News and Blog
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We have all heard the cliché about assumptions and how they can make life harder, but what about those assumptions that make life easier. Escape Online has built-in the good kind of assumptions when it comes to entering dates. Every time you enter a value in a date field, it makes the following assumptions.
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Let’s look at some examples. Notice how you only have to enter as much information as necessary to take advantage of all of the assumptions.
Entry |
Assumption |
Result |
01021958 |
You want slashes. |
01/02/1958 |
070166 |
You want slashes and eight digits. |
07/01/1966 |
0406 |
You want slashes and eight digits. |
04/06/2009 |
26 |
You want slashes and eight digits. |
03/26/2009 |
We also applied this simple solution to fiscal years and time. So, if I enter a fiscal year for a budget model in Finance or a setup record in HR/Payroll, I can enter 9, and Escape Online assumes 2008/2009 fiscal year. If I enter 10, Escape Online assumes the 2009/2010 fiscal year.
If I am entering a date and time for a journal entry or running the Initiate Pay job after hours (in version 1.09.02!), I can enter 10pm, and Escape Online assumes tonight at 10pm. (If only communicating with teenagers about their curfew could be this easy!)
But, that’s not all.
Entering date ranges in a search page uses the same set of assumptions. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples, remembering that in Escape Online you indicate a range with two periods (..).
Entry |
Assumption |
Result |
0204.. |
2009 is the current year. |
All employees hired on or after 02/04/09. |
1..31,4/1 |
March is the current month. |
All work orders that begin work in the month of March or on April 1st. |
26 10am..12pm |
Yesterday was the 26th of this month. |
All journal entries posted yesterday between 10am and noon. (As you would expect, journal entries are one of the few fields where you can search by time.) |
Another awesome thing about dates in Escape Online is our use of the pop-up calendar. This works in any date field. It is especially great for figuring pay dates, since the last day of the month is not always a work day.
Now, I know that we are talking about dates, but before I go, let me just mention that this also works with names, like SMI.. (all last names that start with SMI until the end of the file) or GUMP, BUTTON (all last names that start with GUMP or BUTTON), or any combination thereof (A..B, C..CAN, GUMP).
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I have mentioned before that one of our areas of focus for the Report Task Force would be to modify the Report Service to make it more flexible when reports encounter Crystal errors. Well, I’m happy to announce that those changes have been made and implemented at one of our customer sites. Since the retry code was introduced, the number of reports that were not completed and delivered to the user has decreased dramatically. Now that we have proof that this retry is working as intended, we will release this patch to all customers running 1.09.01.
So what does this report retry code do? Now when a report encounters a Crystal error, the report is automatically sent back to the queue with other report requests and run again up to a maximum number of 20 times and will report an event log warning every 5 retries. Since we know that some other errors are occurring for different reasons, the retry code specifies only which errors can be retried. Currently it will retry for the following types of errors, ‘Failed to open a rowset’, ‘Stack empty’, ‘Crystal license’, ‘Index was outside’.
Although we think that the ‘failed to open a rowset’ error can be fixed in the report itself, we added it anyway to be safe and have seen examples of where the retry on this error set is actually working. With the original release of this patch, snapshots were being deleted after 4 hours but we have changed that back to the default of 14 days so we will be able to see the history of the snapshots when we pull statistics.
From the customer data we are gathering weekly, we can see that for the period 3/1 through 3/19, 20,975 reports were run and of those 1,427 had Crystal errors. This is 6.8%.
The breakdown of the Crystal errors by category is as follows:
| stack | 823 | 58% |
| license | 21 | 1% |
| -256 | 296 | 21% |
| file | 156 | 11% |
| index | 120 | 8% |
| other | 11 | 1% |
For the few remaining Crystal errors that do continue, we need to know more information about the report request to determine where the failure is actually occurring. In order to do this we have added a new table, SysReportRequestHistory, that tracks changes to the status of a report request, capturing every time the status changes from 'InProgress', 'InQueue', 'Failed', 'Completed', 'Snapshot', 'SnapFail' and 'SnapComp'. Having this level of detail will help us isolate where reports are failing so we can fix the problem area.
As we can see, by dedicating resources to this effort and breaking it down into manageable pieces we have been able to successfully whittle away at the Crystal problems. In my next article, I will be discussing changes we have made to individual reports.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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If you watched the last Escape Online Release Review, you saw Terri using the toggle button to hide the activity tree so she could see more of the Report Viewer. (If you didn’t watch the last Release Review, you are missing out! You need to go to our Training page right now and catch up. Take your time; we’ll wait.) The toggle button is in the middle of the screen on the far left. Click it and the activity tree disappears. Click it again and it reappears. For those of us getting older (especially me, I get older EVERY year), this is better than the magnifying glass because we can see MORE. Check it out. |
The activity tree allows you to launch activities, and is always available. Although, it doesn't have to always be displayed.
If you toggle-off the activity tree, you have quite a bit more workspace.
Plus, a productivity hound finds this useful in another way. If you work in the same activities all day, you could open all of your activities (Employees, Additional Pay, Leave Transactions), toggle-off the activity tree and then use the Activity List drop-down (or Alt + arrow key) to move from activity to activity.
The activity list shows all of the activities you have open.
This will give you quite a bit more workspace. And, if you do have to go to some wayward activity, you can just toggle that tree back on.
Oh, and I haven’t forgotten those keyboard people. The keyboard equivalent for the toggle is Alt+F6, and for the activity list it is Alt+Enter.
Happy toggling!
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COMMENTSHello, I wanted to comment on your news article about attachments. In the last paragraph you summed up the productivity benefits of attachments like this: "The idea of keeping paper copies is over. Attachments don’t fade, get torn, or lost. They can be backed up. They can be viewed without printing. They save paper, time, and resources. They are the wave of the future, and this hound sure is glad that so many of our customers are pursuing this exceptionally productive feature." We had hoped to use attachments during the process of auditing requisitions in the Business Office. Typically, one of the approvers will look at the requisition backup and compare certain items to the entered requistion. Were the terms entered correctly? Is the billing address correct? Are the amounts the same? But the way attachments are implemented, you can't look at the attachment and the requisition at the same time. Once you open the attachment, the program prevents you from navigating back to the requisition until you close the attachment. So in order to look at both, you basically have to print the attachment! So while I agree that the potential for attachments is there, the current implementation doesn't qualify (IMHO) as an "exceptional productivity feature". Here are some changes I would like to see to help make this feature "exceptional":
Thanks for listening! Posted: Daniel Bienkowski, Director, Information Technology, Sonoma County Office of Education. |
RESPONSEDan, Let me respond to each comment individually:
Bob Towery Posted: Bob Towery, CEO, Escape Technology. |
As you can see by this picture, we have been attending CASBO for a very long time. The oldest pin there is from 1991. In fact, we were attending CASBO before there was a vendor exhibit - we would go to the workshops, it was a vital part of our learning school business. So it's with some angst that I announce that we won't be attending the 2009 Conference in San Diego. It's a timing thing. As regular readers know, the biggest and most important effort at Escape right now is the release of Escape Online 5 on the .Net 3.5 platform. Last September we announced a release date of early April, and we will be making that. This release is very important both to us and our customers, and nearly everyone in the company is contributing to the effort in some way. So the timing of this important release, and subsequent alpha and beta testing with customers just collided with the CASBO Conference. And while I think it's a negative to not be at CASBO, I just couldn't in good faith divert our important resources at this time. |
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I know it will be a great event for everyone that goes, and I hope the current economics don't hurt attendance too badly. I know I'm going to be wishing we were there! Don't worry: we will see you at the 2010 Conference in Sacramento!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Remember I told you that I was a productivity hound. Well, what exactly does that mean? We all know what productivity is, but where does the hound part come in. Dictionary.com states that hounds “pursue without respite.” Yep, that’s me. And, this week I am going to pursue attachments. Escape Online attachments can increase your productivity by a million times. (Hounds may be subject to slight exaggerations.) Many records in Escape Online support the ability to “attach” a file (Word, Excel, Acrobat PDF, jpg, gif, png, bmp, etc.). This includes assets, credential holders, customer records, department requisitions, employees, invoices, journal entries, payments, receipts, stores items, vendor requisition, and work orders. |
Just think of the possibilities. You could attach pictures, scan documents, and keep all the information for a record in one place. But, do people really do that? Yes, they do. I took a look at one of our customers that recently went live on Escape Online (about a year ago), and did some analysis. I found an organization with 494 attachments for their 135 active employees. They attached W-4s, retro calculations, salary negotiations, transcripts, TB tests, resignation letters, change of address forms, benefit elections, doctor notes for leaves of absence, and the list goes on. I was very impressed: imagine the productivity improvements for that organization!
When Escape implemented this technology we thought we could use it too. So, if you create a change notice, it is automatically attached to the requisition. The same is true if you cancel a requisition. But, do users attach files to requisitions on their own? Again, the answer is: Yes they do. Back to the new customer. If I don’t count cancel or change notices, one organization already has 3,402 attachments for their 2009 vendor requisitions, and the year is not over yet. They are attaching contact information, receipts, invoices, packing slips, conference registration forms, hotel confirmations, membership forms, delivery notifications, even emails.
And while attachments are a great help to all users, it’s interesting to note that the idea started with a Superintendent in Placer County! This Superintendent knows about Bob Towery’s interest in photography, so he showed Bob a digital camera he had won at an ACSA conference. The superintendent wanted take it the camera with him on site visits and document maintenance issues, and then give those pictures to his secretary for follow up. Bob and the superintendent thought: wouldn't it be great if those pictures could be attached to work orders! So Bob brought the idea back to Escape where our design team thought: wouldn't it be great if we had attachments for all of our records! And, a future enhancement was born. The idea of keeping paper copies is over. Attachments don’t fade, get torn, or lost. They can be backed up. They can be viewed without printing. They save paper, time, and resources. They are the wave of the future, and this hound sure is glad that so many of our customers are pursuing this exceptionally productive feature. |
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In yesterday’s post, I covered the Billion Dollar Baby - $1.25 billion of payroll and AP processed during the first year of county-wide operations. Today’s news is even more impressive.
As everyone in school business knows, it is the County Offices of Education that report retirement to PERS and STRS. If there are districts in a county that are not on the same system as the COE, the COE’s system must import the retirement detail and report all retirement data in a combined fashion.
During 2008, we had five COEs using Escape Online 5 to report to PERS and STRS. Are you ready for these numbers?
| $2,519,099,399 | Total retirement earnings STRS/PERS combined, including offline districts. That’s two point five BILLION. |
| $101,439,687 | PERS contributions |
| $309,873,589 | STRS contributions |
| 750,652 | Retirement lines |
| 53,783 | Employee count for retirement reporting |
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A year ago, in March 2008, I penned a news post announcing our baby’s first birthday, Escape Online 5 that is. And while it was technically true that it had been live for a year at that point, just a few districts were live.
In February of 2008, Placer COE went live on Payroll, across all their districts. Their first payroll alone exceeded all of the payrolls of the previous year. And as users and readers of these pages know, it hasn’t been totally smooth sailing since then. It wouldn’t be right to expect a system of this magnitude to be perfect out of the gate, and of course we have been working diligently to correct deficiencies and add a lot of new functionality.
So the point I’m trying to get to is that I believe NOW is actually Escape Online 5’s first birthday! We now have a year under our belt for county-wide operations, at least in Payroll. Nine months as far as Finance goes.
And, like any proud Dad, I want to point out a few of baby’s accomplishments.
There are now 60 organizations live on Escape Online 5, across 11 counties.
Billion Dollar Baby! Probably the most amazing statistic to me is the amount of money and transactions pumped through our system, from February 2008 through February 2009:
| Count | Amount | |
| Paychecks | 76183 | $116,157,425.73 |
| ACH Trans | 200039 | $802,573,641.22 |
| Vendor Checks | 50919 | $338,130,623.33 |
| All | 327141 | $1,256,861,690.28 |
In its first real year of seeing significant action, we have produced a billion and a quarter of payroll and vendor checks. 327,141 transactions in all. You can imagine the number of journal entries and other financial docs represented behind these numbers.
While we are solving the “teething pains,” of a one year old system, I’m happy to report some of the major accomplishments as well. How will we top this? Wait until tomorrow!
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As promised, I plan to provide a status report at least weekly on the Report Task Force’s efforts and results. Our team’s focus is to resolve all reporting issues that customers are experiencing. We begin by quantifying and categorizing the issues, and to get a handle on how many reports are indeed experiencing issues.
We believe that the much newer Crystal Reports engine embedded into the .Net 3.5 system will resolve many of these errors, but because it will be some months before live users are on the new platform, we have to do all we can now to resolve problems in the current platform.
We collected report statistics for about two to three weeks during February, depending upon the customer. Here are some of the salient numbers.
The results show that these errors are spurious; none can be repeated reliably. Reports are working as expected more than 9 times out of 10. However, we do believe we can “fix” some items in the reports themselves, while others we have to make changes to our Report Services to do something different when Crystal reports produce an error.
We hope this open and transparent communication is appreciated, and that customers can see that we are dedicating significant resources to resolving Crystal Report problems ASAP. If you have any questions or suggestions I welcome both…
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
This article is from an email Georgene Neher sent to Bob Towery. Very impressive!
The implementation team from the Tehama County Department of Education, Lassen View and Plum Valley School Districts, is sharing a huge sigh of relief and sense of accomplishment after completing the first month live on Escape Online 5 using the XCOE model.
Early in February, vendor checks and a supplemental payroll were prepared. After several very long days and lots of support from Escape Project Manager, Kathy Carlson, there were cheers when the first payroll checks for Lassen View were printed. A couple of days (nights) later, TCDE Payroll Specialist, Jane Youngman, was nervously poised to "press the button" to run the county office payroll. Although the group is feeling very happy about the accomplishments, they were immediately discussing next steps and areas they wanted to address in the next few days and training plans for the months ahead. With so much work going on in the background, it's very rewarding to actually see the results.
Debbie Towne, Heather Igarta (at laptop) Georgene Neher, Ruth Fennel
On March 2, 2009, County Superintendent, Larry Champion, joined the group for a celebration luncheon, including recognition gift bags with the new TCDE logo and Escape travel mugs. According to Assistant Superintendent, Georgene Neher, this is an extraordinary team effort involving the business office, the two districts, and human resources, all under the very effective direction of TCDE Project Manager, Ruth Fennel.
After many years of research and planning with our partners at the Modoc and Trinity COEs, it is so gratifying to see us reach this point.
We have several months ahead that will require a huge coordination of effort. We feel like we've set the stage for the successful implementation by the rest of the districts in our county and appreciate the willingness of the two pilot districts. There will certainly be many more hurdles, but we've made a giant step in the right direction. We have a dedicated team and they are committed to a successful implementation, looking forward to using the capabilities of the Escape system.
~~ Georgene Neher
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Budgeting! Argh, you just can’t get away. Everyone is talking about it: our Governor, our President, our School Boards, our spouse. Times are tough, but creating the budget shouldn’t have to be. Escape Online provides loads of tools to make the process easier, but the tool that is the most useful in this time of shifting priorities is Perform Change. The Perform Change task lets you change budget amounts in any number of accounts, based on the account component mask you specify, all in one fell swoop. Using this task, I can set a fixed amount, adjust by a percentage (negative or positive), import data, and copy from other Escape Online records (models, actuals, revised, original). |
The Perform Change task has 14 options for mass changing your budget.
With salary and benefits nearing or exceeding 90% of expenditures, position control based budgeting is crucial. There are so many different scenarios to consider: a union is negotiating benefit packages, the Governor has requested a major reduction in expenses, and the list goes on.
That’s a lot of accounts. That’s a lot of work. If I had to manually budget and adjust each position, my head would hurt. Luckily, the Perform Change task covers all of those needs: load salaries from HR/Payroll, recompute contributions, and load vacancies.
Recently, one of our customers shared their procedures for position control budget revisions. Literally, it is two steps for vacancies (load vacancies, check contributions) and one step (load salaries) for filled positions. Then, they run some reports to check their numbers and, if necessary, make any manual adjustments. It is that simple!
Escape Online makes position control budgeting very easy.
Ok, budgeting is not that simple; it requires more than just mass changes. There is a lot of thought and finesse required. Escape Online has numerous other tools to help along the way, like separate forms for salary versus non-salary accounts, contribution records that are not tied to HR/Payroll records so you can “what-if” without affecting production. The whole concept of “what-if” budget models is amazing, allowing as many different models as needed to determine exactly how to budget the money.
Make a mistake? We have got that covered too. We have history records for every change you make that you can rollback. Last year, we introduced a new concept of versioning where you can save a “snapshot” and move forward or rollback.
Versioning takes a "picture" of all the account amounts at a given time (e.g., initial load, principal input, board presentation). You can rollback changes to a given version of a model.
There is no doubt about it. Times are tough. At Escape, we know that virtually all school finance begins with the budget, and it can be difficult on several fronts. We are working hard to provide you with the most powerful and accurate budgeting software available, including 30 excellent and flexible reports dedicated solely to the budgeting process. We are constantly on the lookout for improvements, implementing and adapting them as needs change.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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