Monday Minutes: Acquisitions Enhancements

by Jessie Zairo on Jan 20, 2025

In this week's Monday Minutes, Nick and Jessie show off new Acquisitions workflows and enhancements in 24.11!

Acquisitions Management

• Bug 34805 - Add order search form to acquisitions module start page
• Bug 8855 - Link from receipt to invoice

Acquisitions Orders

• Bug 37081 - Add order confusion when ordering from a staged file
• Bug 34355 - Automated MARC record ordering process

Purchase Suggestions

• Bug 33363 - More specific permissions for purchase suggestions

Acquisitions Management

Search Orders

This enhancement adds the advanced search form for searching orders to the start page of the acquisitions module.

Invoice Navigation

Staff can now easily navigate from the receipt page to the invoice page with a simple click. Before the 24.11 release, the link was not clickable, forcing the staff member to go back to invoices to retrieve the invoice.

1. Go to the receipts page of an order.
2. Observe that the invoice number is a now clickable link to the corresponding invoice!

Acquisitions Orders

New Language - Add orders from MARC file

Before the 24.11 release, when staging or adding a new file to a basket in Acquisitions, there was an ADD ORDER button. ADD ORDER did not add the item to the order, it started a new blank order. This enhancement in 24.11 relabels the button to show NEW ORDER.

Administration MARC Order Accounts

If a library receives MARC files from a vendor, like Baker & Taylor, Ingram or MidWest Tapes, currently functionality in Koha allows users to import those files through cataloging, and import staged files. With this enhancement, participating vendors can send order files directly to a Koha system using a SFTP (secure file transfer protocol). Once Koha receives those files, a cronjob can automatically load those files in staged MARC Management and Create a Basket in Acquisitions. Some vendors refer to this method as "One CLick" where purchasing staff can one-click the order to the ILS from the purchase order site, like TS306 or iPage.

ByWater Solutions has worked with the sponsor of this enhancement to set this feature up with Baker & Taylor, Midwest Tapes, and Ingram. If you would like to set this feature up, please submit a ticket to set up the SFTP site for your Koha system. The second step will be to establish your credentials in Koha's Administration. There is a new feature called MARC Order accounts to manage the SFTP connection.

1. Navigate to Administration --> Acquisition parameters --> MARC order accounts
2. Click Create New account
   1. Vendors: you will want to identify each account (some vendors have multiple ordering accounts)
   2. Fund: default for order. This fund will be used as the fallback value if the MARC records do not contain a mapped value for a fund code. If you
   3. Description: SFTP
   4. Download Directory: set up by ByWater Solutions or your support provider
   5. Match Field (Optional): If you have files from multiple vendors in the same file directory, the match field is the field in the MARC record that will be checked to see if this account should process the file.
      The format for this field is the same as MARCFieldsToOrder - the field and the subfield separated by a dollar sign e.g. 245$a
   6. Match value (Optional): This value will be checked against the match field to see if the file matches this account. If it does it will be processed by this account, if not it will be skipped. Example - multiple order accounts from one vendor (Baker & Taylor account for Adults, Juvenile, etc)
   7. File Import Settings: (same as when staging files)
      1. Record type: Bibliographic or Authority
      2. Character Encoding: UTF-8, MARC-8, etc
   8. Recording Matching Settings: (same as when staging files)
      1. You can set up record matching rules in the administration area
   9. Check for embedded item record data: (same as when staging files)
      1. choose whether or not to import the item data (field 952) found in the MARC records

Click Submit.

Purchase Suggestions

There are new permissions in Purchase Suggestions for Suggestion Management. Before the 24.11 release, there was 1 permission, Manage Suggestions. Now administrations can assign permissions for staff to create, delete, and/or edit.

Navigate to a staff member account, click on the More dropdown, and Set permissions. You will now see 3 options under Suggestion Management.

• Create purchase suggestions (suggestions_create)
• Delete purchase suggestions (suggestions_delete)
• Edit purchase suggestions (suggestions_manage)

Additional Resources

Koha 24.11 Release Notes

Monday Minutes: 24.11 Preview

The Koha Community Announces 24.11 Release

Koha 24.11 Upgrades Hub