News and Blog
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I am excited to announce our 2011 training webinars. Over the past year, I have conducted surveys after each webinar and reached out to customers to find out what they wanted to learn. Using all of this great information, we developed an awesome group of 10 webinars for 2011, including multi-year budgeting, addon basics, leave processing, tips-and-tricks, and the classics: 1099, W2 and year end. We have updated the Training page with descriptions, dates, and links to register. We are also in the process of moving the "download" page to Escape Online Resources, so that your training materials are always right there! In release 10.05, we added a Webinars link to the Online Resources module of Escape Online. This is where you can find handouts, training materials and video clips posted after every webinar. The rules for access are the same as the download page: you can see the agenda and handouts from any webinar, but you can only view video clips from purchased webinars. |
We are also considering other ideas for providing training and learning experiences for 2011. If you have an idea, feel free to contact me.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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I wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks to all of our customers! Time flies at Escape as we’ve been busy trying to keep up with all of the work involved with supporting 11 COEs, directly or indirectly 250 districts, and two community colleges. Because of this hectic pace I sometimes forget to take the time to reflect on how fortunate I am for working at Escape and for what a wonderful customer base we have. Thanks for helping us brainstorm new ideas and keeping us honest when there are issues to be resolved. Wishing you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. |
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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The holidays are coming in fast this year, and I am thinking about delegating. Maybe someone can do my holiday shopping and someone else can talk to my persnickety aunt. Well, maybe not. But, what I can do is set up someone to take care of my approvals while I am on vacation. Escape Online has “proxy” approval technology built into the system. If you are going away for a fabulous weekend to Vail, Colorado (lucky you!), you can easily anoint an approval angel. You don’t have to contact your system manager or anyone else -- except for that angel taking care of your approvals. |
From the Home Page, you can define a proxy using the Change Proxy Approver action. All you have to do is use a lookup to select your proxy and enter an expiration date. Click OK and now you can feel confident that while you are out of the office journal entry, budget transfer and requisition approvals will be taken care of by your proxy.
If for some reason you come back early (could it be that persnickety aunt?), you are still covered because all approvals are sent to both lists (yours and your proxy’s). When you are ready, you expire the proxy approver using that same Change Proxy Approver option, and start approving for yourself.
Please note that the Friday Feature will be on holiday next Friday. We hope that all our customers, their family and friends have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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There are some records that just beg for a lot of data entry. A journal entry is one such record. That is why Escape Online includes the ability to use a spreadsheet-like feature we like to call inline editing. There are many records with inline editing, including journal entries, budget transfers, detail records in Adjust Payroll, and many others. |
What the inline editor allows you to do is keep your fingers on the keyboard, speeding up the data entry process. For example, let’s take a look at manually entering a journal entry. Most journal entries have multiple line items. The easiest way to create a new line item is to press Enter at the end of the line you are entering, dropping you to the next line, ready for more data entry.
The best thing about the inline editor (as opposed to a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel), Escape Online automatically saves the line you just entered. That means when you are done entering all of your line items, without ever removing your hands from the keyboard, they are all saved, and all you have to do is press Ctrl+S to save the entire journal entry.
Another cool thing about inline editors is that we didn't make them "dumb." They include logic. So to continue with our example of journal entry line items, you only have to enter a debit or credit and Escape Online automatically calculates the balancing debit/credit for you, as you type!
Now that’s speedy!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Alpine County Office of Education is the 7th county office running our hosted solution, which we call XCOE. Their project started in July 2010 and they’ve been making wonderful progress ever since.
Here is the Alpine team:. Carole Williams (Escape), Janis Doyal,
Jill Adams, Jacqueline Nyswonger and Dianna Stevenson
“The Alpine County Schools staff is excited about our new financial software, Escape Online 5! The implementation phase is going extremely well. The Escape family, especially our Project Manager and trainer Carole, is very knowledgeable and attentive to our needs. I’ve personally been involved with six prior financial system conversions and none has gone as smoothly as this one. We are looking forward to going “live” in January!"
~ Janis Doyal, Business Manager
Alpine County Office of Education
Since they are a small county we’ve been able to combine and fast-track some of the steps of the implementation. For example, instead of converting their legacy data they are hand keying the data as part of their training and testing. They are currently finishing up parallel and acceptance testing and are on track to go live in January.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Last week I talked about creating custom reports for a group of individuals. This week I want to talk about forwarding a report to an individual or a group. After a report is placed in your My Reports, you can forward it to any user in Escape Online 5. Say you’ve just run a report that your coworker wants to see, but this is one of the reports your district standards prohibit you from emailing (like employee reports). This means you are prohibited from just clicking the email button in the report viewer, like you would normally do. |
You have another option. You could go to your My Reports and use the forwarding feature. All you have to do is open your report and pick Forward Report from the Task menu. You will get a dialog for specifying who you want to send the report to and even include a message if you like.
As you can see, you could even forward the report to a group of people, like the business office or the budget analysts.
This is great news for several reasons. The big one is the security. You can share reports without having to worry about email protocols; you can rely on the protection of Escape Online 5. To recap, you have two options for delivering reports to others:
Distributing Reports – Creates a custom report for each user in the group, based on the individual’s user-based permissions. You enter the group in the original report request. You receive a report according to your permissions and an additional report detailing the delivery of custom reports. Each user in the group receives their custom report in their My Reports.
Forwarding Reports – Creates a copy of the report. You specify the individual or group from the report record in My Reports, using the Forward Report task. Each user specified receives an exact copy of your report, delivered to their My Reports.
And, I have more great news. Next year, we are going to add a notification for receiving a report. That means if someone creates a custom report for you or forwards a report to you, Escape Online will automatically send a notification!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
My name is Craig Hewitt and this is my first post here on Escape’s news page. I work in our QA group. For each release, one of my duties is to verify and validate report changes, answering the following questions:
To do this, I run the reports against actual customer databases, verifying that the new functionality or error correction matches what was requested. I also do before/after timings to make sure the report has not slowed down. Typically our main report developer, Susan, is successful speeding up most reports she works on.
I thought I’d share a few of my timings from the upcoming 10.5 release. It should be noted that these tests are run on our equipment, and we do not have the superfast SAN devices that our large COE customers do. So our times are higher than theirs, but the improvements will be similar:
| Report Number | Pages | Old Avg | New Avg | Improvement |
| Fiscal91 | 160 | 1:24 | 0:57 | 32% |
| ReqPay18 | 362 | 0:51 | 0:20 | 60% |
| Budget01 | 300 | 0:24 | 0:13 | 45% |
| Budget04 | 728 | 0:37 | 0:27 | 27% |
| Employee10 | 815 | 0:19 | 0:15 | 21% |
| Employee99 | 4,176 | 2:23 | 1:09 | 51% |
| Fiscal05 | 245 | 0:45 | 0:26 | 42% |
| Fiscal13 | 35 | 0:39 | 0:16 | 58% |
Often I’m amazed at what our developers and system are able to do. Look at the Employee99 report. 4,176 pages in 2+ minutes is pretty respectable. But in 1:09? Positively smoking! I have never worked with software that has reports that run this quickly.
This year looks to be the first one where our users will run over one million reports. So a minute here and a minute there really adds up. It’s a good feeling when I test a report and it has more functionality that users have requested, and is running even faster than before. I know the end users will be pleased.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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