I forgot to use the 1/31 transaction date on a couple of
entries. Boy, it sure is fast and easy to reverse the entry, then copy
and re-post with the correct date. I ran about 5 extracts in the time it
would have taken for one in the HP. I hope all of the new Escape users in Sonoma County are excited too. I'm looking forward to working with all of them.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think. For many years, Escape has held an all-hands company meeting the first Friday of every month. We would have lunch then meet for several hours to review activity during the past month and discuss the plan for future months. As we have gotten busier with all our implementations and development schedules, we wanted to try to reduce the number of hours spent in meetings. So we have transitioned to quarterly meetings in 2009, carefully choosing a schedule that has the least conflicts with our customers key processing times and important dates for our implementations.
With the high level of activity at Escape requiring many people on the road and others working from home, the quarterly meeting is a chance for all of us to get a chance to actually see each other and receive updates on all the work we are doing. During the meeting we receive updates from all the departments, status of all projects from the Project Mangers and high level updates from the executive team on the ‘big picture’ and our most critical internal efforts. In our February meeting we discussed our .Net 3.5 platform release and also introduced another important new effort - the Report Task Force which I'll be sharing more information about in a few days.
The meeting was successful at bringing everyone up to date and focused on the delivery of our key efforts. It also gave us a chance to catch up and enjoy some much needed down time with each other. Of course, an Escape news item wouldn’t be complete without some pictures, so here are a few pictures from the meeting. See if you can find your favorite Escape employee!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Want updates on the progress of the task force? Keep your eyes glued to the Escape News page. Just look for the Report Task Force's fancy logo!
Performance Improvements, Phase V, .Net 3.5 Implementation
Dateline: Roseville - February 2009 - Bob Towery
Introducing the Friday Feature and the Employee Pay Management Activity
Dateline: Roseville - February 2009 - Leslie Bailey
Friday Feature: Employee Pay Management
(In this case, YES!)
First wave of Sonoma County districts now live on Escape Online 5
Dateline: Roseville - February 2009 - Carole Williams
Carole Williams,
Escape Online Project Manager
Escape First Quarter 2009 Company Meeting
Dateline: Roseville - February 2009 - Ramona Marshall
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