Acquisitions and Finance in FQM
- Joseph Reimers
FQM uses Boolean queries to return lists of records of a given type matching user-defined criteria. FQM is not appropriate for reports that do not use Boolean logic and do not return lists of records of a given type. Current FQM release supports Organizations, Invoices (and lines) and PO lines.
Check github for metadb for other possible reports
Budgets are a composite of Fund + FY. Budgets have a UUID.
All financial transactions are associated with one or more budgets
Transactions are stored in transaction logs associated with budgets
Fund, group, ledger and FY financial data is calculated on the fly based on transactional data stored in budgets.
Should budgets be included in FQM or handled within the Finance app?
Should expenditures be available in FQM? If so, how?
Calculated from financial transactions
Requires defining budget and transaction entities
Requires several joins
Calculated from invoice totals
Disregards encumbrances
Does not necessarily reflect actual balances
DOES reflect actual expenditures
Probably easier to implement
Sufficient to analyze where/how money is being spent
Not useful for analyzing current balances
Common reports in competitor systems
Vendor performance
A report of all transactions associated with a given vendor over time. Vendor performance may include such factors as:
Average time between order and receipt
Average discount (order price vs. invoice price, only works if the PO encumbers at full price. Helps validate contractual discounts.)
Error rate (orders fulfilled vs. incomplete/cancelled)
Total expenditures with that vendor
Broken down by expense class would be great!
Expenditures by expense class (or other characteristics)
A report that helps libraries understand expenditures with library-defined criteria, such as expense classes, in order to track certain types of expenditures (e.g. print vs. e-content, firm vs. ongoing vs. approval, etc.). Some systems allow tracking of expenditures by call number range.
Other potential reports
Expenditure by call number range (or similar)
Used to analyze collection development/funding by subject area
Potentially better handled via 3rd party software (e.g. Panorama)
Compare orders with invoices
Analyze estimated costs vs. actual invoiced costs
Potential overlap with vendor performance reports
But is this an FQM thing?
Other expense class analysis
Association of expense classes with funds
Association of certain expense classes with certain vendors?
Expense class FY report
Expense class + paid amount from invoice
Projections
Serials projection (ongoing orders previous FY, which in current FY have not been paid, compare invoices) - include vendor data; include fund data
Unbilled ongoing orders
Summary amount paid in prior FY
Stuff on continuation funds with unknown future commitments by title
Need short name + description
Claim state (claim cycle report
Needs claim cycle development, but include as entities
Canceled PO(L)s
Inventory + item cost + item accession number
Throughput report
Per (staff) user how much received in a given day (for staffing level purposes)
Possible anonymized version (how many receipts/day vs. how many different staff on that same day/week/month)
Acquisitions SIG feedback
An informal poll was conducted in Slack asking for feedback on useful reports. Results were:
11 votes for “Projections” (as described above)
11 votes for “Expense class reports”
7 votes for “Inventory item cost” (POL per-unit cost associated with an item in Inventory)
2 votes for “Canceled POLs”
Additionally, suggestions were made for:
Fund report by external account number
Fund report by group
The above 2 reports are both cash balance-type reports. Additionally, there is a clear need for better group reports.