Activating a Purchase Order

This section covers the process of activating a purchase order, as well as issues that may arise during the process.

• Encumbers the Estimated Price for the line items in your funds.
• If the provider is for an EDI vendor, the order is queued up and subsequently sent to the vendor.
• Bib records and on order items may be created in the catalog.

• An estimated price
• At least one item
• A fund
• An owning branch

If data is missing in any line item, or if the money you will be encumbering exceeds a fund warning or stop percentage, a note will appear in the top of the purchase order. The note will vary depending on what the issue is.

Problem	Message
A branch is missing from one or more items
One or more Estimated Prices are missing
One or more line items has no items
One or more items is missing a fund

Missing data can be corrected by one of the following methods:

• Use the Batch Updater and enter any missing prices in the Estimated Price boxes.

OR

• Reload a corrected file of records and delete the incomplete, pending PO. See Setting a Purchase Order for Overnight Deletion for instructions.

If you are over encumbering one or more funds you can transfer money to those funds from other funds, or allocate additional money to those funds from your funding sources if you have any.

Problem	Message
Your fund's warning percentage has been reached
Your fund's stop percentage has been reached

Once the purchase order is complete the activation buttons appears.

• Activate Order (button) – When this button is used to activate the purchase order, money is encumbered in the funds and bibs and items are loaded into the catalog. This is the option that is used 99% of the time.
• Activate Without Loading Items (button) – When this button is used to activate the purchase order, money is encumbered in the funds but bibs and items are not loaded into the catalog. Use this option if you want to encumber money in the funds but do not want on order items added to the catalog.
• Allow activation with zero-copy line items (checkbox) – When checked and an estimated price is entered in the line item, the Activate Order button is live even if there are no items associated with the line items. When the purchase order is activated no money is encumbered and nothing is loaded into the catalog.

After you click one of the activate buttons you may see a progress bar. The amounts in the upper right hand corner of the PO will update to show an encumbered amount. Currently there is a bug that prevents the line item colors from updating. You will need to refresh the screen to see the updated colors.

Occasionally when you load a file of records the incoming record fails to correctly match on an existing record already in the catalog. If this happens the Catalog link in the line item will display Link to Catalog instead.

You will also see the Link to Catalog link in a line item that has been added to the purchase order using the New Brief Record option in the PO Actions menu. See the example line item below.

In either case an additional step is needed in order for the purchase order to activate successfully.

Option 1:

Use if you want to try to link to a specific record you know should be in the catalog. Otherwise use Option 2.

1. Click the Link to Catalog link in the line item.
2. In the dialog box that appears, click Submit. This will search the catalog for the terms already filled in in the form. You can also alter the search to just search title or just search ISBN. Sometimes a match is not found because the incoming record has an ISBN 10 and the record in the catalog has only an ISBD 13.
3. If possible matches are found they will appear below the search box.
4. You can click on the View MARC buttons to view the records.
5. If you find a match click the Link button.
6. The line item will now show the Catalog link.
7. If none of the records are an appropriate match, or no records are found, click the Cancel button and use Option 2.

Option 2:

1. Click the Activate button in the purchase order.
2. A form will display.
3. Fill out the form as below. OR If you have Load MARC Order Record templates set up, select the appropriate template.
4. A status bar will appear and then the purchase order.