Re: Issue of overdue notices and closed days

["Seeman, Corey" <cseeman at UTNet dot UToledo dot Edu>]

Howdy --

I think that there have been alot of good points made about this problem 
(especially Karen Perone pointing out the Circ Option that charges for 
days that the library is closed).

I am not 100% sure about this, but I do believe that while the library 
can determine if the system will charge fines or not charge fines for 
days they are closed, it cannot turn off the #overdue clock for those 
days.  For example, if a library is closed on Saturday and Sunday and a 
book is due on Monday, the book is three days overdue on Monday.  It may 
not accrue a fine, but it is still three days overdue.  A good 
description of the billing of an item is in the manual at page # 100087.

I am thinking of two other things that might be at play here.  First, 
you need to print/sent overdue notices to get bills to generate.  If an 
item is overdue, but you never print notices, it will never move up the 
ladder and generate a bill.  And if you have notices before a bill 
(assuming that the highest level overdue is more than one), then it 
would be difficult to get notices to print right away.  In the loan 
rules, the #s of days between notices are not calculated by looking at 
the original due date, but simply by looking at the ODUE DATE and the 
#OVERDUE in the item record.  For example, if we have two notices and a 
bill sent in one week intervles, it would normally look like this:

Due -- June 1
Notice 1 -- June 8
Notice 2 -- June 15
Bill -- June 22
The dates are based on printing the notices every day.

If you decided that June was a great month to vacation and took off June 
10th to the 22nd (and did not print notices), it would look something 
like this:

Due -- June 1
Notice 1 -- June 8
Notice 2 -- June 22
Bill -- June 29

Typically, when you are NOT printing notices, the bills are slower to 
generate than when you are printing notices.

I would look at the loan rules for the items that generated a bill.  How 
many levels overdue is in the loan rule. Maybe that number is one (so 
the first notice would essentially be a bill).  If you have multiple 
notice levels and are running autonotices everyday, then this will keep 
the process going which might bring along lots of things to bill right 
away when you get back.

Another possibility is that after the power outage, were you asked to 
run notices?  I know that if you have a power outage overnight, 
Innovative's helpdesk can manually run the cron jobs that run overnight 
(creating the overdues, etc.).

I am not sure if this helps or not, but hopefully it gives you 
something.  When I have screwy check outs and bills, I always check the 
loan rule and see if everything is as it should be.

It is possible that something moved to a bill before its time, but I 
have not heard of that happening before.

Hope this helps --

Best -- Corey

--
Corey Seeman
Asst. Dean for Resource and Systems Management
University of Toledo

corey dot seeman at utoledo dot edu
http://library.utoledo.edu/userhomes/cseeman/
(419) 530-2333


Colin Rennie wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I would like to query the relationship between closed days and the 
> issue of notices.
>
> During the Christmas break we decided to make 23 Dec to 3 Jan 
> closed days.
> When we printed our overdue notices after the Christmas break we 
> were puzzled at the quantity - about 300 bills were printed.
> It seems that the time schedule to issue notices found in "Loan 
> Rules" did not take into account our closed days schedule.
>
> I would have thought that the calculation to send overdue notices 
> would have been suspended during the closed days period, but 
> instead books due back on the 22 Dec had already incurred a bill 
> by 4 Jan even though we closed during that period of time.
>
> Has anyone experienced similar? Surely closed days should not 
> be counted when the system is calculating when to send out 
> notices.
>
> Just to add a bit of spice we had an unexpected power failure for a 
> couple of days on 21-22 Dec and I know this may have called 
> some instability to the system and might be the cause of our 
> problem, but I dont want to make the helpdesk's life that easy! Any 
> thoughts anyone?
>
> Many thanks
> Colin
>
>
> Colin Rennie
> Systems Librarian
> School of Oriental and African Studies
> Thornhaugh Street
> London
> WC1H 0XG
>
> 020 7898 4191
> cr22 at soas dot ac dot uk
>
>
>
>
> --
> This message was distributed through the Innovative Users Group INNOPAC list
> Public replies:  INNOPAC at innopacusers dot org
> Update your subscription options: http://innopacusers.org/mailman/listinfo/innopac