Purchasing and reporting made simple: an off-the-shelf solution

Information Outlook, Oct, 1998 by Brenda Oakley, Elaine Wells

Like other small academic health science libraries, the Harold Kohn Vision Science Library needs to accomplish a lot with a little. We found that the same type of software employed by most small businesses for financial control could easily and successfully be adapted for our use. Faced with the tasks of acquisitions, account maintenance, and fiscal report generation, in addition, of course, to the overarching need to serve our patrons quickly and efficiently, library staff took a hard look at how our myriad tasks were being accomplished, as well as the staff time and resources that went into each process. The result was an idea for the consolidation of two important library functions, book ordering and financial control, that would save the library time, money, and people power.

What made this consolidation possible was the simple modification of a popular accounting software package. The steps we took to customize the program are simple and straightforward. Most importantly, they can be easily replicated by any library looking to use one simple generic software package to handle multiple tasks. Regardless of whether the library stands alone or is the information service arm of a larger institution, modifying a resource that already exists can make your job easier.

The Harold Kohn Vision Science Library serves the State University of New York College of Optometry students, faculty, and staff, as well as the general public. The library houses 36,000 volumes and has an annual budget of $168,000; $143,800 for acquisitions and $24,200 for equipment and other expenses. Two professional librarians and three support staff, as well as a number of part-time student workers, handle the tasks of acquisitions decisions, book order production, generation and monitoring of purchase orders, and production of financial reports and statistics.

Since coming on board a year and a half ago, the library director has handled the purchasing of library equipment and supplies with a generic, off-the-shelf accounting software package. The process was straightforward thanks to the simple interface and ease of use of the accounting package used. Accounting software packages such as the one selected by our library are popular among small, medium, and large institutions for internal accounting. Generic programs such as these have grown in size and specificity over the years in order to keep pace with the changing needs of organizations looking to streamline tasks without adversely affecting efficiency. Due to their wide user base, instructions, tutorials, and "how-to" information abound for these programs, both in documentation produced by the software's manufacturers and in general computer literature. Generic accounting packages also have online instructions, help functions, and user support lines that make them non-threatening even to the most computer-phobic among us. The program's ease of use prompted us to think creatively as to what library tasks it might be able to facilitate. The idea of utilizing the program for book ordering seemed a natural outgrowth of what it had already helped us to accomplish.

Life Before Customization

Prior to consolidating tasks through the accounting system, our library maintained four separate spreadsheets in Lotus. Relying on one last vestige of precomputer behavior, we processed all book orders manually, using an electric typewriter to record our purchases on carbon paper. Obviously, this procedure was labor-intensive, resulting in the re-entering of vendor names and account information in multiple locations each time an order was processed. In addition to requiring duplicate keying for approximately 600 orders a year, it made the system prone to errors.

Report generation became a cumbersome process, involving the use of four different spreadsheets describing individual processes. The data from these spreadsheets had to be consolidated in order to capture the financial information we needed for analysis.

The customization process is an easy one, relying upon several simple steps. Depending upon the specific accounting package you have selected, the input process may differ slightly from ours; the only requirement is to make sure that the fields contain the information you will need to track purchases and generate reports.

Customizing the System

1. Enter the name of your library in the field designated for "company". Your system will prompt you to enter all pertinent information, such as address and telephone number. You will only need to enter this information once.

2. Establish a chart of accounts, including expense as well as cash accounts. Sample cash accounts used in our library are as follows:

* the general budget we receive from the college;

* a gifts account where we maintain donations;

* a photocopying account into which we place money from the photocopy machines;

* deposit accounts such as our Government Printing Office account that reflects our deposit balance at any given time.

3. Set up your expense accounts. These will correspond to the types of reports the library needs to generate. For example, since we closely monitor expenditures for electronic reference tools in order to assess their value in terms of their use, we need to know immediately how much we have spent in that category. Establishing an account that reflects those expenditures has enabled us to instantaneously generate reports, facilitating our ability to examine the cost of our CD-ROM's over selected periods of time. Expense accounts can include the following: