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Alma Acquisitions Resource Guide

This guide covers all aspects of the Acquisitions process, which includes setting up funds, ordering, receiving physical items, activating e-resources, and invoicing. This guide also covers Serials patterns and arrival/check-in.

Fiscal Year Rollover

Fiscal Year Rollover: Overview

The following jobs must be run to close the current fiscal year and roll over to the next fiscal year:

  1. Rollover Ledger– Copies the ledgers from the closing fiscal period to the next fiscal period
    • Ledgers are not required to be rolled over on the day they expire if the current ledger has extended the:
      • Fiscal period end encumbrance grace periods
      • Fiscal period end expenditure grace periods
         
  2. Rollover PO Lines– Copies PO lines encumbrances from the closing fiscal period to the next fiscal period
    • The following order types are rolled over during fiscal period closure if they have active encumbrances associated with them:
      • Continuous/Subscription orders
      • Standing orders
      • One-Time PO Lines that are not “fully invoiced”
    • “Active” encumbrances are what drives which POLs will rollover:
      • POL or PO status does not impact rollover 
      • The “Receive” or “Activation” status does not impact POL rollover


Considerations when rolling over the fiscal year:

  • Technical, Gift, or Depository Acquisition Methods that are not associated with funds and they will not roll over 
    • These Acquisition Methods do not need to have an invoice statuses of “Fully Invoiced” because they do not rollover
  • Alma will always associate credits and invoices with the fiscal year in which the purchase occurred
  • Do not make changes to holdings records while the fiscal year is being rolled over:
    • It may prevent POLs from being rolled over or
    • Changes may not be saved

Roles

The following role is required to roll over the fiscal year in Alma:

  • Fiscal Period Manager


One of the following roles is required to mark One-Time POLs as fully invoiced for institutions NOT creating invoices in Alma:

  • Acquisitions Administrator
  • Catalog Administrator
  • Catalog Manager
  • Digital Inventory Manager
  • Digital Inventory Operator Extended
  • Fulfillment Administrator
  • General System Administrator
  • Physical Inventory Operator
  • Purchasing Manager
  • Purchasing Operator
  • Repository Administrator
  • Repository Manager
  • Requests Operator
  • User Administrator
  • User Manager

One of the following role is required to change the ledger's fiscal period/year display and to close the previous fiscal year:

  • Acquisitions administrator
  • General System Administrator

Steps Involved

Steps to roll over the fiscal year in Alma: 

  1. If completing rollover prior to the fiscal year closure, or you need access to previous fiscal year funds after fiscal year is over, extend the ledger or funds' grace periods. This is optional. 
  2. Rollover Ledgers 
    • Run in "Draft Mode" if you do not want the ledger and funds to be active right away (if you rollover early, prior to current fiscal period end date. This is optional). 
    • Change Ledger to Active (if Rollover Ledgers was run in Draft Mode; must be changed to Active prior to running Rollover PO Lines)
    • Change the ledger’s fiscal year display (Need Acquisitions Administrator role; otherwise email help@flvc.org)
  3. Rollover PO Lines (POLs)
    • Report Mode 
    • Active Mode
  4. Close the previous fiscal year (may leave active if there are unpaid invoices on previous FY funds).
  5. Deactivate ledger(s) of closing fiscal period. 

Rollover Ledgers Job

  1. Acquisitions > Rollover Ledgers 
  2. On Rollover Ledgers page > Add Job. 
  3. On Add Job page, you will determine how you’d like to rollover your ledgers:
    1. Create Allocation From:
      1. None: If selected, the new ledger and nested funds will have $0 allocated.
      2. Allocated Balance: If selected, the new ledger will have the same allocation as the previous year’s ledger.
      3. Cash Balance: If selected, the new ledger will have the remaining funds in the “cash balance” line from the previous year’s ledger as the allocation.
      4. Both: If selected, both the allocated balance and the cash balance from the previous year’s ledger will serve as the allocation for the new fiscal year’s ledger.
    2. Ledger:
      1. All: Rollover all ledgers in one go.
      2. Individual ledgers listed in drop down menu: If single ledger is selected, the job will only roll over the one ledger. You will have to run the job multiple times to roll over a single ledger at a time.
    3. Action:
      1. Copy: Creates the new ledger by copying the name and details of last year’s.
      2. Delete: Delete a ledger created in error. This job will delete the newly created ledgers only if there are no transactions in the funds.
    4. FPC factor (%): enter a number if you expect a percentage increase or decrease to your fund allocation in the new fiscal year. If you expect a budget increase of 6.5% enter 6.5. If you expect a budget cut of 2% enter -2.
    5. Create status:
      1. Draft: creates the ledger as a draft. If this is selected, the ledger and nested funds will not be available to order with until it is activated.
      2. Active: creates the ledger and immediately activates it. The ledger and nested funds will be available to order and invoice from.
    6. From Year:
      1. You will most likely only select the most current fiscal year to copy.
    7. Copy Notes: Check if you’d like to bring over notes in the funds of previous fiscal year.
    8. Copy Attachments: Check if you’d like to bring over attachments added to funds and ledgers of previous fiscal year.

In this example, the institution only has one ledger, GENERAL_LEDGER. The balances on the current fiscal year’s ledgers are listed below: 

4.  Click Refresh to see if the job has been completed. In addition to rolling over ledgers, you have also created the new fiscal period.  

5.  To see a report of the job, click “…” > View. The report will show how many ledgers and funds were rolled over as well as details of the options you chose for the jobs.  

6.  To view the newly created ledgers, Acquisitions > Funds and Ledgers. All active funds and ledgers will appear. We can see that the ledger is a 1.5% increase of the previous fiscal year’s allocation balance (1,943,010.00 x 1.5% = 1,972,155.15).  

Changing a Ledger from Draft to Active

To change a ledger from draft to active:

  1. Go to Acquisitions>Acquisitions Infrastructure>Funds and Ledgers
  2. Click Clear All next to the filters
  3. Click Draft from the Status facet 
  4. Click Ledger from the Type Facet
  5. Click Activate from the ellipses of the Ledger(s) to be activated.

Deleting a ledger that's been rolled over 

Ledgers can be deleted after they have been rolled over it they did not rollover as expected

  • Ledger can be deleted IF they do not have any:
    • Encumbrances
    • Expenditures
  • Ledgers should be deleted before PO Lines (POLs) are 


To delete a rolled over ledger:

  1. Go to Acquisitions>Advanced Tools>Rollover Ledgers
  2. Click Add Job
  3. Select “Delete” from the Action drop-down menu
  4. Select the Ledger(s)
  5. Select the rolled over fiscal year period from the From Year drop-down
  6. Review the selected parameters are correct
  7. Click Add and Close
  8. Review the job deleted the ledger(s) successfully

Rollover PO Lines Job

If your institution uses full acquisitions functionality (invoicing in addition to creating PO lines), you may want to rollover PO lines of for:

  • One-time orders where you have not received the invoice for yet, or where you must pay for the order with the next fiscal period’s funds.
  • Subscription orders (standing orders or serial/ continuous e-resources) where the PO lines are still active, and not “closed” or “cancelled”.

If you use acquisitions in Alma to create PO lines, but do not create invoices in Alma; you can skip the Rollover PO lines job or run the Update PO Lines Information Job to mark one-time PO lines as “Fully Invoiced”.

To rollover PO lines:

  1. Acquisitions > Rollover PO Lines
  2. Add Job.
  3. On Add Job pop up:
    1. New Encumbrance Calculation (relevant for Continuous Orders and Standing Orders only, One-time orders will always be rolled over based on encumbrance):
      1. Encumbrance: Rollover PO lines on closing fiscal year’s encumbered amount.
      2. Expenditure: Rollover PO lines on closing fiscal year’s invoiced amount for the PO line.
    2. FPC Factor (%): enter the percentage of price increase or decrease for PO lines.
    3. From Year: Select closing fiscal year from the drop-down menu, not newly created fiscal period.
    4. Libraries: If you’d like to only rollover PO lines from certain Acquisitions departments, select the departments from the libraries drop down menu. If left blank, all department’s PO lines will be rolled over.
    5. PO Line: If you only want to rollover 1 PO line, you can search for the PO line in this field.
    6. Check Over Encumbrance: Uncheck if you have rolled over your ledger with $0/” None” allocation. This option instructs Alma to verify that there are sufficient funds in the funds before rolling over the PO lines.
    7. Report Mode: If report mode is checked, the job will run only to identify the PO lines and let you know if the PO lines will rollover successfully, or if you should expect errors. It’s highly recommended that you run the Rollover PO lines job in Report mode first.
    8. Continuous Orders Only, Standing Orders Only, and One-Time Orders Only: If all three are checked, or if none are checked, the job will rollover all eligible PO lines. If only one or two are checked, the job will only rollover eligible PO lines of that type. It’s recommended that you run separate jobs for One-Time Orders and Continuous Orders for ease of reporting.
  4. Add and Close.

In the image below, I am running the Rollover PO lines job in Report Mode for all One-time orders. I would like to make sure Alma checks to make sure I have enough funds for the encumbrance.

5.  Refresh > … > View to see list of PO lines by clicking PO line rollover success.  

6.  If all looks good on the report, run the job again with “Report Mode” unchecked.  

Example of One-time PO line prior to Rollover job:  

PO line after Rollover job:  

The fund has changed to the new fiscal period in the PO line.

Changing the Ledger's Fiscal Year Display & Closing Fiscal Year

Role required: Acquisitions Administrator or General Administrator. If you do not have these roles, please request that FLVC update the description for you by contacting help@flvc.org.

  1. Configuration > Acquisitions > Fund and Ledger Fiscal Period 
  2. On the Mapping Table, change description of new fiscal period and update closing fiscal period status to Inactive or Closed (if you no longer need to create invoices or orders for that fiscal year) > Save.

Before:

After:  

Deactivating closing fiscal year's ledger

If you’re done working with closing fiscal year funds and have changed the status of the fiscal period to “Inactive” in the Funds and Ledgers Fiscal Period configuration table, deactivate the ledger in Alma. This does not occur automatically after the fiscal period has passed.

  1. Acquisitions > Funds and Ledgers
  2. Click "x" next to FY-2024. This will produce a list of all active funds and ledgers. 
  3. Click closing fiscal year in the Fiscal Period facet:  
  4. Find ledger (use facet if needed to filter down further) > "..." > Deactivate.  
  5. An alert will appear asking if you'd like to deactivate the funds associated with the ledger > Confirm.