Created attachment 140860 [details] Full description of problem of end-of-year processing & possible solution. The topic of end-of-year processing has come up regularly in the koha-us Acquisitions SIG. Librarians would like to have a way to order things for the next year when still in the current year and have the items showing up on the next year's budget. Example: our library has a fiscal year that goes from Oct 1 to Sept 30. A popular book will release October 15. We want to order the book in August. We would like to have the item ordered on the new fiscal year starting October. How do we do that? I have attached a Word document that more fully explains the issue and I have suggested a solution that I think will work for both EDI and non-EDI vendors. Please look over the solution and share any problems or improvements.
I would love to have this functionality! Our library is in the same situation as Rhonda’s where we need to be able know the exact status of how much we’ve spent and how much is outstanding in our current fiscal year which goes through the end of September - but we also want to start pre-ordering materials for the next fiscal year. We’ve handled this in two ways over the years. One is to stop ordering anything that we aren’t sure will fill before the end of the current fiscal and wait to order it until the next fiscal year. That means we don’t get the newest materials on time and patrons are not happy about that. The other method is to go ahead and just keeping ordering but attempt to track how much of what is encumbered will actually fill during the current year in an Excel spreadsheet. This takes way too much time and is error prone. So +1 for this bug.
Agreed. Our library system is in a similar situation. This functionality sounds ideal.
What our libraries do here is create the budget for next year when they need to do that (before the end of year actions) and start odering there. You can have 2 and more active budgets in Koha and can still later close them and move the open orders. But maybe I am missing something?
I think this works in some cases. The problem comes when we create the order on the vendor site and upload that in Koha. The grids used on the vendor side contains the fund code but no indication of which budget. We have the same Fund code for both budgets to be able to roll over budgets at the end of the year. Koha doesn't have a way of knowing which budget to attach the orders to. That is why we want the ability to update the fund code in batch mode. In the case of EDI ordering (US), when Koha receives the orders, there is no way for Koha to know which budget to adjust. From my experience, it just uses the first budget code that it finds that matches. That is why we need something in the plugin to pass the budget ID so the correct budget is adjusted.
Thx for explaining! So if I understood correctly, this would be something like: * Use fund id instead of code (maybe optional) when uploading orders to Koha * Batch edit orders to change the fund they are assigned to Maybe these could be split into 2 bugs with this as an omnibus.
I can't think of a way to get the fund id in the grid coming from the vendor. I have been brain storming with Nick at KohaCon about this and an idea he had was - For the cases where we are add to a basket from 'a new file' or 'a staged file' that there would be a dropdown next to 'a new file' or 'a staged file' to allow selecting the budget the basket is for. - When receiving, always use the current year's budget because that will be the year that it will be paid for. The budgets have the dates and Koha could use that information. I have attached a mockup for the 'add to a basket' part.
Created attachment 140958 [details] a mockup of the change to the add to basket
Created attachment 141004 [details] Shows the different ways the fund drop down is organized in Koha.
It would be helpful if the fund drop down was display/organized as it is on the item receiving page with the funds grouped under the appropriate budget header. When ordering, the funds display by alphabetical order with no indication what fund they are associated with. (see attachment 'fund drop down')
Created attachment 148574 [details] Default accounting details tab gives option to select a fund for all orders from a file Hi all, I've found an option to select a fund for all orders from a file. It is found under the 'Default accounting details' tab, visible at the same stage as selecting items from the file to order. I believe this addresses the need to batch edit orders to apply a fund. Can you please advise, where would it be useful to store the budget ID (or name) with the order? If this is still needed? I think it's a great idea to display the budget names in the fund dropdown when adding orders to baskets. Thanks Aleisha
> I think it's a great idea to display the budget names in the fund dropdown > when adding orders to baskets. I think we should standardize the fund pull downs and always include the budget information. It's not uncommon to order on the current and next years end of year here. I believe Nick did great work showing hierarchy, allowing to display inactive etc. on the receive page. So I hope we could use that as a template.