Acquisitions
What report options are available related to acquisitions?
Acquisition data in Alma Analytics covers data from vendors, transactions, funds, purchase types, bibliographic data and more. Alma’s reporting function, Analytics, provides actionable information regarding usage information, budget usage trends and up-to-date expenses overviews. This complements our planned suite of collection development utilities to support selection and evaluation.
The utilities will include overlap analysis and usage statistics and cost/usage analysis data which will be presented to relevant staff during the evaluation process based on information provided by the vendors.
The system also shows the allocations, the encumbrances (pending, actual and total), the expenditures (pending, actual and total) and the available balance for each fund. This information is updated and displayed in real-time within Alma, and available for use in analytical reports.
Alma Analytics allows for reports generated by the solution to be embedded as widgets in the Alma Dashboard or in relevant sections of the system. The solution also comes with an intuitive user interface enabling staff users to create and run customized reports.
As an example, Alma keeps this data indefinitely so the reports are always up to date, and can also be used to compare the spend and cost of previous years to the current year. Here is an example of a report detailing cost per use of electronic and print items.
What reports can be created related to acquisitions and fund expenditure?
Using the Funds Expenditure subject area, the Design Analytics user may create reports and dashboards that help to answer the following types of business questions:
- How much was expended last year per month?
- What is the comparison of encumbrances versus expenditures versus allocations?
- How much was expended per item material type or per item type?
- What is the share of E/P expenditures out of the total expenditures?
- How much was paid per vendor?
- How much was expended per reporting code?
- How much was expended per fund, ledger, or library out of the allocations?
- How much was expended per library?
Alma Analytics is based on a data warehouse created from the online transaction databases and does not run any queries directly on the operational system. This means that there is no interference with the operations of the system. Data is refreshed on a daily basis from the operational data into Alma Analytics.
Acquisitions data in Alma Analytics covers data from vendors, transaction, funds, purchase types, bibliographic data and more.
Each of the elements include detailed fields for analysis.
Can reports drill down fund expenditure by month?
Reports can drill down to expenditure by month. In the "Funds Expenditure" subject area "Transaction date" folder there is a wide variety of date periods which can be used for displaying and filtering:
An example of a graph showing the monthly expenditures of "Fund Biology E-Resources" for 2015.
The same data in table format:
Does Alma provide the ability to show year-to-date details for all funds?
Acquisitions data in Alma Analytics covers data from funds, vendors, transactions, purchase types, bibliographic data and more. Each of the elements include detailed fields for analysis. Analytics allows to create reports based on date, month, quarter and year.
The following example shows a report output of expenditure by ledger and fund:
Does Alma provide the ability to report on funds according to each purchasing location?
The Funds expenditure section in Alma Analytics provides a set of categories:
To narrow the results to a specific location the results can be filtered:
Can vendor performance reports be generated?
It is possible to create custom reports making use of Acquisitions data to compare time to arrival for orders in Alma. This report uses TIMESTAMPDIFF to get the amount of days (difference) between time of ordering an item and time of arrival of an item. The TIMESTAMPDIFF is inside the "Edit Formula". This is useful to see which vendors have the fastest response time.
In addition, the Analytics tab on the vendor record will display data related to vendor performance that is generated from Alma Analytics and is embedded in the vendor record:
Can reports be generated combining several acquisition areas?
The Licenses, E-Inventory, and Fund Expenditure subject areas were enhanced to allow the creation of joint reports using fields from the Licenses and E-Inventory subject areas, and the Licenses and Fund Expenditure subject areas.
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