Important Definitions
Purchase Order Line Owner: The unit/library responsible for creation of the order; it is also the unit most likely to receive and pay for the item, though there are some exceptions
Purchase Order Line (POL): An individual order which includes all the details of the order
Purchase Order (PO): What is sent to the vendor; a Purchase order could include one or multiple purchase order lines (POLs)
Purchase Order Line (POL) Owner
In Alma, the POL owner is defined as a "Library", so the list of available POL owners are in the list of Libraries. The POL owner controls the ship to and bill to addresses on vendor communication.
The Aleph Order units were migrated into this list of "Libraries". <insert or link to Aleph order unit migration map>
In some cases, there was a one to one ratio for this migration: such as Aleph order unit for Schlesinger (SCH01) orders, receives and pays only for Schlesinger: in this case the POL owner for Schlesinger orders would simply be the library, Schlesinger Library:
In other cases, there may have been multiple order units for one library: such as Aleph order units for the Botany libraries which all represent different Botany libraries with separate bill to and ship to addresses. In these cases, there are separate POL owners for each followed by the suffix (ACQ) --this may no longer be the best example. I will try to find another one--dab
A third scenario is the case of the Shared Service unit ITS, which orders for a number of libraries, and the ship to and bill to addresses are not the libraries but rather the ITS facility. In this case, we have created POL owners that represent three separate ITS Units:
Purchase Order Line (POL)
The Purchase Order line, commonly referred to as POL within Alma, represents the details of a single order. It includes the type of order, the vendor, fund, price, currency, material format, notes to vendor etc. It also includes historical information and vendor communication. To create an order in Alma, we first create a Purchase order line.
Purchase Order (PO)
A Purchase order represents what is sent to the vendor or the last stage of the purchasing workflow. The Purchase order is created from a Purchase order line when a POL is "ordered" or "packaged". PO's can contain one or multiple POLs and can be packaged manually or automatically. For more detailed information, see Packaging and Sending a Purchase Order
Purchase orders can contain multiple Purchase order lines if the following are the same within each POL:
- Vendor account
- Owner
- Currency
- Continuity – One-time/continuous
- Acquisition method
- Source type - Manual; Imported, etc.
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