Congratulations and thanks to Kerstin in the Paying Unit and Beverly Caggiano at USF. Aleph ARROW now produces a payments per budget report that shows complete line item data including title and date paid. We now have Arrow functionality that has been 5 years in the making. Way to go Kerstin and Bev!

President Machen will publish proposed 10% budget reductions from all colleges tomorrow, 4/16/09. According to the latest information I have, it will be available on his UF website at http://budget.president.ufl.edu/ According to information there, UF must achieve budget reductions of $72-$75 million in the next fiscal year.

How green is my department? Just a note from the Library Green Team that best practice for energy savings is to turn off your monitor when you leave for the day. Please do not shut down your workstation, however; Systems needs them running for periodic updates they push out to our machines. Best practice at the end of your day is to either do a re-start or log off.

Last week, the Serials Unit, joined by Doug and Paul,  met with Justin Clarke and Patricia Rodgers from Harrassowitz. Some of the topics we discussed include invoices, orders in Otto Serials, and claims.

The main discussion was about invoices and some problems associated with them, such as discrepancies between invoice numbers contained in the EDI file and those delivered through snail mail.  Recognizing the importance of  the issue, Justin proposed and we all agreed on a new way of invoice delivery.
From now on, Harrassowitz will send PDFs of invoices with their e-mail notifications. To avoid duplication, they will stop sending paper copies of invoices.  Although this means that we will have to print the invoices, we believe that the new way of invoice delivery will allow for a timely and more efficient way  of  invoice processing, including downloading, posting and payment.

With regard to invoices that come with standing orders materials, after learning that three copies of the invoices are not needed here, they agreed to send two copies only.

Similarly to what we agreed with EBSCO a few months ago, we asked if Harrassowitz could create separate accounts for print, print+online, and online journal subscriptions. Justin responded positively to our request and promised that Harrassowitz would do separate invoicing for each format.

And lastly, we found out that Harrassowitz accepts EDI claims. I’m reading their online documentation and will work with them and our staff to have this project accomplished soon.  EDI claiming will definitely speed up the claiming process and reduce staff time devoted to this task.

Let me know if you have any concerns and/or questions.

Thanks, Raimonda

I’m relieved to report that Blackwell EDI invoicing for approval books is finally in production. The first groups of invoices were successfully loaded this morning, thanks in no small part to Jason’s help, (and the custom EDI service he created to adjust the object codes in the invoices, from “EDI” to “1100″). The down side: the Paying Unit isn’t reaping any great relief from this process, though now that the invoice loading process is working and we’re in position to move forward with firm order EDI invoicing (Blackwell, probably Harrassowitz too), we can at least hope to have invoices processed more quickly. This should mean less wasted staff or student time with seemingly endless invoice paying of line item after line item.

-Paul