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EMIS Staff Reporting - What, When, Where, Why, How?

The Staff and Course Collection - Initial for fiscal year 2025 is set to close January 29, 2025. We all know EMIS reporting can be a very overwhelming task. Where does one begin, right? Our focus is to assure you are aware of our many tools to make reporting this information as simple as possible.

First, complete the steps outlined in the Staff and Course (L) Collection Checklist. Please keep in mind many ITC’s have their own checklist for EMIS reporting. Always follow your ITC specific instructions; however, this Staff and Course (L) Collection Checklist can be used as a supplemental. Some important items to pay particular attention to in this checklist before processing your first collection are:

• Is your EMIS Reporting Configuration>Fiscal Year is set to 2025?

• Are all your past Compensations archived or marked as unreportable to EMIS?

• Have all your previous year’s long-term illnesses been cleared?

• Have you updated all experience fields - including total experience, authorized experience, and principal experience - for the new fiscal year?

• Have you updated information for employees that have changed degree types and semester hours?

• Are all the Position ‘override’ values that do not apply to this fiscal year been cleared?

• Have all of your employees that left over the summer months and have not yet been reported as separated in last year’s final staff collection been updated with a separated date and reason?

• Do you have any employee’s that are no longer employed at the district, or employed in the district but with a different position, this year? If so, has their position status and/or date been updated to reflect such?

• For new employees, and those that may have moved positions thus have new compensations, have all three employee, position, and compensation) 'EMIS reportable’ checkboxes marked - for new employees and those that may have moved positions/have new compensations.

Once you feel you have all of the necessary reporting components entered/updated properly, there are many ways to check your information - prior to running the data collection. All of the options list below can be run as many times as necessary till the desired outcome is achieved.

• From the Reports menu, select EMIS Reports, and then EMIS Data Collections Reports:

  • Run both the Employee Report and Position Report. It’s important these two reports are error free before processing your collection in the Data Collector. Please reach out to your ITC for assistance in resolving these errors.

  • EMIS Data Extract Report. This report puts all the EMIS reporting pieces in one place. This report can be run multiple times by changing the report parameters to view the data in different ways.

• Use the information provided in the Public Shared Reports Library (located by clicking on the ‘Help’ menu option in your application)

  • EMIS Employees Report.

  • EMIS Active Positions Report.

  • EMIS Inactive Positions Report.

  • EMIS Active Contract Compensations Report.

  • EMIS Inactive Contract Compensations Report.

  • EMIS Active Non Contract Compensations Report.

  • EMIS Inactive Non Contract Compensations Report.

  • EMIS List.

  • EMIS Reportable Report.

  • EMIS Staff Report.

After all the necessary information has been updated in the system and verified using any of the report options, it’s time to proceed to the data collector. Always remember to always check all of the data collector level one reports. If you encounter errors in these reports, what’s next? We have a helpful resource—the EMIS Level 1 Errors Explanation—which pairs each data collector error to the corresponding field(s) in State Software causing the issue. Note, the document is separated into four worksheets - CI - Staff Demographic, CK - Staff Employment, CJ - Contract Staff Employment, and CC - Contract Only Staff. So based on the type of level one error, be sure to select the appropriate tab.

The process of running the collection, viewing all level one reports, correcting any errors and/or updating any inaccurate information should be repeated as needed until the collection is error free and all data being reported is accurate.

Other useful resources:

• USPS User Manual - USPS and EMIS Connection

• Miscellaneous SSDT Training Presentations - Mastering Mid-Year Contract Changes

• SSDT YouTube Channel - EMIS L Checklist and EMIS Common Errors

• DEW’s EMIS Manual - Section 3: Staff Records and EMIS Resources

Happy Reporting!

A Year in Review

With 2024 behind us, we can reflect on an extremely productive year for the State Software Development Team. We successfully implemented a new software application mid-summer, enhancing our existing suite with the addition of the Employee Self Service application. Mind you, this was a fast and arduous process converting hundreds of districts from the Kiosk application to ESS and we have everyone to thank in this journey! This achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the collective efforts of the ITC and district staff involved in the conversions. We cannot thank you enough for your hard work and dedication, as well as your feedback on ways to improve or enhance the newly released application. You were all so actively engaged, allowing our development team to gain a better understanding of what was needed to improve user experience and functionality. Our developers have already completed several of your enhancement requests with additional enhancements to be made in 2025. Thank you all!

Along with the implementation of ESS, we continued to improve our existing applications as well, prioritizing feedback from our user community such as the State Software Steering Committee and members of the Prioritization Working Group. We implemented numerous user-requested features and improvements to enhance our software’s functionality and user experience. Listed below are some of the most impactful updates that were made in 2024:

USAS

• Ability to merge vendors and unmerge (previously merged) vendors

• Allow modifying Requisition fields (that do not impact amounts or accounts) on a requisition in a closed period

• Enhanced the PO Repair option by allowing the ability to remove the vendor on any new or previously invoiced PO. This will result in a multi-vendor PO.

• Added the ability to filter by all account code dimensions on the Activity Ledger grid

• Improved Accounts Receivable so that when processing a payment from the billing grid, once the payment has been processed, it will automatically return to the billing grid

• Implemented option to clone existing report bundles so they can be shared with other users in the district

• Created a canned Requisition Approval Report to include all requisitions currently in the workflow process

• Performance Improvements:

  • Canned Budget Summary Report

    • If running the report using the ‘Exclude All Amounts Zero,' improved an average of 73%

    • If no parameters selected, improved an average of 35%

  • Canned Financial Detail Report (average of 68%)

  • Processing of pending transactions (POs 45%), purchase order UI responsiveness (82-97%), AP invoices (16-40%), payables posting (58%) and several disbursement processing improvements (voids 66%; unvoids 47%; reconcile/unreconcile 99%; resequence 38%)

• Added CSV and Excel-data format options to the canned Accounts Payable report

• The ‘Change Invoice Items Received Dates’ mass change definition was made available to mass update invoice item received dates. 

• Improved the handling of posting periods during the account change process. Posting periods will no longer be reopened as part of the account change process.

• MiniOrange MFA Integration

USPS

• Improved the Payroll Error Report by:

  • Including a warning when a Position with Retirement System set to ‘None’ is included in payroll

  • Including a warning if Medicare tax payroll item is not found

• Enhanced the Leave Balance Report to allow the report to be run based on user provided ‘as of date.’

• Allow salary notices to be processed by pay group.

• Several USPS improvements related to the implementation of Employee Self Service

• Improved the styling (the look) of several reports. The report column heading row is highlighted and the report lines are shaded.

• Several improvements to various USPS views including:

  • Payroll Payments View

  • Accumulations View

  • Adjustment Journal View

  • Payroll Account View

  • Leaves View (and removal of ‘Leaves-New’ option from the menu)

• Added a new warning to New Contract when the calculated pay period is different than the user entered value.

• Updated the Quarter Report so the Form 941 section now includes line 5d for Medicare over $200,000.00.

• Renamed the Expenditure Accounts grid account dimensions to match the USAS Expenditure Accounts (for example, the ‘accountDimension1’ is now labeled ‘Fund’).

• Enhanced all Attendance report options to allow selection of multiple categories.

• Improved the generation of the SERS Per Pay submission file option to automatically check to see if a SERS Adjustment file should be generated. If so, the adjustment file is automatically generated.

• Add the ability to enter employee and/or employer payroll item maximum amounts when processing a new employee using Employee Onboarding.

• Improved the Attendance grid to allow multi-selecting and the ability to mass delete.

• Enhanced the direct deposit notice to always include YTD totals for all payroll items - even if the payroll item was not withheld that pay.

• Created a canned Account History Report (replaces the Account History v1 and v2 template reports) - viewable under the Reports option.

• Added the W2 SSN Verification option which includes the Create Submission File and Results Reports options.

• Added an EMIS Reports option called EMIS Data Extract report to extract EMIS reporting data in .csv format.

• MiniOrange MFA Integration

Inventory

• Enhanced the Location Worksheet to include acquisition date, original cost and a physical inventory comments line (in order for users to hand write comments)

• On the Pending Items grid, added the following dates fields to the MORE button: purchase order, invoice and received so users can add them to the grid.

• Improved the Split Item functionality

• Made several improvements to the Audit report

• FYE Bundle improvements

• MiniOrange MFA Integration

Open

• SSDT Wiki

• December Release Recap

• Newsletters Home Page

• SSDT Documentation

• USAS Documentation

• USPS Documentation

• Inventory Documentation

• ESS Documentation

• SSDT YouTube Channel

• USPS YouTube Playlist

• USAS YouTube Playlist

• Inventory YouTube Playlist

• ESS YouTube Playlist

Open

One of our most recent training recordings covers both USPS Mass Load and Mass Change. Please review the recording to get more information on the “How Can I” questions such as mass updating payroll accounts, mass loading payroll items and reviewing several mass change definitions.

Did You Know?

ESS Pre-Export Report

Many of you have asked for the ability to generate a ‘preview' report in ESS prior to exporting leave request data. This enhancement was made available on the 2024.17.0 release. With the 'preview’ report, you can review and validate the data before finalizing the export, ensuring greater accuracy and peace of mind.

The ‘Print Pre-Export Report’ button is located in the Leave Management>Export Leave Requests window. Once you are finished filtering the leave requests you would like to include in the export, the bottom grid displays the filtered results for all approved Leave Requests. Select the leave requests you would like exported (or select the top box to select all), and click on ‘Print Pre-Export Report’ to generate the leave-request-export-report.CSV file.

The CSV spreadsheet will include the absence data that will be exported out of ESS.

Once you have reviewed the preview report, the selected leave will remain in the grid so that you may continue on to perform the actual export using the ‘Export Leave Requests’ option.
More information regarding exporting Leave Requests can be found here.