News and Blog
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With the holidays upon me and my son’s 16th birthday just weeks away, I am very aware of budgets! Financial awareness is important when you are filling out requisitions too. In vendor requisitions, we have a new account balance column that lets you know what the remaining balance is for the accounts you are using to pay for those goods and services. When users select accounts from the drop down list, we have always showed the current balance. Recently several customers asked us to add this to the requisition’s account list to show at all times, not just when the user does a lookup window. |
The new Available Balance column in the Vendor Requisition activity works with the Budget Check option in the Organization record. So if your organization has budget checking turned on for accounts (or not at all – lucky you), the balance displayed is the account balance. However, if your organization has the flag set to components (for SACS rollups), then the balance will be for the rolled up accounts. Very tricky. Very helpful. Very financially aware!
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We pride ourselves on ensuring that Escape Online meets all Federal, State, County and agency regulations. We monitor web sites and news alerts to make sure we can spec, program, test and deliver software to our customers with plenty of time for them to test before putting into production and before the regulations take effect.
1099s and W2s are just examples of the regulations we keep an eye on. We also check in on PERS, STRS, EDD and others. If we find out about new regulations, we create a change request and let our customers know by updating our Regulatory Changes page on our web site.
The page briefly describes the change, and provides a link to any helpful web sites or PDFs. We also tell you our planned release date for the version that will accommodate the new requirement.
We recently updated the page with 2011 changes. So check it out and always feel free to contact us if you hear about a new regulatory requirement. If we don't already have the information, there's a link on the page to send it to us.
We hope that this useful information will help you feel confident that your organization will be in full compliance, on time, every time.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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As a productivity hound, I never retype a single character unless I absolutely must. So, if there is information in some third-party system that needs to be in Escape too, heck if I am going to sit there and type away. I am going to import!!! That is why I think the Additional Pay import feature is practically perfect in every way. Seriously, this feature IS perfect for those situations where you have a lot of information that needs to be input for a pay day. For example, I need to enter thousands of adjustments for adjunct faculty that is already entered in a scheduling system. Or, I need to enter hundreds of units for teachers whose time is stored in a substitute calling system. Or, I need to add hours for dozens upon dozens of teachers who went to a training and are listed in a spreadsheet. |
Granted, you need to have the information exported from the “other” software in a specific format, but it is just a comma delimited text file. That should be fairly easy. Of course, the employee pay information has to be for existing employees with primary pay cycles, but you would have had to have them set up anyway to pay them.
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These figures are easily entered and monitored in Excel or exported from a substitute or scheduling system. The file layout is documented in the How To for the activity. |
This is fabulous because the only data you really have to have in the file is the employee Id (or SSN), addon, and rate 1 amount. You can also import the units, rate 2 amount, account number and effective date, or let Escape Online default the rest of the information from the employee’s pay cycle or addon setup. Even the job category/class defaults from the addon. It is that easy.
When you select the Import task, the pay entries are imported into the batch. You can enter additional information, like units, or you can just post the batch!
NOTE: It is true that the import feature is practically perfect, but we have a couple of changes in the coming months that should make this feature actually perfect, including making it faster, improving error handling, and adding fields to the import file.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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One of the joys of the Christmas season is receiving cards from the kids we support through Children, Incorporated, a child sponsorship program which is affiliated with schools, orphanages, and welfare centers around the world and in the United States. For over a decade, Escape Technology, in the name of our customers, has sponsored children receiving aid from this great organization. We started with two sponsorships and have built that up to four. Every year the kids send us Christmas cards that they have decorated themselves. |
This year we received a card from Marino, a soccer devotee who likes glitter a lot. It is hard to tell from the scan, but we are sure the printer repair technician will appreciate the copious amounts. :) We have sponsored Marino since 2003.
We also received a card from Yenny. She is new to the program, likes to color in the lines, and has excellent penmanship.
We wish all of our customers and their children a very happy holiday season!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Last week, I wrote about our changes to 1099s. Now, let’s talk about W2s. While the State of California and the Federal Government did not require any changes to the submission of W2s, we still took the opportunity to make a few adjustments and enhancements. In HR/Payroll, we have this wonderful feature called Report Warehouse. The purpose of the Report Warehouse is to automatically store important reports for historical purposes. So, when you are processing payroll the Payroll Summary report automatically goes to the Report Warehouse. If you rollback payroll, the report is rolled back. When you re-process, it sends a new report. |
Customers have requested that the W2 reports – Employer Copy (Pay26) and Summary (Pay27) – be added to the Report Warehouse. We thought this was a great idea, so now when you print your W2s, these reports will automatically go to the Report Warehouse. This is a great timesaver!
Another customer request was for a “problem count” on the Organization list of the County W2 processing list. This column would allow counties to immediately see if there are any problems with the W2s generated at the Organization level, like a missing address.
Speaking of addresses, we also changed the way we format addresses that are longer than 22 characters. While Escape Online allows some sophisticated formatting of addresses for employee letters, the Feds only want the first 22 characters. We changed our address logic to strip out any formatting you may have inserted (like line breaks) and display just the first 22 characters as required on the W2 itself.
All of these 1099 and W2 changes are in Release 10.05, available NOW. We are very excited about this release, our biggest ever. We are sure you are going to find some great changes that will make your workflow faster and better. And to our customers, thanks for these important suggestions that help out everyone. We appreciate being able to make each year’s W2/1099 cycle a bit easier and less time consuming for you.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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I am always telling my kids, “look but don’t touch.” Well, that can be applied to adults as well, especially if they are auditors. It is a fact of school business life that there will be auditors in your system looking at your records. To give them the unfettered access they need, sometimes they get more than they bargained for—the ability to edit. Mostly, you can rely on their sense of professional integrity to not edit any of the records they touch, but what if you had an easy way to control this access. |
In Escape Online, we have an elegant way of handling just this situation with a read-only access role. Each module has this RO (read-only) role which provides access to almost every activity in each module. This is great for auditors and system managers. The system manager creates a very simple user record for the auditor and the auditor gets all of the access necessary.
And, that’s not all it is good for.
This same role can be used as a read-only role for user-based permissions. So, if you have an AP user that needs to see the setup for departments but should not be allowed to change them, you can give that user the read-only role for that activity.
And, there is a bonus to all of this.
Read-only users can run reports. Those auditors are going to need to run reports so that they can see the data in particular ways. Read-only roles allow for all search and report parameter fields to be filled in and used. It really is an elegant way to provide access without too much effort on the part of the system manager creating the user record!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
At this time every year, we put out our W2/1099 release where we make sure the processes, forms and files comply with State and Federal regulations. Today I am going to talk to you about the 1099 features and later this week I will give you an update on the W2 updates.
For 1099s, we went beyond just complying with the new regulations, double-checking printouts and making sure the 1099 reports work with the new report viewer. After the 2009 1099 printing cycle, we heard from our customers that they would appreciate some additional functionality, so we added a new import task for Districts and a "New" button for adding vendors already in the system to your 1099 list.
If you need to report vendors that are not in the system for whatever reason (like payments from your student body, charter schools or other entities), you need the ability to import the vendors and their amounts into Escape Online 5.
Now, we always have had this capability but it was at the County level, which was causing some extra work and coordination for some of our larger counties. So, we pushed down this capability to the District level. Now Districts don’t have to ask the County to import a file, they can do it themselves!
Here is the other circumstance for 1099 reporting. You have a vendor that is not showing up on your list for some reason, but you know that they need to be there. How do you manually add them? With release 10.05, you have an easy way to add them to your list and enter the necessary adjustments.
All you have to do is click New from the list of 1099 vendors and then fill in the form!
We also included a few minor changes like a new problem column on the District lists so counties can quickly see where there are issues, improved statistics, better error validation, and aesthetic changes to lists to make them easier to read. We are very excited about this upcoming release. I look forward to telling you more about the W2 changes!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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