News and Blog
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Probably the most common search in HR/Payroll is for an employee. Whether you are entering leave transactions, assigning positions or searching for benefits, Escape Online has a handy dandy way of finding an individual. It is the employee Id field.
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Check it out! This field allows you to enter an employee’s last name! Anywhere that you can enter employee Id, you can also enter last name and use the lookup to find the employee Id. Just enter the first two characters of the employee’s last name and use the lookup. Voila! When you select the employee, the employee Id is entered automatically.
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On occasion, I am superstitious. So, since it is Friday the 13th, I thought I should write a tip about moving through records quickly, because you don’t want to stay in any one place too long. It could be unlucky! You probably already know that at the top of every form there are the Previous/Next buttons, but did you know that they use the same Escape Keys as they did in Escape Classic? So if you are an old Classic user, you can still use F7 (previous) and F8 (next) to quickly move up and down a list. |
If you are a new user, let me give you a quick overview. The F7/F8 keys open forms from the list without you having to return to the list. For example, if you are adding contact information to a list of vendors, you can open the first record and then use the Escape Keys to Save/Close/Open the previous (F7) or next (F8) record.
These handy dandy keys make working a list very speedy: two clicks for the price of one! Now that’s lucky.
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Keeping track of time and making efficient use of your time are two very important business goals. This is true whether it is your desk calendar or an account in your financial system. This is why Escape Online uses a single database for all transactions across fiscal and calendar years. This vision of time as interrelated, as opposed to isolated, is crucial during processes that cross fiscal years (W2s and 1099s) or calendar years (year end processing). Think about it. Almost every record in Finance has some kind of time stamp. There are accounts and every document associated with them: budget entries, requisitions, purchase orders, invoices, and journal entries. On the HR/Payroll side, it is just as complex with assignments, pay cycles, calendars, tax records, benefits, pay schedules, and so on. |
In Escape Online, all Fiscal Year fields default to the current fiscal year based on TODAY. This is extremely convenient, but if you want to enter another fiscal year, you can use the lookup or just type it in, which is very easy. Simply type 10 to get the 2009/2010 fiscal year. The validation is smart, only allowing you to enter fiscal years that actually exist in the database. For example, if you want to see next year’s accounts but they haven’t been created yet, 2011 does not display as an option in the lookup. This is effective time management. As you can see from the lookup shown here, some of our customers keep all their data available for comparison purposes; others archive data that is more than a specified number of years old. Either way, the ability to look across fiscal years and calendar years without having to login/logout is a great time saver! |
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Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Besides requiring a great many reports, our customers have told us over and over the importance of report accuracy. With over 350 reports now, that is a lot to keep track of. Nevertheless, we recently put our heads together to see what we could do to make certain all reports are accurate.
What we came up with was a way to cross check sets of reports. We did this both in Finance and in Payroll. When we run the set, we expect data points such as totals and counts to match. (We are in the process of adding procedures for HR reports.)
When a report is modified, this is tracked in our system that maintains “Change Requests” (CR’s). As you know, every CR is unit tested by QA when it comes out of Development. In the case of reports, the actual change asked for in the CR is tested, followed by regression testing to ensure it’s working as originally designed. Starting in 09.06 we added the step to regression testing of comparing all financial reports and payroll reports against each other, thus ensuring accuracy across the reports.
For example, all payroll reports are run with the same parameters and then all the counts and financial totals across the reports are compared; employee counts, check counts, check totals, ACH counts, ACH totals, etc. If and when any discrepancies are discovered they are researched and, if needed, a CR is created and fixed before the release is available to customers. For variance, we alternate customer databases to make sure we get a broader representation of data and setup.
Running this new testing protocol for the 09.06 release actually uncovered a couple of discrepancies, ones that had not been previously reported by any customer. So we are pleased that the new process is working for both discovering issues, and making sure report enhancements maintain cross-report accuracy.
Customers tell us that our reports are the “window into the database” to determine that everything is in balance and they can trust the data. So we feel good about this additional testing in each release – it is important to you.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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