Koha How-To

Claims Returned Enhancement

by Kelly McElligott on Jul 1, 2020

Koha 19.11 will have a new feature for Claims Returned.

This feature was sponsored by Fargo Public Library and North Central Regional Library System

Tutorial Video on using Claims Returned Feature

Setting up System Preferences For Claims Returned

ClaimReturnedChargeFee -When marking a checkout as "claims returned”:

Options- Ask to Charge a Lost Fee, Don’t Charge or Charge

If set to Charge, Koha will charge the Patron the Replacement Price of the Item when it is set to Claims Returned.

If set to Don’t Charge, Koha will not charge the Patron.

If set to Ask to Charge, when an item is set to Claims Returned, there is a checkbox to either charge/don’t charge.

Image below is if your library chooses "Ask to Charge"

ClaimReturnedLostValue : Use the LOST authorised value X to represent returns claims. The X will be filled in with the numeric value that was assigned under the LOST authorized Value.

ClaimReturnedWarningThreshold: Warn librarians that a patron has excessive return claims. If the patron has claimed the return of more than Y items. If a library would like to set up a limit to the number of claimed returned that the patron can have, this can be done through this system preference. Once the number of claims has reached this threshold, the running total of claims returned will appear in the Attention portion of the patron's account.

Changes in Display

From the Patron’s Checkouts:

With the introduction of Claims Returned, there is now a new tab on the Patron’s Account and Detail screen. This tab shows the “Claims Returned” and how many outstanding claims have been made.

Also, next to each of the patron’s checkouts, there is a new column allowing staff to mark a checkout as “Claimed”.

The Process on which to Claim an Item

When a patron states that they have returned an item, from the patron’s checkouts, staff can choose to “Claim Returned”.

This will provide a popup- notes can be made about this particular claim returned and if a choice to charge the patron is indicated from the system preference, ClaimReturnedChargeFee, then this will also be an option.

The item will remain on the patron’s account until this claims returned status is resolved. In addition to this, under the ATTENTION portion of the Patron’s account, there will be a running tally of the number of claims returned for this particular patron.

The Return of a Claimed Item

If a patron/library later checks in a “Claimed Returned”, there will be alert to the staff and the item will be removed from the patron's checkouts.

The item will be removed from the patron’s checkouts.

The claim itself is not resolved, the staff will need to resolve this claim from the claims returned tab.

Resolving a Claim

After an item has been returned, a message will appear that this was a claimed item - there will be a hyperlink to the patron's name that the claim is on (as seen on the image above).

To remove this active claim from a patron's account, go the Claim tab under the Patron checkouts. This claim tab will hold all active (unresolved) and resolved claims. On the far right hand since, there is an "Action" button.

Under the action options- staff can resolve a claim or edit the notes on a claim.

The resolution options by default are "Found in Library" and "Returned by Patron" which are found under the Authorized Values. The category is called " RETURN_CLAIM_RESOLUTION". A library can add more claim resolutions to this dropdown. From the image above, you can see that new value has been added to this dropdown.

For more information about adding a new value to an existing Authorized Value category: see this section in the manual.

Once an item has been resolved - under the same Claim tab, the chosen resolution will appear and be stored. The numbers on the Claim Tab such as (1/0). The first number is the running total of resolved claims, the second number is the number of active claims.

Note:

If an item is set to Claims Returned from the Items Tab, this will not work as a “Claims Returned” item as it would do it the way outlined above.

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=24279