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You may have heard the cliché, “use it or lose it” but have you heard of “use it or get an extra paycheck?” Of course, I am referring to vacation balances. Some of our customers have a vacation policy that does not include carrying over a balance, and that means that something must be done with the leftover. Escape Online supports paying off leave balances and docking pay for leave overages. Let’s take a look at how this works.

• Docks. Each leave balance profile can be set up to go negative or dock an employee’s pay every earnings period.

• Payoffs. Each leave balance can be set up to payoff excess leave in the employee’s last earnings period.

Here is the setup. It is super easy!

All you have to do is set the flag in the Leave Balance Profile and specify the addons to be used in the Organization record.

Everything else is automated. The users entering the leave transactions simply enter the transaction. They don’t have to do anything special. This is awesome because many of our customers have their site users entering leaves.

Escape Online creates the docks/payoffs automatically based on your setup. And, it gives you two opportunities to override.

First, when the HR/Payroll Technician loads leaves into payroll (in the Leave Status activity), Escape Online shows each dock or payoff, giving the technician an opportunity to allow the leave to go negative or carry over.

Second, when the leaves are posted Escape Online creates the addons for the dock or the payoff. Again, the user has the opportunity to override the amount in the Adjust Payroll activity.

Slick!

Let’s take a look a “real” example. Say an employee has 6 hours of vacation but uses 10 hours; the payroll technician has the option of docking the employee’s pay for 4 hours or allowing the vacation balance to go negative.

On the other hand, say an employee has 20 hours of vacation but has only used 10. Escape Online would create an addon paying the employee for those 10 hours on their last earnings period. Again, the technician has the opportunity to override and allow those 10 hours to carry over to the next year, or adjust the amount for any other reason.

Leave docks/payoffs are one more example of how Escape Online provides expert functionality with simple setup, and that is very slick indeed.

While cash is always important, this time of year the control of cash is imperative. Districts and County Offices of Education need to close cash and make sure that nothing changes in the closing fiscal year.
Fabulously, Escape Online gives you the control you need. Not only can you control when cash is closed, but also at what level. Let me explain.

The When

The “when” is controlled through the cash and close dates in the Fiscal Year Status activities. (Districts only need to fill in these dates if they want cash to close on a date earlier than defined by their COE.)

For each month, you have two fields that control the closing of cash:

• The Close Cash field defines the date when cash for the level can no longer be changed.
• The Close field defines the date when the ledger is closed.

At What Level

The “at what level” is controlled by the JE Check Cash Closed Option field in the Organization record. (COE control is in the System table.)

This field defines at what level users will be stopped from posting journal entries that move cash after the cash is closed. Levels include:

• Any – JEs will not post if there are any cash accounts in the journal entry, as determined by the cash object.
• Fund – The journal entry will not post if there is a change in cash at the fund level. For example, if a journal entry transferred between funds, the JE would not post. However, users can post JEs that transfer cash between resources.
• Overall – JEs will not post if there is a change in overall cash across funds. Users can post JEs that transfer cash between funds as long as overall cash is not changed.
• Resource – JEs will not post if there is a change in cash at the fund or resource level. Users can only post JEs with changes to cash where the accounts are within the same resource/fund combination. In other words, if a JE transferred cash between funds — or even across resources within the same fund — that JE would not post.
• SACS Fund – JEs will not post if there is a change in SACS fund rollup cash.

What Happens

When you attempt to post a JE, Escape Online checks to see if the JE affects cash and at what level. Then, it checks the appropriate date in the Fiscal Year Status: the Close Cash Date or the Close Date.

• Affects cash for level specified – Checks today’s date against the close cash date for the Fiscal Year status month of the transaction date. If today’s date is after the close cash date, the journal entry is automatically put on hold (instead of posted) and a history record is written.
• Does not affect cash for level specified – Checks today’s date against the close date for the Fiscal Year status month of the transaction date. If today’s date is after the close date, the journal entry is automatically put on hold (instead of posted) and a history record is written.

Fabulous! Escape Online puts you in control of the cash!

We are about to enter Year End for school business. This is a time when expenditures and revenues cross fiscal years. It is a time when decisions need to be made: which requisitions will be accrued, carried forward to the next year or closed. One of the ways Escape Online helps you manage this process is through the use of the Final Payment flag for vendor requisitions.

With one click of the mouse, you can signal that this requisition has received all of the payments that it is ever going to receive. Escape Online takes it from there.

If you mark a payment as final, Escape Online releases any unused liability amount(s), adjusts the account amounts to reflect the actual payment account amounts, sets the requisition total amount to the sum of all payment amounts and updates the requisition adjusted amount by any difference between the original total amount and the payment total amount. And, finally, changes the status of the requisition to “Complete.”

That’s pretty awesome for a single flag!

But that’s not all. Escape Online tries to help you set the flag at the right time! If the sum of all payments for a requisition (including the one you just entered, but not including any that have been denied or cancelled) is greater than or equal to the requisition amount and you did not flag the payment as the final payment, the payment will be put on hold and the message “Final Payment?” will be written to the Status Comment field.

This handy-dandy little flag allows you to easily make partial payments and even keep a requisition with a zero balance open so that you can process it on your year end list!

Escape Online workflow definitions also include a powerful notification feature. Let’s take a look!

This is a screenshot of a step within a workflow definition. Honestly, this is not a LIVE example because I wanted to show you all of the options in one shot, so to speak.

As you can see, there are three types of notifications that you can set up.

Notify User: This allows you to notify a specific Escape Online user of an event. For example, say Celeste is the Principal and she wants to be notified every time an HRA is completed for her school. To do this, she would have the location set in her Workflow Role User record and have her user specified here in this step.

Notify Other: This allows you to notify a particular type of user, like document originator or previous approvers. Many of our LIVE customers use this to notify users of cancellations or documents that were denied during the approval process.

Notify Workflow Role: This allows you to notify a group of users, like purchasing, budget managers or IT. Some customers have used this to notify budget managers of requisitions over a certain dollar amount going to the Complete status. Others have used it in HRAs for employee termination to notify the IT department about an employee’s departure so they can remove the employee’s access points.

All three of these options can be used in combination with each other. In fact, you could create several steps in a workflow so that you could closely control who gets notified and when.

As we can see here, the ALL flag is set to yes for level 10, workflow role Admin Appr. (When you see this flag set to YES that means everyone with the workflow role for that level MUST approve the document before the next level of users would receive notification of required approvals.) To see who is attached to the workflow role, we need to check out the System-Setup-Workflow-Workflow Role Users activity.

The Workflow Role Users activity is where you tie a workflow definition to a User record in Escape Online and define how the user works within the workflow structure for documents, departments, locations, goods/services and accounts.

Here’s a snapshot of the Workflow Role Users activity.

Actually, in this LIVE example from a customer, there are quite a few workflow users for this workflow role, so I focused the graphic on only those approvers for location HR97, and I highlighted some of the account component codes so we can get deep into the intricacies of workflow.

Let’s say we have a requisition for location HR97 and its account has 5043 for the management component. That requisition MUST be approved by Jamie, Jan and Randy before moving onto level 20.  Here’s another one.  If the requisition is for HR97 and the management component is 7279 (the second code on Jamie’s line), the requisition would need approvals by both Jamie and Randy.  If the requisition has management code 5042 (not in Jamie, Jan or Jim’s list), then only Randy will have to approve.

But what if the Approve All flag was set to NO?

I sometimes find being contrary can help me understand concepts better. If the flag for level 10 was set to NO that means that anyone who matches the criteria can approve for the whole level. Using our first example, if a requisition is for location HR97 and its account has 5043 for the management component, then Jamie, Jan OR Randy can approve.

In this LIVE example, there are a lot of levels and a lot of criteria for each level of approvals. The COE that developed these workflow definitions spent a lot of time discerning how workflows could be used for their business practices. Escape Online allows workflows to be as complex or simple as you need them to be, with users working together or separately to approve documents as they go through the life cycle.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or in this case, the principal or the superintendent. The key feature of workflow approvals is flexibility. You can define approval paths any way you like. You can go for the simple (principal, budget manager, purchasing) or the complex (principal or assistant principal, budget manager but only if over $500, program manager for certain account components, and CBO). Even though these seem very different, both of these scenarios have only a few levels. You could go really crazy and create up to 99 levels, because that is how flexible workflow approvals are.

Let’s take a look at two LIVE examples of leveling currently being used at two different districts.

The first example has many levels. The levels tell Escape Online the order in which the approvals are to take place.

We can see that the department chair for this Unified School District is the first to receive an approval request. Once the chair approves, the Department Head has their chance, then Budget, then the Site Administrator and then the Program Manager.

But what’s this? We have two level 20s. This means that both of these approvals are going to happen at the same time.

Now, why would you do that? Because the Director and the Categorical Managers are two different people. You could have put them into a group, but then your workflow users and groups could become too complicated to maintain. This simplifies the workflow.

What happens in Escape Online when you have two approval items at the same level is that the requisition (or HRA or other document) will not move onto the next level until ALL items at that level are complete. In other words, the Technology Verifier is not going to get to see the requisition on the approval list until BOTH the Director and Categorical Manager give their approvals.

Our next example is a little more streamlined, or so it seems.

It has only five levels, but there is a lot going on under the hood.

First, the Approve All flag is set to YES, which means the workflow role Admin Approve has many people assigned to it. This is extremely powerful and needs a Friday Feature all of its own, so we are going to talk about this next week.

In the meantime, let me point out that the last approver has a Dollar Min set. We saw this in the first example too. Setting a dollar minimum for an approval level means that the person (or people) for that level will not see the approval request on their list unless the total amount of the document is greater than that amount. Pretty impressive!

Which brings us back to the age-old question, which came first the chicken or the egg? Well, with workflows in Escape Online, the answer is you get to decide.

Now, I have written a few Friday Features about workflows in Escape Online (see below) but I have never really explained how workflows are setup and how they work. Let’s start that process today, and spend the next six weeks covering such topics as document types, leveling, requiring all approvers to approve or not, notifications in general and notifying users specifically. In other words, let’s talk workflows!

First things first. We really need to define what the term workflow means in Escape Online. In a nutshell, workflows are used to define the progression of a document through its life cycle, defining approvals and notifications sent to users when certain events occur.

Oh, now that was tricky. I introduced two more terms: document and event. For Escape Online, a “document” is a record that is processed, generally with approvals along the way. This means that the term “document” refers to requisitions, payments, HRAs (human resource authorizations), journal entries and work orders. (Next week, we will explore document types in depth, like which types support workflow definitions and what can you do with them.)

An “event” is “anything that triggers a history record.” This means that submitting a document, changing a status, even changing a field in a document can be an event.

Let’s look at an example from one of our customers.

For their vendor requisitions, they have specified that certain things should happen when an event occurs. So, using our definition of event above, when a requisition (document type) is submitted (an event), then it will be electronically routed for approvals to a site user (principal), a program manager, the assistant supervisor and the purchasing agent.

Then, when the requisition is approved, Escape Online will assign a buyer for the items in the requisition and it will send a notification to the budget director.

If someone changes the requisition, resulting in a change order, then all of the people in the purchasing group get a notification.

If someone denies the requisition, then the person who originated the document (the requisitioner) will be notified and so will all of the people who gave their approval.

Finally, when the requisition is complete, the requisitioner gets a notification. The requisitioner also gets a notification if the requisition is cancelled.

Cool! It seems pretty clear that workflows can engage the intricacies of a document winding its way from Open to Complete.