How to Charge a Replacement Fee for Damaged Items in Koha

by Karen Holt on May 19, 2017

Currently, if you set an item’s Damaged status in Koha, it won’t charge the patron a replacement fee. With this workaround, we’ll show you how you can mark an item as damaged so that Koha automatically charges the patron the replacement fee for the item.

Koha tutorial on How to Charge a Replacement Fee for Damaged Items

The trick is to create a new authorized value in the Lost Status field that says “Damaged” (or however you prefer to call it in your system). If an item is given a lost status in Koha, the replacement value is automatically charged to a patron. When you select the “Damaged” value as a Lost Status, the patron will be charged the replacement cost.

Here are the steps for creating a new authorized value in the Lost Status field:

1) Go to the Administration Module and select the Authorized Values under Basic Parameters.

2) Select the LOST Category.

3) Click on the New Authorized Value for Lost tab.

4) Create a new value for “Damaged”. The Authorized Value field should be filled in by a number that represents the place of the Damaged value in your list of values. For example, if you already had 4 values for Lost statuses, you would enter 5 for “Damaged”. The Description is how you would like the value to appear in the Drop Down menu for the Lost Status field.

5) Click Save. You’ll now see this authorized value displayed in the Authorized Values for the category Lost.

6) To apply this value, just go to the item record and set the Lost Status as “Damaged”.

To learn more about other features in Koha, check out our video tutorials on YouTube.