Wishlist: "Reporting tags" in purchase orders

[Tiffany Little]

After a discussion on the Acq listserv regarding multi-tier fund structures, I think that a similar idea to Voyager's reporting tags would be useful in Evergreen.

Currently we have libraries that need to monitor their budgets by source, branch, and then collection. If each branch needs this division, it can lead to a really large number of funds. If we removed collection as needing to be one of these divisions in funds to be tracked, we could potentially reduce the number of funds needed to track all the information libraries are looking for.

Tracking this via shelving location isn't always appropriate--shelving location can change over time, items can be deleted, etc. We want to see what was *purchased*, no matter what ends up happening to it.

Free form thoughts on implementation:

1. Add a field on line items for "Reporting Code" (or "Tag"?).
2. An admin interface so that libs could just choose from a dropdown list of available reporting codes vs freeform text. Since we want this to be reportable/dashboard-able, it needs to be consistent.
3. A YAOUS to determine if a given org should be required to use reporting codes or not. If we're going to strip collection out of the funds, we still need it to be available for everything just like a fund would be, so it should be a required field if the YAOUS says it is.
4. The YAOUS should be checked as part of the PO blocking check for activation (like fund balances and zero copy count) so you can't activate if you're missing a required field.
5. Available as a field in the batch updater so it can be mass applied as appropriate.
6. Should be available to distribution formulas.
7. Should be able to be imported from uploaded MARC files as a repeatable field.
8. Nice to have: A tab(?) in the fund summary to see the breakdown of items purchased in that fund with each reporting tag.

Questions:
1. Should we allow more than one "reporting code/tag" per line item? Or only one? Multiple ones would be cool, but I think would also complicate implementing it.

If we *did* allow more than one tag, we could also shuffle around what funds are needed too. So if you created a tag for branch, you could potentially just have one fund for "Adult" with monies and then tag individual purchases for each lib. Or, more likely, to have one fund for branch (they've got the budget) and then monitor your spending for each collection via reporting tags.

In general, I think it would just give a lot more reporting capability and flexibility. If libraries want to use it, they could, and if they prefer having all of that info in the fund then that works too.

[Jennifer Pringle (jpringle-u)]

What if we borrowed from statistical categories and set up something similar where you could set up categories (like audience) and then have a list of values for them and then be able to set the categories as required or not, depending on what the library needs.

As well, maybe this replaces the current collection code - https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1878488