Acquisitions Reports: Description and Examples wanted

Stacks and the Acquisitions Small Group will be discussing acquisitions reports in the coming weeks. In preparation for that discussion, please provide some information in replies to this post. We can also set up a folder for sample reports if that would make it easier to share report examples.
Some questions:

1. What are common reports run against Acquisitions data? (orders, invoices, funds, vendors)

2. Who is the audience for the reports? Selectors, Admin, End of FY

3. Scheduled or ad hoc? Frequency?

4. How detailed/broken down does the data need to be? For example, if analyzing a payment for a package, is there a need to assign cost for individual journals?

5. What other kinds of data does order/financial data need to hit against, e.g. bib data, circ data, COUNTER usage data, classification, what else?

6. Some examples - please provide other examples as well as sample reports (please remove any financial data if library considers it sensitive)

• Usage data vs cost of online journals = cost per use report
• Track costs across FYs to analyze trends
• Purchases by title for endowed funds
• Orders/purchases by subject area or selectors
• Annual expenditures by various categories (type of order, format, subject, location, vendor, etc.)

Hi Ann-Marie,

this is pretty open-ended with the request for reports. Would it be better to break this down into more specifics? E.g., fund balance reports needed? Fiscal Year close reports needed? I’d be better able to target this to individuals who could answer. I know Stacks had wanted earlier sent out a general call for collecting this reporting data, and I still feel a little uncertain as to primary goal. I believe it is to gather use cases, but if we are looking at how reports are generated, we should probably share with the reporting SIG.

I’m not sure if this is useful for this exercise, but we have examples under the restricted area of Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0ByKXfvKzMDq-cmZqYWRzWWo3LXM. These are from the major workflow examples we put together for new acquisitions and renewals. There are some financial data included, so if we want to make these more public, we probably need to scrub some data, but meanwhile I can make sure that anyone on the subgroup gets access if you don’t have it already.

@ScottPerry has his basic outline of FYRO in the folder (that’s where it went). If you want want more concrete examples for the reports used in that process, he could probably provide more examples (incidentally, Scott is on the reporting SIG, so he might also be able to speak to any overlap in this request and the work of that SIG).

As for questions 5 and 6, I did share some workflows from Chicago in the Google drive folder on renewals, that shows how the financial data is combined with usage to cacluate cost-per-use. There is one for a database and one for a journal package.

I also know that we do run reports to track endowed funds, and can talk to our Head of Acquisitions to get an example report. We could probably stick that in to a secure Google folder as well.

Please share any report that you need in FOLIO as one line in the Reporting SIG Master Spreadsheet., https://docs.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/spreadsheets/d/1svUM74Dkg4KvTXLzKZK_2k_SxeukX-87NnYf8CaTrYQ/edit?usp=sharing . Please use column B “Institition” to identify yourself: put the name of your institution or your group (e.g, the name of your SIG or working group) here. Use column A “ID#” to assign a unique ID to each line of the spreadsheet.

You can put links to samples in the “Link to sample”-column.

Regular reports that we run at Cornell University, that I know of:

• ARL/NCES annual stats, at fiscal year rollover. They ask for stuff like how much we’ve spent on print this year, how much on E, how many “current” e-journals you hold, etc. One of the most annoying things about these reports is that a lot of terms can be vaguely defined, like “current” or “database”, so universities have to interpret them as best they can. That’s both a pain in the butt for us, and also degrades the quality of the cross-institutional data because we’re all using different criteria. If FOLIO were able to integrate a centralized report for the kinds of things asked by these associations, it would go a long way towards improving the quality of those mass surveys, as well as reducing stats staff misery.

• Fund balances: we currently give each selector an Access query they can use to see how much money is left in each of their funds, what line items have been paid for with it, what line items are still open orders. This helps them identify where they have money left to spend, what orders are stalled and need prodded, whether something’s been accidentally charged to the wrong fund.

We have a problem with the fund reports, though: because serials prices change every year, we enter their PO/line item price into Voyager as $0 so that it doesn’t commit the wrong amount of money to a selector’s funds. (Probably other reasons too, I could see cancellation confusions ensuing - but I’m not a serials expert.) But entering $0 on the PO means that these reports don’t include the money that a selector should plan to keep on hand to pay for their serials subscriptions; as far as I know, they have to track that elsewhere and by hand. Sometimes I think maybe we should write a query that pulls together the data on how much they paid for each of their subscriptions last year, that could be integrated into the “how much money do I have left, and where” queries?

• Open ebook orders: monographic ebook firm orders turn around pretty fast, except when something goes wrong and they stall out forever. Our ebook team has a query that looks for Approved, but not received or not paid for, POs associated with our biggest ebook vendors; we run it on a weekly basis, and investigate anything that’s been sitting around for more than a week (but less than ~45 days, because I want unfixable stuff that meets the query criteria to roll off eventually). So we’re also looking at create/update dates in that query.

• We also shy away from actually pre-ordering Not Yet Published ebook titles, even if GOBI technically lets us; we’ve only ever gotten headaches from that. So we load the order into Voyager Cat+Acq, suppress the bib, and leave the PO Pending with a Note that starts “NYP” and goes on to describe the circumstances. We have a query that’s very similar to the open orders query, except it specifically looks for Pending POs that are older than a month or so, and displays that note, so we can tell whether it’s worth the time to investigate it again or not. (For example, if the note says it’s expected to be published in December, but it’s only October, it’s not worth our time to re-investigate yet.) We run that one maybe once a month. (I’d love to be able to do this with packages, as well… waiting for frontlist activations is such a pain.)

• We’re sometimes asked how much money we’re currently spending on [Publisher X]'s journals, to help evaluate whether some new Big Deal that includes them might be worth it to us. That one can be tricky, if we’re getting them from different vendors or different platforms. I usually try to hit the publisher field in the bib data, which is painful because it’s free text. If I’m lucky and we buy them all on the same platform, I go for the URL in the bib.

• A report I wish I had, but don’t: something that ties a package-level invoice payment to the individual titles in that package. When we lose access to an e-resource that we bought as part of a package, if the payment isn’t attached to the title itself, it’s a pain in the butt to try to track down proof of payment to wave under the vendor’s nose. It’s even worse when you’ve been buying books in perpetal-access packages from a vendor for decades, and somehow they lose your title list and ask you for what you think you should have access to, with proof, please. I would like to be able to go from the one-line invoices paid to a particular vendor, to the title lists they paid for, so I can send that title list and its associated invoice numbers to the platform.

I was interested to see @Heather’s last two reporting areas, as these are things that have been discussed, at least in pass, by RM SIG members, as well as personally things that I’ve had to deal with. For trying to identify all of Publisher X’s journals, that can be tricky, but if we were able to build in the relationships appropriately within FOLIO, I think this type of work could be supported, although maybe not in all cases. For example, if you had titles from publisher X on platform Y and those were controlled organizations within FOLIO, you could pull a list of titles, and then find out what you’ve been paying through the attached POs to the titles, which are linked to the particular holdings

The second report is I think something of increasing importance as libraries turn to digital collections. Time passes, publishers get bought up or sell rights, so the library having supporting documentation is critical in case of lapses on the publisher side. A centralized resource record, with licensing information, attached title lists from the publisher, links to all of the holdings that are part of the package, and then the ability to have the PO/payment information attached at the resource level to demonstrate what is part of the package. It could still be a challenge proving it to publishers without a title list (and sometimes they are bad at providing that).

Preamble: The USMAI consortium is made up of 17 campuses that all share a centralized implementation of Ex Libirs Aleph. All reports are controlled by a central consortial team and are disseminated through the Aleph end-user application.

1. What are common reports run against Acquisitions data? (orders, invoices, funds, vendors)
   • Budget summary reports: all budgets for an individual campus broken out with information on allocations, encumbrances, invoiced amounts, and remaining available funds
   • Transaction by budget: item title, price, associated budget, order number, order and invoice status, invoice data (sometimes) and vendor; totalize payment amounts by budget
   • Daily invoice report: variation of transaction by budget to include more invoice specific data, run daily for select campuses
   • Current subscription report: all open subscription records for selected campus, with latest invoice info, order info, order status, receipt date, and number of items received in past 3 years.
   • Order history report: Item titles, budget information for last encumbrance and invoice transaction, payments and transactions over preceding three years, material format, vendor, order status, material type & format, acquisition method
   • Serial encumbrance report: report on serials orders that includes serials orders that were paid in the last fiscal year but have not been paid in the current fiscal year. Includes title, vendor, budget code, invoice date, paid date, material type. Alternate report shows serials orders that have paid $500 less (or more) than the previous fiscal year.
   • Serial Claims: Serials issues that were expected but that have not yet been arrived, generating claims notification in Aleph to be sent to vendor.
   • Various EDI & GOBI loader reports: Report on batch bib loader processes; includes incoming information from vendors, items/orders/invoices created automatically within Aleph with associated data on budget codes, vendor codes, encumbered amounts, invoiced amounts.
   • Reports related to new fiscal year roll over: New budget report, encumbrance renewal reports, financial carryover report.

2. Who is the audience for the reports? Selectors, Admin, End of FY
   • Collections services staff
   • Acquisitions technicians
   • Budget office auditors
   • Federal auditors for 501©(3) compliance
   • Associate Dean of Collections
   • Library directors
   • Pretty much anyone that wants to know stuff about acquisitions. Our permissions allow for anyone at a given campus with appropriate Aleph access to view acquisitions reports data.

3. Scheduled or ad hoc? Frequency?
   • Scheduled
   • Daily: Budget Summary Report, Daily Invoice Report, Invoice loader output & reports
   • Weekly: Order history
   • Monthly: some order reports have been set up to run monthly
   • Ad hoc
   • Fiscal roll-over report, current subscription report, transaction by budget, order history reports.

4. How detailed/broken down does the data need to be? For example, if analyzing a payment for a package, is there a need to assign cost for individual journals?

5. What other kinds of data does order/financial data need to hit against, e.g. bib data, circ data, COUNTER usage data, classification, what else?
   • Bib data: Titles, call numbers, collections, sublibraries
   • Order data: order date, cost, invoice data, invoice date, order status, budget code, historic price data, items/issues received

6. Some examples - please provide other examples as well as sample reports (please remove any financial data if library considers it sensitive)
   • Usage data vs cost of online journals = cost per use report
   • Track costs across FYs to analyze trends
   • Purchases by title for endowed funds
   • Orders/purchases by subject area or selectors
   • Annual expenditures by various categories (type of order, format, subject, location, vendor, etc.)