"Owes money - ...." error prevents loan but patron's Cash shows nothing owed

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Product: Aleph
Product Version: 20, 21, 22, 23
Relevant for Installation Type: Dedicated-Direct, Direct, Local, Total Care

Description
Loan screen error 191 ("Owes money - ....") appears when the patron tries to check out an item, even though the patron's Cash display shows $0.00 being owed. (Note: the message displays when the check_circ_5 is specified in tab_check_circ and the amount owed exceeds the amount specified in z305_cash_limit.)

There are four cash records with z31_status "O" (Open) which are not appearing in the patron's Cash display.

Resolution

Looking more closely, we see that these 4 transactions are from the Conversion, with a year of 2008, and, rather than having the yyyymmdd....... as the sequence, they have "00000000.....".

SQL was used to change these 4 z31_status "O" transactions to "W". (Since they are not appearing in this All transactions tab, it seems that they won't be missed.)

The patron was then able to check out items. The following SQL showed other similar cases:

xxx50@ALEPH22> select substr(z31_date_x,1,4), count(*) from z31 where substr(z31_rec_key,13,8) = '00000000' and z31_status = 'O' and z31_payment_cataloger = 'CONVERSION' group by substr(z31_date_x,1,4);

It seems these converted records have some defect, which causes the Cash module to ignore them, while the Loan function does not.

SQL was used to spool out a file which contains several thousands of these cases. Please spot-check the patrons/transactions. Since all of these transactions were quite old and seemingly invalid, they were all changed to "W" (via SQL).

Article last edited: 28-Feb-2016