News and Blog
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As you know I am a huge fan of favorites. They save so much time and so many keystrokes. Favorites in Escape Online are just like favorites in Explorer or other programs. They save what you have typed for future use. All you have to do is click the favorite and it remembers what you saved. But, what if you have a favorite of your favorites? One you ALWAYS use, one you wish was programmed to load automatically, just for you. Well, your dream has come true! You can tell Escape Online which favorite you want to be your default. All you have to do is check “Default” when defining your favorite. |
The new Default checkbox (introduced in 10.01, v3 only) allows you to define default entries for search pages.
So what does this have to do with budget? Yes, I remember that I promised to make the next few Friday Features about budget. Well, just check out that screen shot. I have four favorites. They are all for next year’s budget, specifying the fiscal year, model Id and account component masks for each variety. I can choose any one of them to be my default.
Whichever one I select as my default loads automatically when I launch the activity. In other words, every time I open the Budget Entry activity, these fields automatically default to my favorite. I change them or just press Ctrl+G to GO!
And don’t forget that I can use favorites in my quick starts too!! For instance, I could enter BE f2 (Budget Entry Favorite 2) to run the certificated favorite in the example above.
Escape Online lets you create favorites for each and every search page. And, you can select a default from among them. Whether it is budget time or year end, default favorites are a great time saver.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Since many of you are focused on next year’s budget, the Friday Feature is too. As you may know, we recently hosted a Budget Management webinar. This was the most interactive webinar we have ever hosted. Attendees sent a ton of questions through the chat box. While Terri was explaining a feature, I was interjecting with the user’s questions. It was really cool, just like a classroom, but no one had to leave their desk! Of course, the questions were thoughtful and timely, for example, “How do you bring up a list of all accounts showing expiration dates?” And, the Escape Online 5 answer is so clever, I thought I should include it in the Friday Feature. |
From the Budget Entry activity, set the Expired Accounts flag on the search page to “Include Expired Accounts” or “Only Expired Accounts.” When you press GO, your list will now include expired accounts AND an Expires column so you can see the date the account expired.
Of course, this new column can be sorted and filtered to help you manage your budget and your accounts!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Our customers are fun, and every once in a while I get to step out from behind the documentation and really get to know one. In a new occasional series, called Your Turn, I will interview customers, asking them about their use of Escape Online in their everyday business. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Lynn Thomasson when I was working on the quotes for Escape’s marketing materials. Lynn is the Fiscal Assistant at Kelseyville Unified School District in Lake County. She is quoted in our materials as loving the Employee Pay Management activity. She has been live on Escape Online since July 2009, plus 6 months of prep, so about a year. She is a system manager in the HR/Payroll module and a department user in Finance. |
Not only is Lynn fun, but she is a published chef! (She recently had a very delicious recipe published in Sunset Magazine!) After following her recipe and getting her permission for her quote, I asked her if I could do a customer profile and she said yes! Here are some excerpts from our conversations about Escape Online.
 Lynn Thomasson, Kelseyville USD |
LESLIE: Have your processes changed since being introduced to Escape Online 5?
LYNN: Well, I'm trying to think; some processes have changed just due to the software’s differences, but I have been able to reduce our paper trails because I can export so many reports. LESLIE: How did that happen?
LYNN: I used to print reports and fax them to the county office when our payroll was done. Now, I export and email the reports to our rep. It is faster and greener. Another part of our process that changed, due to the ability to export reports, is maintaining our payroll data. In the "old days" a tech person at the county office would run reports and save them to a CD, then send them to the districts via a courier. Now we can export the reports ourselves and save them however we desire, be that on our hard drive, a CD, a thumb drive, or print the dang things. The district is in total control. Heh heh heh. That was supposed to be an evil laugh in case it didn't translate well. >:) |
LESLIE: So you run a lot of reports?
LYNN: All the time.
LESLIE: Cool. Which ones do you run the most?
LYNN: Pay22-Payroll Errors, Pay04-Payroll Differences, Benefit03-Benefit Provider Reconciliation, and Leave02-Leave Transactions with Excess Balances. The Snapshot in Adjust Payroll is very handy too - does that count as a report?
LESLIE: It sure does. Do you have a favorite report?
LYNN: I have many favorites (note plural). The Pay08-Quarterly Multiple Worksite Report Benefit is awesome because it reports all data in one place for the EDD quarterly report - a luxury I haven't had in the past. In [our old system], I had to run about ten different reports to get the EDD amounts I needed and that isn't an exaggeration either.
Another one of my favorites is the Benefit Provider Reconciliation report since it lays out the information so clearly and detailed.
If the Adjust Payroll Snapshot counts as a report it is my very favorite because I can immediately see how changes affect everything from taxes to retirement reporting to deductions and account distribution.
Thanks to Lynn for her time and excitement. I hope to hear more (and cook more recipes!) from her.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Last week I got a great email from Joel Toste, the Director of Integrated Fiscal Services at Placer COE. And I’d like to share it with you. First, he sent this screen shot:
For a little more background, last year's Escape Online Road Map included “Online Resources.” Our intent was to put as many training and documentation resources “one click away” for all users. In the process of doing so, we decided to make it easy for customers to do the same. As you can see, PCOE has done so, integrating several different “help” resources directly in the Escape Online 5 activity tree.
Now here is what Joel emailed me:
"PCOE is very excited about what the “PCOE Resources” module that we’ve implemented in our 3.5 environment will be able to provide our users. I believe it will greatly assist my support staff and I in providing more efficient and timely support to our 780 users without requiring the user to even contact us. We will continue to add and update the documents in this new module in order to maintain its usefulness and reduce the number of support calls. We truly appreciate and applaud Escape for thinking out of the box and developing this excellent new idea!"
We are with you Joel! We are excited about both sets of resources helping you and your end users every day. Great job!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Everybody has their own way of doing things. Some of us like entering our budget items directly into Escape Online. Some of us like entering our numbers into Microsoft Excel. Some customers like to let their users have access to Budget Entry and some don't. That is why Escape Online has a budget import option. If your district or your sites don't want to use Escape Online to enter figures for control purposes or whatever reason, you can enter the figures into Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, or any other program and then import them into Escape Online. |
It is an easy task in the Budget Management activity. You just browse to the file on your desktop or anywhere on your network and import. Tada!
Your fellow employees will love you for your consideration, allowing them to do their work their own way. And, isn't that what it is all about? A little more love? Happy Valentine's Day!!
P.S. The layout for our import is documented in the Budget User Guide, always accessible this from the Help menu!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Sonoma County Office of Education is now live on Escape Online 5 Payroll! Nine of their 51 payroll districts went live in the first phase with the remaining 42 districts going live over the next 4 months. During January, they processed three payrolls for over 2000 employees and $4 million.
After the final phase goes live, Sonoma will be processing payroll for over 19,000 employees and $400 million annually. The HR module has been live in these same districts since mid-September and the district personnel have been maintaining employee records and positions in both systems! I’m sure they are glad to be working in only one system now.
Congratulations to Dan Bienkowski, Director of IT, and his project team—Kimberly Williams, Tina Rodriquez, Rosalie Sulgit-Shay and Bambi Weinberg-Tuttle—for pushing the effort forward and keeping the project on track. Denise Calvert, Deputy Superintendent of Business, stayed very involved and did a wonderful job sponsoring the project and providing oversight. Many thanks also to the district personnel and end users for making the time to attend training and complete testing as scheduled along with doing their normal jobs!
I’m very impressed that Dan and his team were able to meet the original target they established over 18 months ago of going live in payroll in January 2010. January is an especially difficult month for going live due to the holidays and the processing of W2s and 1099s. To add more complexity to the situation, SCOE also transitioned from v1 to v3 during December and January, making this accomplishment that much more impressive!
Of course all of this payroll activity follows a full year of successfully implementing the Finance module in all 65 districts. The finance implementation was completed in four phases, starting in May 2008 and ending in June 2009. As a former Project Manager, I understand first-hand the difficulty of managing a project of this scope AND actually keeping it on track. Managing user expectations, controlling change management, organizing and delivering training are just the tip of the iceberg. Dan and his team have done an outstanding job of organizing the short term tasks while always staying focused on the long term goal.
Carole Williams, the Escape Project Manager, was also extremely impressed with the effort put forth by the team and district users in Sonoma County.
"For the finance implementations, I did the training for the first group of districts, then the county support analysts took over to lead all the training for the following groups. Since this process worked so well for finance, they are following the same model for payroll. So far things are going very well for the second group going live on Payroll in April. This team is amazing in their dedication to the project, having to learn the new software while still supporting the old. They are in training with districts for days on end, and yet have maintained enthusiasm and a great attitude for the project.”
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Each February after our customers have completed W2 processing we review the numbers. For Calendar 2009, we have a real increase in the amount of retirement records processed through Escape Online 5. Note that these figures do not include our Escape Classic system districts, and that several organizations did not have a full calendar year with Escape Online 5. And, Sonoma COE just went live, so their numbers here are very small.
Nonetheless…
2009 retirement earnings (nearly 3 billion):
| $743,540,709 | PERS |
| $2,158,529,874 | STRS |
| $2,902,070,582 | Total |
2009 EE/ER Contributions (nearly a half a billion):
| $121,823,690 | PERS |
| $352,065,411 | STRS |
| $473,889,101 | Total |
2009 Retirement report file “lines” including adjustments (nearly a million):
| 325,080 | PERS |
| 486,042 | STRS |
| 811,122 | Total |
This is certainly an impressive amount of work by our users, processed through our system. But wait until you see 2010 numbers!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
We’d like to share some good news just received from Georgene Neher, Assistant Superintendent, Business Services, Tehama County Department of Education:
"As you know, since we implemented Escape in 2009, many of our users would experience “dropped connections.” Some interaction between the Escape program and our network seemed to cause this. In reviewing Microsoft’s changes between .Net 1.1 and 3.5, our technical staff felt your new .Net 3.5 based system might resolve the issue.
I am happy to report that since we implemented your .Net v3.5 based software, this problem has been eliminated. We have been live on it for one month now, and users are much happier. We sure appreciate your efforts to make this transition and resolve our unique XCOE connectivity matter."
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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If you are a payroll user, you have probably noticed that there are two versions of Adjust Payroll on your activity tree. And, if you are an Escape user, you have probably noticed that we are always trying to make the system better. And, if you are a regular reader of the Friday Feature, you have probably noticed that I am a productivity hound and efficiency expert. So, let me tell you how the Adjust Payroll v2 can give you the opportunity to do your job better, faster, stronger. (I am also a Six Million Dollar Man fan.) Behind the scenes, the functionality is exactly the same as the original, but the Adjust Payroll v2 activity shows ALL tabs and has a two-line banner that gives you a ton of really important data. Let me show you. |
This is the “original” Adjust Payroll. It works great, but the heading takes up a lot of room and to see Deductions, Contributions, etc., you have to use the task Open All Tabs. It does the job, but it is not as efficient as it could be.
So we rebuilt it, making it better than it was before. Now, we have a streamlined Adjust Payroll v2 activity. All of the tabs are there, so it is really easy to jump around from adjustment to adjustment. And, the important information is displayed in a very succinct banner, giving you all the information you need without taking up space that could be better used for reviewing adjustment lines.
Like I said earlier, both activities work the same, but the Adjust Payroll v2 activity is simply better: all the information you need without any extra mouse clicks, and an added bonus of Payroll Errors on their own tab, making it so much easier to review all of your adjustments and any errors you may have made (not that you would, bionic payroll user that you are).
We are convinced you will love this new activity, and our latest poll shows that we are right. Based on the poll taken during the last Release Review, payroll users have agreed that the original Adjust Payroll activity should be removed from the activity tree in release v10.02, scheduled for April 2010.
We have the technology; now it is up to you to use the capability.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Last year was the first full calendar year of user generated report statistics. And as you know, especially during the first part of the year, our Report Task Force was on the attack! Report bugs were squashed and report throughput increased dramatically.
Reports are incredibly important to our users. Every one of our reports is ad hoc in some nature, especially with regard to sophisticated filtering. Let’s take a look at what our users did with our reports during calendar 2009:
2,563 |
Number of users who ran reports |
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1,060,673 |
Reports generated |
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9,624,919 |
Pages generated |
Lots of reports, that is for sure. How did we do on performance?
75% |
Finished in two seconds or less (server report generation) |
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91.4% |
Five seconds or less |
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96.7% |
Ten seconds or less |
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99.2% |
Sixty seconds or less |
In fact, of the top 25 reports by usage, 19 averaged 5 seconds or less. Only two averaged more than 10 seconds, both complicated payroll reports (Pay 10 @ 12.92 and Pay 22 @ 14.87).
Obviously, the reports are very fast, but seconds still count. Looking at our most popular reports is interesting.
The most used report was the Employee Payroll Snapshot: PayDtlEmpList99. During January through June, the average time was 2.43 seconds. During July through December, the average was 1.56, an improvement of 35%.
The second most used report was the Account Transaction Detail by Object – Balance Report: Fiscal03. During January-June, the average time was 13.58; whereas during July-December the average was 2.88, an improvement of nearly 80%.
Speed is great, but not without quality and accuracy. I’m happy to say that we completed over 1,000 change requests for report fixes, enhancements and improvements. Of course our work is never done, we still have approximately 200 change requests in our queue that we will be working on.
Keep running those reports Escape end users!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Some people may not know we have a very large Credentials module within Escape Online 5. On a monthly basis, things culminate with something called the “Pay Holds” list—a list of the employees that will have their pay check held and why.
Generally, a payroll technician is only working on a small number of Pay Holds at any one time. This news item is once again about SQL and how it has a mind of its own, which sometimes can give users a headache.
At Ventura COE, in recent months it was taking an average of 24 seconds to get this list. Much too long. Should just take a couple of seconds. In this case, the fix was different from yesterday’s, where we just told SQL directly how we wanted to access the data. For this Pay Hold list, we were utilizing several SQL “views” and one of them had a link to Employee data which was not needed, and caused SQL to do tons of extra work. A new view was written, and now the average load time is 4 seconds.
Ventura COE is by far the largest implementation of Credentials linked up to Payroll. So they saw the worst case. But anyway, it’s now fast for them and faster for all of our customers.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
People know that Escape Online 5 uses SQL Server, and that we have an enterprise class database design that comprises approximately 400 tables. There are hundreds of stored procedures that read and manipulate data. And then, in our code, there are an untold number of query statements to read and update data.
Sounds simple, right? You have some software, that has some statements, that say “get this data for me.” In practice, it is much more complex.
First, you don’t want SQL Server looking through all the rows of a table in order to find the ones that match, that takes too long. So you build indexes. These indexes allow SQL Server to very quickly locate the correct data.
As our implementations continue, these indexes are evolving. When we were first going live at Ventura, some of them were not suited to the large numbers of rows in tables, and needed to be tuned for performance. When we began working on the Sacramento City USD conversion, some indexes were not properly set up for one organization that had so much data (i.e., rows) in certain tables. So we continue to tweak these indexes for best performance.
Sometimes though SQL Server really has a mind of its own. One of its own resources is “query optimization.” It looks at a given query and decides the method to use to find the data the most quickly. You can defeat this by telling it implicitly to use your method. Or, you can give it “hints” (yes, this is that they are called) to help it figure out the best plan.
We recently had a situation where the 1099 list for just two customers was taking a long time to load. Like 5 minutes. Or even timing out. For every other customer, including organizations ten times their size, the list appeared in seconds. We first reviewed the SQL code, was theirs different somehow? No. Had someone erroneously loaded millions of rows into the 1099 table? No. Nothing was amiss.
So we did one thing. We added an ORDER command to the query, that tells SQL Server to process the query in the order presented in our code. Problem solved. Why in the world would SQL Server make this poor choice just these two installations? We’ll most likely never know.
In this case, no one had done anything wrong, it just went wrong inside SQL Server. And it was easily solved (and thankfully, for the users!). This is the kind of work we have to do day in and day out here at Escape. It’s an evolution.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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