Most school districts spend more than 75% of their budget on salaries, so payroll processing is mission critical.  Typically, one or more people spend many hours or even days each pay period manually entering data from stacks of paper forms to account for employee leave and substitutes’ time worked.  The procedure is not only tedious but also error-prone.

An increasing number of Aesop districts are radically transforming this process.  Because Aesop routinely captures complete records of employee leave and subs’ work history, an electronic file containing all of this data is easily exported from Aesop and uploaded into payroll software.  The process takes minutes instead of hours or days, and improves the accuracy of data transfer.

Customized Aesop data extracts already exist for most popular school finance payroll software, and for many “homegrown” systems as well.  For most new payroll systems we encounter, Aesop’s flexible and robust Report Writer can easily produce a custom-formatted data extract which maps to the payroll software’s import template.

So compelling are the efficiency gains through Aesop-payroll integration, they may rival the value of Aesop’s primary function of substitute placement.  This is a bona fide best practice which any accountable school district must consider.  Here is the “low-hanging fruit” in your quest to improve district operations.  Your school board will be proud of this efficiency improvement.

Click here for a case study on just one of the many districts using Aesop's payroll integration.

No Child Left Behind and other teacher quality initiatives have greatly increased the volume of professional development activity at districts across the nation.  Very often, a teacher’s training event will require absence from their own classroom and the assignment of a substitute.  The process of registering for a PD event and requesting a sub is not particularly challenging, but the cumulative time required to coordinate these activities is a drain on teachers’ and districts’ effectiveness.  Until now.

Districts using Aesop and the popular PD management program “My Learning Plan” are benefiting from the integration of these two web-based solutions.  When a teacher registers for a class and their request is approved, their absence is automatically created in Aesop, with a substitute request if required.  When a teacher cancels a PD event in My Learning Plan, the absence is automatically deleted in Aesop with notification to the substitute, as necessary. 

This seamless, real-time interface greatly simplifies management of PD absence requests and improves the accuracy and accountability of the process as well. Added benefits for administrators include the ability to track and evaluate all professional development absences, set daily limits and assign budget codes.

Click here for Aesop-MLP integration case study

Click here for a video demonstration of the Aesop-MLP intergation in action.

Many school districts now use sophisticated applicant tracking systems to manage the flow of electronic documents in the hiring process.  Things go pretty smoothly until a candidate is actually hired, at which point various new employee set up procedures conspire to slow things down.  The bottleneck is especially pronounced in the Spring and Summer hiring season, when many new employees are processed at the same time.  Now, at least one of these procedural obstacles has been removed. 

Frontline has worked with some of the leading applicant tracking vendors to create an automated import mechanism for new employee data in Aesop.  The process is configured to pull information from the applicant tracking system into Aesop at specified intervals, typically once each day.  By automating the creation of new employee records in Aesop, districts can accelerate the new employee setup process and reduce manual data entry errors.  A little bit more time can be recaptured and put to better use.  Small process refinements help school districts become more efficient and accountable.