Comment 7 for bug 1617318

I mentioned to Jeff in a side conversation that the current behavior of the penalties/notes is resulting in a lot of extra manual work by PINES staff that would disappear if the penalties/notes worked as I've requested. Here's the current workflow for at least several (if not most) PINES libraries who use collections once they have a report from UMS of patrons added to collections:

For each patron put into collections:

1) Bar the patron (by clicking the "Barred" checkbox in the User Editor). Since per PINES policy, no other library can *un*-bar a patron that wasn't barred by them, this makes the patron have to pay the fine at the library that put them into collections.

[Side Note: "Bar" is really intended for serious offenses, like theft or harassment. Libraries are using it for this purpose basically because the software currently offers no alternative for this workflow]

2) Place a note in the patron account explaining the bar with enough information that other libraries know how to handle this.

For each patron who pays off their collections amount:

1) Remove the bar, delete the note, inform UMS.

The manual nature of this workflow is cumbersome and error-prone. If the collections penalty/notes worked the way requested here, there would be no need for barring and no need for managing manually-entered notes, freeing staff to do other tasks.

Please let me know if anything is unclear!