Polaris 7.6 - Bulk waiving of old fines
We have a lot of very old charges for fines on patron accounts. We know we're never collecting on these and would like to waive a bunch at once - hundreds, maybe thousands. So we could never open each patron record individually and waive the fines manually. It would be very helpful if there were a batch process of some kind that would allow us to waive fines based on certain criteria:Reason for the charge - late fee (fine) vs. lost or damaged item, etc.Date the charge was incurredPatron code of the customer (adult, teen, child, etc.)There are probably other criteria that would be useful - the more flexibility the better.Some examples where this could be useful:One library has been manually waiving all overdue fines on juvenile accounts, one by one.Our board previously approved purging bills over a certain age and under a certain dollar amount, but there is no function to do this cleanup.Widespread amnesty/welcome back to the library programs
Idea Value
Being able to clean up old fines would create a more accurate picture of the library's finances.
Bill Taylor
shared this idea
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Michael Culletto
commented
Our system is also at a point where we'd like to clean up some older accounts and bulk waive the fines/fees. We're looking at between 25,000 to 30,000 accounts at the moment, so doing so by hand is out of the question.
Some of the features that might be nice to consider here are that we need a way to track what was done. Such as a report or spreadsheet of some kind that would indicate information about the accounts, how much was waived, date and time, etc. Especially for fiscal tracking purposes.
Also, having a threshold or criteria that could be used would be nice. For example, we have 25k but we only want to waive the fines/fees on accounts who currently sit at $25 or less.
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Robert Harvey
commented
We are mandated to purge/write off any unpaid fees more than 2 years from the bill creation date and report that total out. Polaris does not have an inherent way to bulk purge fees and we think this ability would be an optional feature that other clients may wish to have.
Idea Value
This is a requirement for us so the value for us is high, but I think it speaks to a larger question of control systems should have without dependence upon custom reports or workloads.