Receiving - Acquisitions Overview Module

This is the third section of the Acquisitions Overview module to the Alma Overviews course. The video is at the top of the page, followed by the script.

In this video, you'll review:

Receiving Workflow

Now, let’s talk about receiving. The receiving workflow is much more straightforward than ordering. Remember, this process is only for physical materials – please watch the eResources module for more on activating electronic materials. So, here’s the receiving workflow.

First, the material is received by the Tech Services department.
The question about Continuous material is here because some Continuous Orders have a very different workflow than one-time orders, and some are only slightly different. For instance, continuous orders might need to be renewed or not, and the item creation process might be different. We’ll look briefly at these options in the Continuous Orders segment of this module.
Next, the material is received in Alma using the correct process, depending on the material type.
Once it’s been received, Alma changes the status of the order to Awaiting Invoice, until the invoice is created and sent. Or, for continuous materials, it’s going to be Waiting for Renewal.

Receiving Department

In Alma, the process of Receiving physical material is organized within Receiving departments. Receiving departments are Alma "departments" that correspond to the PO Line owner (the Acquisitions ordering library) OR the holding library's Tech Services Department.

You must be "at" – your Location must be set to – a specific Receiving department to be able to see and edit the orders associated with that department, and to be able to assign and change a Work Order status value if needed.

In other words, if you are "at" Schlesinger, you will only see and be able to edit Schlesinger orders in the Receiving list.

If an order is placed by a shared service unit such as ITS at 625, a user must be either at the ITS 625 Acquisitions - ITS Tech Services location (or receiving department) or at the holding library's receiving Department, such as Widener Library Acquisitions (Judaica). Staff should have permissions for all libraries that they order for.

Receive New Items Page

Let’s take a tour of the Receive New Items page.

If I go to Acquisitions, then Receive under Receiving and Invoicing, the Receive New Materials page opens. At the top are two tabs. One-time orders waiting to be received are on the One-Time orders tab, and continuous orders are listed on the second. My tabs are in a slightly different position because of a configuration error in the Sandbox today.

First, we’ll review the features of the one-time orders tab, then look at a few differences on the continuous tab.

In this top section, we have a few clusters of options:

Keep in Department lets you indicate that received items should stay in a tech services department for additional work, or toggle it off to indicate that the items are ready to go straight to their owning library after being received. See the Work Orders Overview videos for more on the Keep in Department process.
Shelf Ready lets you quickly get to a specific item by searching for a barcode, including shelf ready material. You can toggle that on and off as well.
The Received date defaults to the current date, but you can change this to another date if needed.
You have the option to Receive all of the orders currently listed, or use the tickyboxes to the left of each order to select one or multiple orders to receive at once. Note that if you receive more than one item at a time, you can’t make individual changes to those items or give them different destinations for additional work. You have to do that individually.

Next, you have search and filter options to limit a long list down to what you’re looking for:

There are a number of criteria that you can search on for specific orders, and most are self-explanatory.
The Common fields criteria searches the Vendor reference number, PO line number, Additional PO line reference, Title, Standard number like an ISBN, and Vendor title number simultaneously.
The bibliographic criteria (such as the Title or Author name) search from the brief Bibliographic reference that is part of the order, not all the fields within the full bibliographic record. We saw that bibliographic reference information in the ordering video.
Use Invoice number or Vendor Invoice # criteria to search for invoice numbers.
If you use the Title Starts With option, you will need to include any initial article such as The. This lets you quickly find a title you know exactly, as opposed to a more general title keyword search.

You can filter your list by Vendor or by Owning library – these will only represent options available from the items in your list at this moment. We’re just at Schlesinger, so there are only Schlesinger materials in this list. If I were at 625, any of the owning libraries receivable by me at ITS would be here.

You can also filter by the Status of the order and by whether an order has Interested users or Patron requests on it. Locate identifies whether to find just the Order Lines that match the search criteria, or to find those plus any POLs packaged into the same purchase orders as the order lines that match the search criteria. So, Order Lines is a more specific search; Entire PO Content is a broader search. Again, all of this is searching just the 1,088 items in my Receive New Material list.

As an example, if I wanted to receive all shelf-ready items that are on an invoice, I could filter by a certain vendor, search by Invoice number, and select the POLs and receive them at the same time, rather than finding each one of these individually. This makes things a little more efficient.

Next, what information are we seeing in the list of orders to be received?

The ticky box we mentioned, so you can select multiple orders to receive at once using the button in the upper right
POL number. Click on the order number to open the Purchase Order Lines Details page for that order
Item description is that brief bib reference from the order. Click on it to open the MARC record for the bib in view-only mode. From there, you could edit the bib record if needed.
The Status of the order.
Locations are the Library and Location of the attached inventory (items and holding)
# Ordered indicates the number of copies ordered
Items received indicates if any items from that order have been received yet.
Date sent is the date the PO was sent to vendor or, if not sent to the vendor, the date that the order was created
Next step indicates the next step for the item once it has been received. This might be in transit to the owning library, or it might be at the tech services department that will perform additional work.
A red clock icon indicates that something was a Rush order. When receiving a Rush order, you’ll get a pop up confirmation indicating that the order was Rushed.
Notes: If it has a green check mark ; that means there are notes on the POL. For migrated orders, this would include the migrated Aleph order's library note. Click on the check mark to open and view the note.
Receiving note displays any receiving notes from the POL. This might also include Claim notices from orders migrated from Aleph.
If there are Interested Users associated with the POL who want to know when the item has been received, there’ll be a check mark in this column. Click on the check mark to view the list of users.

There is also the row action item list icon. Under the row action item list icon, there are a few actions you can take on an order from this screen:

Manage items will open a list of the items associated with this PO Line. From here, you can view, edit, and receive each of the PO line's items. In a moment, we’ll see that starting with Manage Items is recommended when you want to edit an item prior to receipt.
Receive will allow you to receive this single item without editing it first.
If the POL has interested users, we would also see Print Interested Users List.

That’s been a tour of the features of the One Time tab of the Receive New Materials list. If I click on the Continuous tab, I see most of those same features. However, because of the differences in the way continuous orders are received, there are no Receive all or Receive buttons in the upper right and no tickyboxes to the left of the orders. That’s because you can’t receive issues for different serials at the same time. You could receive multiple issues of the same serial, but not individual issues for multiple serials all at once.

Now, let’s go through the receiving process in Alma from start to finish. For my example, I will again use a one-time order, but many of the steps are the same for both One-Time Orders and Continuous Orders. The big difference comes in how you manage the item information and we’ll review that in the Serials segment of this module.

Receiving Workflow Questions

Alma provides a tremendous amount of flexibility around receiving and invoicing materials. Your choices depend on the answers to four questions:

Do you want to receive materials independent of invoice creation, or as part of invoice creation?
Do you want to keep the item in the department for further work or is it ready to go to its owning library?
Do you want to receive one item or multiple items at the same time?
Do you want to edit the item during the receipt process?

All of these options are possible in different combinations and which you choose depends on what you’re processing and what your local workflows are. With practice, you’ll be able to make these decisions quickly and streamline your work accordingly.

Answering the first question tells you whether you want to skip straight to the invoicing workflow or stay here in the receiving workflow. We’ll go ahead and receive independent of invoice creation and stay here in the receiving workflow.

Receiving an Item - One-time order

To receive an item:

Set your location to the correct Receiving Department for the item(s) you’re receiving.
Go to Acquisitions >> Receive and you’ll come to the Receive New Materials screen.
Start answering your questions:
1. With or without invoice creation? No, for this example.
2. Keep item in department? Yes, for this example. So, we’ll leave this tickybox ticked, and we will choose – since we’re at Schlesinger – Cataloging (in house).
3. One item or multiple?
  1. Multiple: Click on the tickyboxes and then click on Receive in the upper right corner. Again, that means you can’t edit individual items this way, just do a blanket receive and set all to Keep in Department. This would be useful if you if you have a group of items that all need extensive record work and will be edited later. You can leave Keep in Department on, just receive them now, and then they’ll be kept in the department for that additional work. Or turn off Keep in Department and select multiple items that can just go into transit.
  2. One: I could go into the row action item list for that item and choose either Receive or Manage Items if it requires editing. For our example, we’ll receive one item that needs editing, so I’ll go to the row action item list for the Annotated Frankenstein and click on Manage Items. There is my confirmation that the order was a Rush order.
If I choose Manage Items, I’ll be taken to the Received Items List. This is a list of all items available to be received on that POL.
1. PO line items includes all the copies of that title ordered on this POL and what their status is.
2. Bibliographic information is the brief bib reference used to identify an order in a list, so we can see what we’ve got.
Now we answer our fourth question: Do we edit the item during receipt process?
1. Just barcode: You can edit the barcode right from this list. Click on the row for the item, scan in the new barcode, then click Save to go back to the big list, or Save and Receive will receive this item and move you on to the next step.
2. More than barcode: Choose Edit Inventory Item from the row action item list for that item. We’ll go ahead and do this.
If I wanted to change more than just the barcode, I would choose Edit Inventory item from the row action item list for that item. I’ll go ahead and do this. Now, you can see that this puts me on the Physical Item Editor for this item, which we’ve seen a few times now, and I can go ahead and update all the item information: a barcode, material type, item policy, enumeration and chronology, any additional information I want to add to it. If I needed to move it to a different location, I could do that at this time, add a different call number, put it in a temp loc, etc. Whatever needed to be added to it.
Click Save and it tells me it’s been updated.
Now I am ready to Save and Receive, but before I do that I am going to quickly copy the PO Line number so that I can look it up in a moment.
I go ahead and click on the items on this order that I want to receive and click on Save and Receive. The receiving process was activated, it is now Waiting for Invoice (because I have all statuses here on this list).

If I wanted to (since I copied the POL number), I could look up by the Order Line and PO Line, and also see the order information, that it has been received, and the receiving date.

If I look up the barcode to double-check one more time, I get the item information and see that the status is Not in place and it’s in the Technical Services work order, Cataloging (in house) at Schlesinger Technical Services.

How you manage items during the receiving process and what you fill in to these various screens will differ depending on your local unit’s practices. Confirm with your manager on how to properly receive materials in your location.

Now, let’s move on to invoicing.