Coding Selectors for Ease of Financial Reporting

[Wally Babcock <wbabcock@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks, I'm curious whether any of you have come up with an elegant
solution to the problem of tracking and reporting spending by your
selectors, both librarian and faculty. 

Here at Chapman, we are transitioning from using Midwest's system for
ordering, to doing everything on the Innovative server. 

With Midwest, it's relatively easy to track spending both by department
and selector (faculty or librarian). We then can get reports that give
us subtotals of spending by each librarian or faculty requester in each
sub-category (Art Books, Art A-V, etc., which we treat as separate
funds), and totals for all faculty or librarians the overall category
(Art).

In Innovative, we are finding that if we want to track spending by
individual selectors, we have (or will soon have) too many to make the
use of one or two of the CODE1-4 fields in the order records for
entering them (coding one character for each selector). 

This results in us currently using a variable length selector field to
track selectors. The problem with that is that once we cut over from
Midwest we will then need to run review files and then reports on each
selector to get their spending, a cumbersome process compared to what
can be done in now.

We have several hundred funds that we use, and anticipate the potential
over time to have several hundred selectors. The web reports option is
good for tracking overall spending in different areas, but not the more
detailed spending by individual selector we would like to be able to
track.

How are other folks out there using either character-based Innopac or
Millennium to handle this?

Thanks, Wally

-- 
Wally Babcock
Coordinator of Library Systems
Clarke Library, Chapman University
One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866
Phone: 714-628-7272  Fax: 714-744-7063
Email: wbabcock@xxxxxxxxxx