RE: Question: Electronic transfer of shipping-cost information

["Peter Picerno" <ppicerno@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't know if I've understood all of the aspects of your question, but I
think I can supply you with a work-around. We transmit our payments to our
AP department (they use Banner), so I'm somewhat familiar with the whole
invoicing-transmission process.
What I would suggest for your situation is that you process the invoices (I
assume you're keying information into order records) for the individual
items as per usual but that you process the shipping costs to a bib-order
record which is designated for that purpose, i.e., your short bib might read
"SHIPPING COSTS" with an attached order record which would employ the
desginated fund for these costs in the fund code field. Thus, you could
process each shipping charge by invoice number or lump them all together or
have different bib-order records for different vendors, or whatever would
suit your needs. The only drawback I could see would be that if you were
processing a lot of invoices in one work-session, it would tie up the one
order record, so you might want to process the shipping costs in batches
against that record using an internal note to specify a range of invoice
numbers or some such other means of tracking that cost if that's important.
Anyway, by having its own order record, the shipping costs can then be
transmitted to their own fund when you do your posting of payments.
Let me know if this works for you!

Peter Picerno

Dr. Peter V. Picerno
Acquisitions and Serials Librarian
Nova Southeastern University Libraries
3100 Ray Ferrero Jr Blvd
Fort Lauderdale   FL   33314-7796
(954) 262-4662
FAX (954) 262-3946

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-admin@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:innopac-admin@xxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of William H. Walters
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 1:30 PM
To: innopac@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Question: Electronic transfer of shipping-cost information



Hello.  I would be grateful for any assistance with the problem noted below.
(It's a long message, but I have been unable to solve this problem using any
of
the documentation supplied by Innopac, and I strongly suspect that there
have
been other libraries in our same situation.)

I am wondering if any III users charge shipping costs to a separate shipping
fund AND transmit payment information electronically from Innopac to an
outside
accounting system.

Here at St. Lawrence we are implementing a plan to electronically transfer
our
payment information (including shipping-cost information) from Innopac to
FRS.
Unfortunately, we have not used Innopac to track shipping costs in the past.
We
would like our shipping payments to be charged to a separate shipping fund,
if
possible.

As I see it, there are two options:

(1) Use the shipping-cost line supplied by Innopac when paying invoices.
(This
pro-rates the shipping cost among all the items appearing on the invoice.
It
charges shipping to the regular acquisitions accounts, which is NOT what we
want
to do at St. Lawrence.)

(2) Enter shipping payments as y-records.  (This charges shipping to a
separate
account, which is what we want.  Unfortunately, y-record information is not
exported by Innopac when we use the Output Payment History to Disk function
to
export payment records to FRS.  I see no way to transfer y-record
information
from Innopac to FRS.)

(3) Enter shipping payments as x-records.  (I believe this charges shipping
to a
separate account, which is what we want.  According to the Innopac
documentation, x-record information should appear as a separate line when we
Output Payment History to Disk -- when we export payment information to FRS.
In
practice, however, the x-record information doesn't appear in that file.)

Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated!

Bill Walters

--
William H. Walters, Ph.D.
Collection Development Coordinator
and Acquisitions Librarian
St. Lawrence University
Canton, NY 13617
(315) 229-5331 phone
(315) 229-7447 fax

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