Koha Question of the Week: Does a Renewal Count as a Circulation?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Aug 4, 2023

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: Does a Renewal Count as a Circulation?

Answer: Short answer, it depends.

If an item is checked out in Koha and has been renewed twice before its return, that is recorded as one checkout with two renewals, not three checkouts. The checkout history will display that, and the count on the items.issues and items.renewals fields will go up by one checkout (or "issue") and two renewals respectively. So strictly speaking, Koha only counts the initial checkout as a checkout.

However, there's a little more wiggle room with how libraries count those for reporting and record-keeping purposes. If a library wants to count both checkouts and renewals for total circulation, and that item should be recorded as having circulated three times, they can make sure that a report on statistical transactions is counting both checkouts and renewals during a given time period, either as separate counts or in a combined total. The Koha SQL Reports Library has a variety of circulation reports, calculating circulation statistics broken out in different ways.

Additional Resources

Creating a Report for your Library using the Koha Report Wiki