What tasks live in Alma's Acquisitions section? Money tasks live here. To start with, money infrastructure elements which must be set up prior to the acquisitions workflow tasks are managed here:
The workflows for acquisitions in Alma are:
Any tasks that are about dealing with a physical item, such as cataloging and inventory, are in Resource Management as are management of electronic resources post-purchase.
Remember that what you see in the menus depends upon your user role(s). If you have responsibility for setting up money infrastructure in Alma, this is the menu list you will see:
If you do not see these menu items, you may still be able to search for and use funds, vendors, and licenses, but you will not be able to edit them. Use the Alma documentation to explore how to set up these areas if you have user roles that require this. For now, on to purchasing.
Here is the graphic from the Purchasing Workflow article in the Alma Documentation. Don't break your brain on this, in fact, from the worker-bee perspective, the first step is actually finding the bibliographic record for the thing you want to order.
There are a great many types of purchases, e.g. one-time orders, standing orders, subscriptions, replacements... We will work through a one-time order for a physical book to give you a flavor for the process. You will need to delve into the Alma documentation for all the details if acquisitions is the main part of your job.
The first step is to locate the bibliographic record for the item you wish to purchase. The best source is if someone else in the consortium already has the item, in which case, you can search the network zone for the record. Alternatively, there are a number of external sources linked into Alma from which you can pull the record (WorldCat, Amazon...)
Let's say we want to buy the book "Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks" by Priya Krishna. First do an All Titles:Title search and locate the record. Note that only Buffalo has it currently and that there is a button labeled "order" in the upper right corner.
So we have identified the bibliographic record we wish to attach our order to. Clicking the "order" button, gets you:
The choice you make for purchase type is very important because it determines the workflow steps for an item further on in the process. As you can see, in the next screen shot, the choice of "physical-one time" caused changes to our screen:
All PO line owners are libraries because this is what determines the next step of the process, namely, where the item will be received. For libraries with a central receiving area, such as SUNY Potsdam, the PO owner will always be the receiving department library. We will assign barcodes when the item is received, so will not use the automatic barcode generator. We will also assign inventory manually at first, so that box should be checked. Once the PO Wizard is filled out to your satisfaction, click on the "Create PO Line" button to the upper right:
Because we chose to create our inventory manually, Alma has pop-up messages checking that this is what we wanted to do. Alma has several types of pop-ups. Some are confirmations which give you a chance to change your mind, some are warnings about the implications of the action you are about to take, and some are actionable (like overriding the expiration date on a patron to get into their record)
Click Confirm to get past this message.
So you have created a Purchase Order Line. That is just a number, and you must fill out the details before the order can be placed. Remember the big, scary, diagram at the top? We have only started step 1. After all, we haven't yet said where we're placing the order or how much do encumber the fund for or all the rest of those fun, fun details. So once we've confirmed our PO Line creation, we get this:
Now you need to add all the important bits. Figure out where you are going to get this item and select that vendor. Enter the list price to encumber the correct amount, and select the fund it will come from. When you have all the information entered BE SURE TO CLICK THE SAVE and CONTINUE BUTTON or you will have to do it all...over...again.
If you have forgotten any required aspect of an Alma form, Alma will tell you when you try to save it. In addition to the pop-up warnings, Alma also embeds messages on it's screens. Kind messages are blue (see screen shot above), error messages are red (see screen shot below). These messages are step 2 of the process - "Normalization, Validation, Alert Processing (automatic)".
When you have filled in all the details, and Alma has accepted your Purchase Order from a jumping-through-automatic-hoops kind of perspective, the next step, step 3 of the big, ugly chart, is to review the order before it goes forward.
The beginning of the purchase order review will let you see ALL the PO lines that are in review. So the screen you get is:
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This is confusing, as the first thing you see is items that are ALREADY assigned to you personally, that is, to your Alma account. Since you just created the previous PO line, it will NOT be in the first tab, but will instead be found in the second, "unassigned" tab. Easier than trying to find it by scrolling is to just search using the search box at the top.
