Fee/Fines - Considerations for Data Migration

Owned by
(OLD ACCOUNT) Erin Nettifee
Last updated: Sep 07, 2021

Fee/Fine Data Structures

In Folio, fee/fine information is stored as accounts and actions. See Fee/Fines - Data Structures for more information.

If you are transferring charges to FOLIO using the APIs, and you want the action, to properly update the account, you must post the action to the appropriate API endpoint.

  • staff info - POST /feefineactions
  • payments - POST /accounts/{accountId}/pay
  • waives - POST /accounts/{accountId}/waive
  • refunds - POST /accounts/{accountId}/refund
  • transfers - POST /accounts/{accountId}/transfer
  • cancelled - POST /accounts/{accountId}/cancel


Considerations for Migration

Migrating as an account, versus an account plus fee fine actions

Depending on your source data, you may want to explore transferring fines from your old ILS to FOLIO only as accounts rather than trying to also bring over historical transactions.

This approach essentially treats your migration from your source ILS as a point in time - e.g., this is where this fee fine is right now - and then FOLIO generates transactions as the fee/fine is handled going forward. This simplifies your migration approach. 

Note that migrating only as an account and not also creating JSONs does break some functionality (as of Honeysuckle) - you are not able to see the Staff Info Only button, for example. 

Migrating feefines as manual instead of automatic charges

You could consider migrating fee/fines from your system as manual instead of automatic charges. If you do so, the recommendation is to create a charge type for each fee/fine owner that can help you identify which fee/fines were migrated from your old system.