SMART FINANCE

SMART HR

Synergy

MealsPlus

SchoolReach

Spring is here!
 And along with it, new things at Region 1!

MealsPlus has made a massive upgrade to its online lunch payment system, lunchprepay.com, to MySchoolMoney.com. Not only will parents be able to place money on student lunch accounts, they will also be able to make payments on any school fees assigned to students all in one transaction.  Synergy 8.0 was also released recently featuring many new and exciting features. Read more about these new items and more below!

Administrator Symposium
Region I will be holding its first annual Administrator Symposium on April 23rd and 24th at two locations in our region – Fergus Falls and Thief River Falls. This event is geared towards Superintendents and Building Administrators, and is intended to provide a useful cross section of information, highlighting interesting topics on efficiency and effectiveness. We will be reviewing some features and functionality of specific software applications, however, this event is not intended to be a sales pitch. Our main goal is to simply have you asking the question – “Can this help me do my job more effectively or make my district better?”

The event will run from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm at each location. Registration is free and we will have snacks and beverages available.
Registration information has been e-mailed and is also available by simply contacting Laurie Raftevold or our student service staff members at our office.
We hope to see you there!

ITV System Upgrade Opportunity
If your district currently has one of the old Tandberg ITV systems through NW Links, you will be receiving information in the next few weeks regarding a grant opportunity to replace the aging equipment in your district with a new ITV system. This is made possible through a grant from the MN Public Utilities Commission that was awarded to Region I. This an excellent opportunity to move your videoconferencing capabilities into the world of high definition technology at a very a reasonable cost.

Stay tuned for more details.

New Schools - Software Updates:

Fertile - Beltrami Public Schools – MealsPlus, SchoolReach
Lake Park - Audubon Public Schools – MealsPlus

SMART FINANCE

New UFARS Codes:
We have loaded the latest FY 12-13 UFARS codes into SMART Finance including finance 316 for Staff Development.  We will be running new Chapter X edits for all districts.  Stacy or Kath will be contacting districts that have FY 12-13 UFARS compliance reporting errors.

Staff Development
After we added the new finance dimension for staff development-finance 316.  We did the following dimension changes for all districts:

• If there was a balance in account B01-403 (Reserved for Staff Development), we made no changes to your staff development accounts.  You should continue to use finance dimensions 306,307, and 308 until the balance in B01-403 is zero; then, switch to finance dimension 316.

• If your district did not have a Reserved for Staff Development fund balance, we referenced finance dimensions 306, 307, and 308 to finance 316.  You may want to consider converting accounts using finance dimensions 306, 307, and 308 to finance 316.
We will be discussing staff development accounting options at our year end meetings.

SMART HR

Sign up for a SMART HR Fiscal Year End Meeting

Topics to be covered at the meeting:  What’s new in SMART HR including an overview of the new Employee Management module, Payoffs and Fiscal Year End Review. 

Email Carol with the location you will be attending.

Date: Time: Location:

____ Monday May 6, 12:30-3:30 – BRIC conference room, Bemidji

____ Wednesday May 8, 9:30-12:30 – LCSC training room, Fergus Falls

____ Friday May 10, 9:30-12:30 – NWSC training room, Thief River Falls

Let SMART HR help YOU get the most out of your day!  
If you can’t check off all of these features… call Angie or Cindy for help to get you started! 
I currently use:

_ Rate Tables for Contract Pay Codes
_ Rate Tables for Hourly Pay Codes
_ Rate Tables for deduction/benefit Codes
_ The retro process to import retro timecards for contracts or hourly employees
_ Retiree & COBRA Insurance COBRA notices and tracking
_ Injuries & Workers Comp including the ESS online SRA
_ TimeOFF for tracking sick leave and vacation.
_ Pay Detail
_ Budgeting
_ New Account Code Transfer window
_ Automatic Vouchers from SMART HR
_ SMART HR’s 941 form
_ OPEB data extract process
_ ESS Paperless Pay stubs

Banking Holidays –plan your check dates accordingly:
Monday May 27th – Memorial Day

Reminder: Effective July 1, 2013 TRA contributions increase from 6.5% to 7.0%

SMART HR Budget Training - SMART HR’s budget module can help you revise your current payroll budget or project next year’s payroll budget complete with employee step increases, salary and benefit increases.  The end result is a budget file that can be imported into SMART finance.  Contact your processor if you are interested.

What should you do with your un-cashed payroll checks?
Under Minnesota’s Unclaimed Property Laws, un-cashed and returned checks must generally be reported to the Minnesota Department of Commerce after three years. To learn more, click on the following link to view the holder report guide from the Department of Commerce: http://mn.gov/commerce/images/Holder_Report_Guide.pdf

Additional information about unclaimed property can be found on the Department of Commerce’s website at http://mn.gov/commerce/topics/Unclaimed-Property/.
To prevent having un-cashed checks consider requiring direct deposit for your employees.   

           

Synergy 8.0.0 has over 2300 updates and enhancements from version 7.5.0. Some of the new features include:
• Streams indicator inside Synergy
• Auto-complete for the Quick Nav
• Ability to quickly e-mail report output to self ('E-Mail Me' button on reports)
• Notification of Address Updates via Tasks
• Ability to e-mail users of Tasks
• Student Grade Book screen showing student marks in Grade Book from inside Synergy
• Classroom Taken Attendance Summary screen
• Ability to run Update Grades for multiple schools at once
• Aggregate functions in Query
• Schedule and Request Analysis screen
• HealthVUE for iPad
• Ability to limit report output by Group or Counselor
• Student Notes from TeacherVUE and Synergy
• Free-form seating charts
• Quick Add for Discipline Incidents
• Emergency Report, available inside AdminVUE as well

Supported Web Browsers for Synergy 8.0.

* For TeacherVUE, Safari 5.1.2 or above is also a supported browser for Macintosh computers.  Also, any browsers currently supported by the browser vendor can be used with ParentVUE and StudentVUE.

OBJECTIVE BASED REPORT CARDS –
If your elementary school is using the objective based report cards in SYNERGY, now is the time to meet with your elementary teachers to review any changes needed for next year.  Please review these important deadlines. 
- Submit all requested changes for report cards to Region I by June 15th.  Email (diana@region1.k12.mn.us) or fax (218-236-2368) a copy of the report card with the changes needed. 

- Region1 will return a PDF file of each report card for you to review before August 1st.  

- Any minor adjustments must be submitted back to Region I by August 15th. 

- Region I will return a Final PDF file for each report card by September 1st.  At that time we will ask the Principal at each building to approve each report card and sign off on the final draft.

END OF YEAR CHECKLIST –
A new School End of Year checklist is available on the Region I website.  Please review the checklist – we have added some additional items to think about.  These steps are critical for MARSS reporting of graduated seniors.  If you have any questions please contact any of the student support team.

MCCC 2010-2011 Reporting
With the release of version 8.0 the MCCC student extract using version 2 schema became available.  A new MCCC - Synergy Document is available on the Region 1 website.  This document will change as work is completed for the required K-12 reporting starting fiscal year 2011-2012 and beyond.
No deadline has been set for the collection of 2011-2012 data.
The Region1 student staff is available to answer your questions and help you get this reporting done.

Carl Perkins -2012/2013
The extract file for Carl Perkins has changed starting this school year.  The reporting window will open when school closes for the summer and will remain open until school starts this fall.
MDE is adding the following fields to the extract:
Student First, Middle and Last names, Suffix, Gender and Date of Birth
The record length will go from 42 to 175 characters.
Region1 is working with Edupoint to meet this new reporting requirement.
We will let you know when the new extract program becomes available.

MySchoolMoney.com’s Official Launch!
Meals Plus has released their newly enhanced online payment website MySchoolMoney.com to replace LunchPrepay.com. The changes have been put in place to increase online payment capabilities for school districts and parents. The site offers an online payment system for parents to pay for meals and any school-related fees.

As with the former website, MySchoolMoney.com gives parents 24/7 secure access to all of their children’s meal history as well as the ability to set low balance notifications when an account goes below a certain amount. Parents will also automatically receive a text message and e-mail alerts when a fee is assigned to their student if the district utilizes the school fee payment option.
“We are very excited to give school districts more flexibility in managing and processing payments. While the basic functionality is the same as LunchPrepay.com, the new enhancements provide an opportunity to simplify task all around, which is a core value of our system,” noted Meals Plus Vice President, Jeff Flynn.

For school districts, the site will simplify bookkeeping procedures by allowing meal and school fees to be accepted into separate accounts and paid in one transaction. Districts will be able to assign school-related fees to the entire district, specific schools, classrooms, groups or individual students. Teachers can now accept payments in the classroom and the service is free for school districts that use the Meals Plus Point of Sale systems.

MySchoolMoney.com is an improved version of LunchPrepay.com, but for parents and school districts there is very little they will have to do when the transition occurs. The site when live March 26th, 2013.

Auto Update 97
We will begin releasing Meals Plus Auto Update 97, on Monday, April 8th, after 1:00 p.m. Central time. The last full release, for your reference, was AU93. Numbers have been skipped due to hotfixes and releases that were issued for beta testing purposes only.

The update will be released on a staggered schedule, as follows:

The district name is pulled directly from your license file. If you want to confirm how your district is listed, simply log in to the Point of Sale module and select the Administration menu, and Control File option.  The “unit name” is what we consider your district name.

Number Tracker

Number Tracker™ is an innovative service included on all SchoolReach accounts that helps ensure that parents never miss an important message. Parents often move, or change phone providers, and fail to notify school officials. Behind the scenes, Number Tracker is working for you, quietly analyzing the success or failure of call delivery attempts to the phone numbers in your lists.

Benefits: Number Tracker delivers enormous benefits to both staff and parents:
•Proactively keeps lists accurate ensuring parents NEVER miss a message
•Reduces work load on staff, slashing the amount of time spent updating records and contacting parents
•Increases parent satisfaction by keeping them up to date and informed.

How it Works: Phone numbers can fail for many reasons on any particular broadcast, but those that consistently fail over time are the ones that need to be addressed.

When you open and run Number Tracker, you will be presented with a graphical analysis of your phone numbers. A built-in email system allows you to send emails to parents, automatically inserting the invalid phone number into the message, which asks them to contact and update the school office. An export capability allows an invalid number report to be generated and given to a staff member for follow-up. Number Tracker allows you to proactively improve the quality of your parent phone data, ensuring the highest overall message delivery rate for your important phone broadcasts.

Existing SchoolReach users can learn how to use Number Tracker today. Just go to training.schoolreach.com and sign up for any SchoolReach New Features session.

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