Overview of the New Acquisitions Module for Existing Users of Acquisitions

 

Concord is introducing a new Acquisitions module; replacing the previous Acquisitions module.

 

If your library has previously been using Acquisitions, this article will outline what has changed between the earlier module and the new module.

 

Existing data in the old module will be preserved and re-created in the new module, but some information and concepts will be presented differently. Underlying costs on resources are unchanged.

 

Acquisitions as a feature of your Infiniti Library Management System

 

Librarians may use Infiniti to catalogue and circulate their physical collection and use an independent procurement system the librarians have access to purchase and reconcile new acquisitions. In this case, librarians may choose to only enter minimal information about the origin of their physical resources, such as the supplier or invoice number.

 

Alternatively, a librarian may wish to use Infiniti to order and track new acquisitions directly. In this case Infiniti can link catalogued records to their respective suppliers, invoices, orders, and budgets. Which information a librarian can enter and which acquisition practices are supported by Infiniti have been revised in the new Acquisitions module.

 

Concord will outline each workflow scenario and how the new module may have changed your options.

 

For Budgets, Suppliers, or Invoices of Copies in Bibliographic Cataloguing

 

When a resource is not attached to an order, entering budget, supplier, and invoice information is substantially similar to previously.

 

The key differences are:

 

  • If entering an invoice number for a supplier, the invoice date is now also required.
  • Budget selection will now require typing in the budget name if the library has more than 20 budgets to select from.

 

When a resource is attached to an order, the relationship is managed through the Acquisitions module. The presentation of this relationship in the Resource Edit dialog has been changed into a four-quadrant layout of: Order Number; Order Status, Order Supplier and Order Invoice.

 

When Budgeting within Infiniti

 

The previous Acquisitions module used the concept of Budget Departments and Budget Periods. The new Acquisitions module uses the concept of Budgets and Cost Centres.

 

All existing Budget Departments have been converted to Cost Centres. Cost Centres are optional and mostly used for grouping and reporting.

 

Existing Budgets have been re-created with explicit dates by combining Budget Departments with Budget Periods, if any were declared. Depending on what Budget Periods were declared, you may end up with a Budget for each year; several Budgets for the same year; or Budgets without a date range.

 

You may want to review, rename, or consolidate your auto-generated Budgets, if they don’t suit your preferences. Since Budgets are optional, if no Budget Departments were declared, your library may have no Budgets.

 

The previous use of Budget Periods to summarise a year’s expenditure across budgets is now presented as “Yearly Expenditures” which sums budgets on the basis of their end date.

 

Budgets have new display behaviour for Placed and Spent columns:

 

Placed sums how much of a placed order hasn’t yet been received. A guide of possible future expenditure on the default budget of the order if the order proceeds.

 

Spent will sum the resource costs differently depending on whether the budget was re-created from the old module versus budgets created in the new module; for consistency. The new module introduces a requirement that a resource only qualifies as spent once received during the ordering process. The old module counts all resources regardless.

 

To use the new Spent logic for budgets from the old module, you will need to merge the old budget into a new budget.

 

The Committed column has been retired; replaced by the new criteria for Placed and Spent.

 

 

Creating an Order

 

The old module had a simple workflow that required very little information about the order. The new module now tracks orders under one of three workflows:

 

  • Library Managed. This means that Infiniti, and by implication the librarian, is responsible for initiating and managing the order. The library can (and usually will) email the order to the supplier from Infiniti using the library’s supplier list.
  • School Procurement System. If your school-wide policy is to manage all school purchases through a centralised acquisitions system, which librarians may or may not have access to, Infiniti can be used to comply with this policy. In this case, librarians can use Infiniti to track and monitor the order’s progress in parallel.
  • Retrospective. This means that the order was created, placed, received, and paid for in the past; outside of any relevant procurement system. For instance, an ad-hoc bookshop receipt or a donation. Because the “order” already happened, the workflow for Retrospective order is much simplified.

 

In the new module, the decision of which supplier to use can be deferred until the order is about to be placed.

 

While order number is optional for a School Procurement System order, it is highly recommended - otherwise the authoritative order may be impossible to look up in the other system.

 

Coordinator is a new optional field to help guide who to discuss an order with in a larger school.

 

Editing an Order

 

The new Acquisitions module enforces a workflow for orders; with each order transitioning from one stage to the next depending on certain criteria, both in Infiniti and the library’s policies. Library Managed and School Procurement orders will follow this workflow:

 

Open

 

In this stage, the order is being collated and prepared to be placed with a supplier. Several keys differences exist between the new module’s concept of an Open order and the old module:

  • Resources are not automatically created and attached to an order while collating a possible order. This allows for a separation of concern between the catalogued collection and prospective orders. You can still create copies of a title with an “On Order” status, but this is no longer needed and they will not be attached to the order until the items are received from the supplier.
  • Order Line Items are now used to explicitly collate the desired quantity of a desired title from the supplier. Since Order Line Items are not resources within the collection, they can capture information only relevant for ordering - such as the supplier’s proprietary product code.
  • While the library catalogue is still used to create the order metadata for the supplier, and the library will need to create bibliographic records for novel titles - new options have been introduced in how Z39.50 can be used to auto-create these titles; including multiple ISBN search and duplicate reconciliation.
  • Notes have been introduced as a general feature. Notes can be flagged to block an order’s completion (until unchecked).
  • Each campus (if your school has campuses declared in Infiniti) can have a different delivery address for the dispatch instructions to the supplier.

 

Placed

 

In this stage, the order has been placed (sent) to the supplier. This may have been done by Infiniti using email; by the librarian in a phone call; or by placing the order on the supplier’s website. Once an order is placed, the supplier and most other details can no longer be changed (unless the order is re-opened).

 

This is the first point in the process where the librarian could opt to attach an invoice if known and relevant. Invoices are treated differently in the new Acquisitions module: They are not mandatory for an order to proceed successfully to completion should a librarian not wish to track this information through Infiniti; and conversely a librarian can attach invoices to resources directly without using the ordering system (see other documentation for further detail on that scenario).

 

Receiving

 

In this stage, the library has received at least one item. This differs from the old module which didn’t have an official status for incrementally receiving and processing items.

 

While an order can be put into this stage before any item is received for processing, treating Receiving as a present-tense activity of incremental processing helps distinguish in the list of all active orders between orders whose parcels haven’t begun to arrive and those that have.

 

Delivered items can be processed (received) in one of two ways. The main way is “Receive New” - where resources are created on the title only when they are received. This allows for barcodes to be assigned when the item is physically present.

 

The other method is “Receive into Existing On-Order Resources” - which is similar to the old module’s behaviour and useful when finalising orders created by the old module.

 

You can only cancel an order if no item has been received. Once an order has at least one catalogued resource attached to it, the order can only progress to completion (partially or wholly fulfilled) with the resources thus received.

 

Received

 

An order is placed into this stage once either all expected items have been delivered or you decide you have received all the goods that the supplier is going to deliver. You can return to Receiving if more parcels arrive. The difference between Received and Completed is that the Received status can be used to park the order while other sundry activities are met, such as invoicing, processing and updating other procurement databases.

 

Retrospective

 

Only Retrospective orders will have this workflow status and this will be the only non-cancelled non-completed status a Retrospective order can have. The order is kept in this stage until all data entry for Retrospective order has been performed.

 

Completed

 

Completed indicates that no further work is needed for the order; although notes can still be added. Completed orders can also be used as an ordering template for another new order.

 

A completed order is a historical order and will no longer show in the Active Orders tab. While a Completed order can be deleted, this should only be done if Infiniti is not the primary persistent record of orders and the library no longer needs to know the origin of a resource or the spent tracking of a budget.

 

Cancelled

 

An order is cancelled when the library backs out of the order for whatever reason before items are received. Library policy may also require that an order cannot be cancelled once the order is placed if monies were paid - but Infiniti does not enforce this.

 

A cancelled order is a historical order and will typically be deleted (a manual choice) by the library once there is no expectation of reviving the order or using it to create new orders.

 

 

The Unintentional Open Orders Tab

 

As a prior user of the old Acquisitions module, you may encounter a tab in the new module called “Unintentional Open Orders”. This is the result of a quirk in the old module that could automatically and misleadingly create a new open order when a librarian simply set a supplier on a resource in the Catalogue Editor.

 

Since Infiniti doesn’t know if these orders created outside of the old Acquisitions module are intentionally open orders, the new module offers librarians the ability to flag the order as valid and open; continue the order as valid by placing it; or simply delete it (whilst preserving the supplier information on the resource that triggered mistake in the old module).


Below are some sample screenshots to assist with visualisation