Billing Statement View

[Dan Wells]

Over time, Evergreen has developed a rich set of features to support various billing scenarios. Unfortunately, our interface has not kept up in some ways, and this leads to some confusion at times, particularly for front line staff.

One way to bring clarity is to apply better grouping, labeling, and ordering of the various transactional events. By doing so, we can generate a billing "statement" with similarities to the statements we regularly encounter when dealing with other financial institutions.

The incoming branch does so for the staff client view, but it also seems viable to carry over the same idea to an eventual patron (or print) view as well.

Though not exactly the same, this bug factors into questions raised on bug #1593815 and bug #1671856, and may influence the outcomes and approaches taken there.

[Dan Wells (dbw2)]

Working branch:
http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/dbwells/lp1748986_billing_statement_view

working/user/dbwells/lp1748986_billing_statement_view

As a first attempt for me at anything other than simple changes for the web staff client, general code feedback is welcome! (Actually, the Perl side can probably benefit from new eyes as well...)

[Dan Wells (dbw2)]

See also bug #1648232. (This branch should satisfy that one as well, IMHO.)

[Dan Wells (dbw2)]

Pushed a tweak to some interface labeling to the posted branch.

[Dan Wells (dbw2)]

With a little distance, I realize it might not be obvious from the comments what this branch actually does :)

To test: after loading this branch, find a patron bill and view the full details of that bill. Where there was once two tables for bills and payments, you will now find two tabs. On the first tab you will see the new "statement" view, which groups, orders, and summarizes all the billing events into a more legible form. Next to that you will find the "details" view which now contains the original tables.

I will try to find a minute to get a screenshot up to help clarify this feature even more. Thanks!

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

I really like this, Dan!

We have it on our test server and we'll poke at it to see if we spot any problems, but the first impression is great.

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

I really like this too Dan! I think many of our circ people are going to be happy with this view. I've merged the code for inclusion in release 3.1.

I have a couple of follow-up comments that I can think can be addressed in new LP bugs, possibly as Wishlist requests.

- From discussions with our own users as well as comments posted in LP, I think it would be really useful to have a "Total Real Charges" tally that shows the amount that was charged minus any voids or adjustments. I'm just not sure of the best place to show that information without confusing the user.

- Although I think this interface will clear up a lot of confusion at the circ desk about what has happened with the billing transaction, I still think some improvements are needed in the primary Bills tab. In particular, I could see the totals displayed at the bottom of the statement being column picker options in the main bills interface. Our staff likes to distinguish between real payments and adjustments, and adding those columns would allow them to do so without clicking into the new screen.

Thanks, Dan, for your work on this!

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

Also, I was going to leave it to mmorgan to decide if bug 1648232 should be marked as a duplicate or not.

[Dawn Dale (ddale)]

Love this!! This will be helpful for staff.

[Michele Morgan (mmorgan)]

Thanks Dan! Our libraries will find this very helpful! I've marked bug 1648232 as a duplicate.

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

I've added bug 1752664 and bug 1752663 to address my Wishlist items in comment #6.