This menu option allows a report to be run cross-referencing the locations at which a charge is paid against the location at which it was owed and is described later on.
The reconciliation report is designed to identify payments made at locations other than the location to which the charge was owed – in other words, it allows the library to determine that branch A, for example, took £212.50 which actually belongs to branch B.
The processing allows for a number of runtime options. Since it is expected that the report would be run at regular intervals, the standard ”Save Settings” option allows a regular “production” set of options to be setup once and used subsequently.
After choosing this option an input form will be displayed:
Name for this run: This field simply allows a “name” to be attached to the report for identification purposes.
Start date, End date: These two define the period for which payments are selected. In addition to a usual specific date, Start Date may be set to “Date of last run” where this is specific to the current user. End date may be set to “Today” or perhaps more usefully “Yesterday”. Thus for example, useful settings saved for these would be “Date of last run” and “Yesterday”.
Group by location: The location for a charge is defined at the Institution/Location level. Rather than breaking down the report for each location, the “group by” setting allows you to aggregate payments according to the location, institution or financial group.
(Thus, for example, we might simply report “Institution X owes institution Y a total of £345.23”, rather than “Location X/Alpha owes Location Y/Gamma £2.50, and Location X/Beta owes Location Y/Delta £4.87” and so on.).
Level of detail by date: Valid settings are “by day”, “by week”, “by month”, “by year”, “whole period”. Thus for example, if the report is “by day”, then a figure is given for each day in the period selected; whereas, for the whole period, a single figure is given.
Include figures where charge location equals payment location: This option allows you to include payments which were actually paid at the right location. In other words, you can report on all charges or just those for which the locations are different. In this case, the location means the location as defined by the “group by” setting. That is, if you group by institution then a charge paid at, say, “Avon County/Central” and “Avon County/West Branch” are considered to be the same location (whereas if grouping by Location, these would not)..
Note
Only one report per meta institution for circulation may be in process at any one time, and only one user may access this screen (per meta institution for circulation) at any one time.
The top lines show the most recent run – if it is in progress, then the “Completed line” will show “In progress”; or, if no report has been run, then the text “No previous reports” will be shown. Also shown are the last details for the current user, if these are different from the last overall run.
Clicking initiates the selection run. This brings up the regular ‘start process' form.
Reports can therefore be run on a regular basis by setting the job as a permanent “in memory” process –although this probably only makes sense for a job for which the start and end dates are set to “Date of last run” and “Yesterday”.
When a report is completed, the “output results” command will output the results to a spreadsheet.
It should be noted that although an individual user's date of last run and previous settings are saved on an individual basis, there is only one report current for any circulation meta institution; submitting a run will overwrite the results of a previous run.