News and Blog
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As an HR/Payroll specialist at Escape, I need to stay abreast of regulations my customers need to comply with. Recently, a major topic of conversation has been the new CalPADS reporting. To comply with No Child Left Behind, the State of California created the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (or CalPADS) reporting system. Local education agencies are required to report staff and student demographic data. Escape Technology has been working with districts and State agencies to provide a straightforward method for reporting. Our latest release (11.01) provides the infrastructure and tools necessary to make reporting as easy as possible. We have two tables that will drive lookup windows to ensure consistent data entry. With Escape's help, customers need to map their already existing table data for the SysPermanency and SysEducDegree tables to the State values. Here is an example of those tables and values: |
Escape Perm Code |
State Emp Status |
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Escape Degree Code |
State Degree Code |
The mapping is required because Escape Online allows you to have as many permanency codes and degrees as you want. Districts use this flexibility to slice and dice their data in a myriad of ways. To comply with the State, though, districts need to map each of their codes to the State codes. For example, a district may want to map their At Will, Categorical, and Intern to the State's 3-Temporary code.
The same is true for the degrees. A district may want to separate out the employees with Business, Divinity, Education, Science and Music masters, but the State is only interested in the fact that the employee has a masters degree. So, the district can keep all of their "master" codes and then just map them to the State's M-Masters code.
Of course, this is all in the background. Users never see these crazy codes because Escape Online uses lookups. So, the Permanency Codes (mapped to the Employment Status Category required by CalPADS) will appear as a field in the Employee Tab and the Education Degree (mapped to the State Degree Codes) will appear as a field in the Education tab.
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Once the codes have been mapped and the employees updated with the appropriate codes, reporting is very easy. The new CalPADS Extract (Employee50) report is designed to extract staff demographic and salary information for reporting to CalPADS.
There are two options: Staff Assignment which lists the CalPADS required data for staff assignments, including one row per assignment (that has not been cancelled) effective in the fiscal year; and Staff Demographic which lists CalPADS required data for staff demographics, including one row for each employee with an SEID number, that has an active primary assignment for the fiscal year and a valid employment status. Use the Go/Excel (Ctrl+E) button to automatically launch Microsoft Excel with the data from the report.
I am ready to help customers set up these tables. All you have to do is contact me or your Escape Customer Care representative and you can be ready to report CalPADS with minimal effort!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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It may be spring, feel like winter, but really it is almost year end. Yes, those crazy days of closing and opening are almost upon us. One of the simpler tasks you can perform to make your closing easier is to set the Allow End Bal flag in the resource component record. This handy-dandy flag can be set to NO to ensure that all accounts with this resource MUST NOT have an ending balance at fiscal year end. This small change can have big dividends in the amount of time and energy saved. The flag can be changed at any time during the year. It is in the Finance-Setup-Chart of Accounts-Account Components activity. |
If you set this flag to NO and the resource has an ending balance, you will be alerted on the Fiscal15, making sure that you create the necessary journal entries to move the money out of the accounts with that resource before the books are closed. The Fiscal Year End Checklist (Fiscal15) has a special section just for these accounts. Check it out.
This flag is especially important for county implementations where you can have numerous organizations closing their books simultaneously and you need the automation to help keep everyone straight. This flag ensures district users set up either receivable or deferred revenue forcing the account balances for this resource to zero before the closing can proceed.
You probably know we put a great deal of effort into automating year end procedures for our customers. Each year, since Escape Online 5 went live in 2008, we have made numerous enhancements based on user feedback. Our last release (11.01) contained 16 year end enhancements, and our next release (11.02) scheduled for mid-May is expected to have as many or more. Thank you to our users that provide feedback to make our Escape Online 5 system even better.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Because we incorporate industry standard products into our Escape Online 5 system, from companies like Adobe and Microsoft, improvements they make automatically benefit our users. The new Adobe Reader X is a case in point. The new Reader has a completely new look that gives you a lot more screen real estate. The toolbar is automatically hidden. To see it you hover over the bottom area of the page and the tool bar appears. Let’s take a look. |
The “old” Adobe Reader defaulted a lot of tools and bars that made it hard to see your report.
The “new” Adobe Reader gives you a lot more screen real estate.
(Plus, the toolbar is only displayed when you hover over the bottom of the screen.)
If you really want to see the “old” toolbar, you can click the Adobe logo on the right and it will display. It looks a little different but is basically the same old toolbar, no pun intended. Right now, you can continue using the old reader. As of today, Adobe is still creating updates for Adobe 9 and is not requiring users to upgrade to X. However, if you want to make the leap and get the new Adobe Reader X for yourself, it is available from the Adobe web site.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Regardless of size, school businesses require secure reliable connections and practices. With project XCOE, Escape Technology provides all of the software, hardware and administration necessary for smaller counties to run Escape Online 5 in a hosted environment. Recently, John Rhoadarmer and I replaced the firewall for XCOE. We chose the SonicWall NSA 4500 as the new firewall because the 4500 provides high-performance virtual private networking with state-of-the-art intrusion protection and unified threat management. To make this change, John and I headed up the hill (from Escape Headquarters) to Placer County Office of Education where all of the hardware and software reside. The install went smoothly because we were really prepared. All users had been notified and all of the hardware had been set up, ready for install. The entire XCOE system was down for less than an hour, and the new firewall has been working great. Users are thrilled! Since we installed the new firewall, connections have been stable. One of our COE’s network had been experiencing connection issues, some type of hardware conflict, and these have disappeared. |
While we were upgrading the hardware, we also decided to upgrade the backup procedures. We entered into a contract with CarbonitePro for backing up application data, like attachments and report files. CarbonitePro adds to the already established backups for the database which are managed by Iron Mountain.
We think this new contract puts us in the best possible position in case of disaster. If the unmentionable ever happens, the databases and the files can be restored from Iron Mountain and CarbonitePro to any suitable server farm to re-establish operations.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Because I have worked at Escape for over ten years, I receive a generous amount of vacation. With two kids and a husband, there are some years where I simply cannot coordinate vacation time, so I just keep accruing without deducting. This is fairly common and a great employee benefit. But what if I simply don’t take any vacation year after year, that could create a huge liability for Escape, so we have a maximum vacation amount. This allows Escape to continue granting vacation hours until I have reached the max. After I reach this ginormous amount of vacation, I stop accruing. |
Many school districts have the same situation. They need to do more than just limit carryover because the amount accrued in a single year may be more than the max. They need to stop grants from occurring BEFORE employees ever have a chance to earn too much leave in the first place.
Escape Online supports this restricting of grants through the Limit Leave Grant flag in the Leave Balance Profile.
If this field is set to Yes, an employee's leave grants will stop accruing when their balance is equal to or greater than the max. To calculate the grant, Escape Online starts with the maximum leave allowed adds/subtracts future leave usages and adjustments and compares the amount to the maximum carryover balance.
If the amount is over the max, the excess is displayed on the Leaves tab in the Employee record. You can also see the excess on the Leave Grant Transaction Summary (Leave10) report.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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As I promised you last week, I will now tell you about the extraordinarily cool copy line item feature in vendor requisitions. Let’s take a live example and see how it works. First, as an efficiency, we all create requisitions with lots of line items that are related. The sample below is from a Lead Custodian reordering supplies. Using one requisition for his 23 line items gives him an easy way to track the order. |
Fast forward six months, and he is ready to reorder the highlighted supplies. Not all of them, just some. So he doesn’t want to copy the entire requisition and delete items; that would take too long. Neither does he want to enter the items from scratch.
So what is a Lead Custodian to do?
Use the Copy Line Items task on the Items tab of the vendor requisition, of course! Not only can he specify which line items he wants, he can also specify the order in which they appear. He wants line item 18 to appear first, so he enters that first. Then, he enters all of the other line items he wants, using ranges when it makes sense.
And this is what he gets: less data entry, more control, and a faster way to order his supplies while ensuring that he doesn’t make any data entry mistakes!
Now that’s extraordinarily cool.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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The people who enter requisitions online are wonderful, saving time and the environment by going paperless. Sometimes, though, their exuberance gets the better of them, like the user that entered 524 line items in a single requisition (true story). While we applaud their enthusiasm, the administrative side of processing 524 line items for a single requisition can be difficult on vendors, purchasing, and warehouse personnel. |
Without squashing requisitioner excitement, purchasing can tamp down the party by limiting the number of line items per requisition. This can be done for vendor requisitions in the Department Record. The Max Number of Line Items field allows departments to enter a number of line items that cannot be exceeded.
If a user exceeds this number of line items (75 in our example), they will receive a warning on the 76th line item that they have exceeded the limit.
Of course, they can still save the requisition. But they cannot submit it until they reduce the number of line items to equal to or less than the maximum. No worries, though, this can be accomplished quickly with the copy line items option, which I will talk about next week!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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You know that every Escape Online 5 release is filled with hundreds of enhancements and fixes. Releases may also contain new functionality for our larger scale additions to Escape Online 5. We keep track of these projects via the Product Roadmap, which outlines what we plan to complete in the upcoming year. These projects usually take more than one release to complete and require the skill set of multiple developers. We re-evaluate the roadmap several times during the year to determine if we are on track and assess if any updates need to be made. |
Below is a recap of the roadmap items that we completed in 2010. Please visit our Product Roadmap page for more detail on these items and to see what’s planned for 2011.
As always, your input is appreciated, so if you have something specific you’d like to see on the roadmap, please feel free to contact me directly.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Part of my job as the IT Manager at Escape is ensuring that our products work with the latest Microsoft technologies, such as Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL server 2008. This requires that we submit the most current version of software to a Microsoft Certified test facility every two years. The testing is conducted independently by VeriTest, a testing service of Lionbridge Technologies. |
On January 21st, we submitted Escape Online 5 version 10.05 to VeriTest and registered to acquire the Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV)/Software competency with testing on Windows 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008. I’m happy to announce that we received notification in late February that we passed the testing and have renewed our Microsoft Partner certification!
In addition to testing the software, VeriTest also requires customer references to verify certain information about their operation and use of Escape Online 5. I’d like to thank those customers that participated as references, including Sonoma County Office of Education, Santa Rosa Junior College, Tehama County Office of Education, Alameda County Office of Education and Placer County Office of Education.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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