Koha Tutorial Videos

Monday Minutes: Expanding the Guarantor Relationships in Koha

by Kelly McElligott on Apr 10, 2023

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie talk about a new enhancement to allow adult patrons to be linked to other adult patrons. This feature will be extremely helpful for libraries that would like to link Adults to Care Giver patrons or Homebound patrons to other Adult Patrons in the system.

Patron Categories

This new feature allows libraries to identify and update an Adult patron category to allow guarantees. Prior to this enhancement, guarantor/guarantee relationships only could be created between an Adult Patron Category and a Child Category OR a Professional Category with an Organizational Category. Now any Adult Category can be set up to allow for guarantees. This relationship will work similarly to a Child/Adult relationship in Koha.

To update an Adult Patron Category to allow to be a guarantee, go into the Administration module and go to Patron Categories. On the patron category the library would like to edit, go to the far right and click edit. There is a new option found on this form,

"Can be Guarantee" - Yes/No

Creating a new patron in this category

Once the library has updated the patron category with this new option, staff can create a new patron within this category and assign a guarantor. Just like with the Adult/Child relationship in Koha, this guarantor can be a patron within the database or not.

To enhance this process by allowing staff to identify the relationship, a library can include other choices within the borrowerrelationship system preference. Adding more choices in this system preference will show up in the relationship dropdown.

Adding a Guarantor to an Exisitng Patron

To add a guarantor to an existing patron, staff will want to edit the patron and add a new guarantor to their account.

Once the guarantor has been linked, this linking will appear in both the guarantor/guarantee patron account.

Monday Minutes: Adding Guarantees

How Fines work with Patron Relationships

When linking patrons within Koha, there are a few system preferences that come in handy on how you want Koha to handle the fines.

The first system preference, NoIssuesChargeGuarantees, allows for a library to define an amount of owed money by the guarantee to prevent a checkout to the patron.

System Preference: NoIssuesChargeGuarantees

Asks: Prevent a patron from checking out if the patron has guarantees owing in total more than ___ USD in fines.

The second system preference, NoIssuesChargeGuarantorsWithGuarantees, allows for a library to define a dollar amount of owed fees by the family and will prevent more checkouts.

System Preference, NoIssuesChargeGuarantorsWithGuarantees,

Asks: Prevent a patron from checking out if the patron has guarantors and those guarantors’ guarantees owing in total more than ___ (currency) in fines.

Another helpful blog post about Fines:

See and Pay Your Guarantee's Fines on the OPAC

Note:

If an adult guarantee is connected to a guarantor, that adult guarantee account will not have any connection to the other guarantees under their guarantor if they are not connected.