Monday Minutes: Adding Guarantees

by Kelly McElligott on Mar 22, 2021

In this week's Monday Minutes, Jessie and Kelly walk through how to add a guarantor to a guarantee account and also adding guarantees to guarantor accounts.

Patron Categories

In Koha, there are specific Patron Category types that can be linked to each other. The patron category type: Adult can be linked via a Guarantee/Guarantor relationship to a Child.

When creating a new patron category, a category type must be associated with it, all the options are Adult, Child, Organizational, Professional, Statistical, and Staff. The other category type that can be linked to another is Organization & Professional.

More about Category types can be found here.

Adding a Guarantee to a Guarantor

When either an Organizational or Adult patron category type is created in Koha, the option will appear to "Add Guarantee" will appear on the Patron Page.

If the guarantee doesn't already exist in the system, library staff will choose to create a new account to be linked to this Guarantor.

Once "Add Guarantee" is chosen, then a full patron form will appear and the guarantee information will need to be filled out.

In the Guarantor Box, the linkage between the Guarantor will appear, and the "relationship" can be chosen. This setup is discussed later in the blog post.

There is also the option at this point to add another guarantor to this Guarantee record. The button, "Search to Add" will allow library staff to search in Koha for another guarantor to be linked to the guarantee account that is being created.

Adding Guarantor to Guarantee

If a guarantee is already in the system, and the library would like to link this existing guarantee to a guarantor. Editing the patron record, the "Search to Add" option will appear here. The only guarantors that will appear in this search will be Adult patron category types.

System Preference

The values in this dropdown come from the system preference, borrowerrelationships. The options that are added into this system preference will appear in the dropdown. If a pipe | is added in front of the values, then there can be an option for "not defined".

More about Relationships

Ability to Add Multiple Guarantors

Define which Fields are Copied from Guarantor to Guarantee in Koha

See and Pay Your Guarantee's Fines on the OPAC

Relative’s Checkouts Koha OPAC