Reduce time for Patron record payment lock
The patron record payment lock time should be reduced or have the ability to be overridden. Four hours is an excessive amount of time for a record to be locked. If a patron record is open for more than, say, 15 minutes (or even 5 minutes), the other session is probably not in the midst of making a payment.
Idea Value
Patron record locks are unexpected and embarrassing for staff that encounter them when the patron is in front of them wanting to pay or have a fine, fee, or other charge paid or waived. The patron is confused and possibly angry that staff not only cannot help them immediately, they cannot help them for hours. Even under the best circumstances, staff have to add a tickler for themselves to come back to the account, often the next day.
Sarah Frieldsmith
shared this idea
This idea was selected in MEEP voting for inclusion in Sierra 6.3.
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AdminJulie Cole
(Admin, Innovative)
commented
MEEP candidate March 2024
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Evan Marzahn
commented
Or if there's a lock when the record is open but records automatically close after a inactivity. Accidentally leaving records open happens very easily, especially since it's often useful to have multiple instances of Sierra open in order to work around other limitations, so I wish it weren't as big of an issue for payment.
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Katie Zimmermann
commented
This causes issues with our discovery product as well. Fine payments are accepted and patron credit cards are charged but then the charges are not cleared from the patron record in Sierra. Sometimes patrons try paying a second or third time - and cards are charged. Thankfully our discovery product is able to send us an error message alert that this has occurred, but its' a pain to clean up and not good service!
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Wendy Zhang
commented
I'd love to see this happen soon! We have been having issues with taking payments as well. Shorten this waiting period would be great.
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Sheryl VanderWagen
commented
We encounter this so many times and YES! 4 hours is way too long to keep a record locked and frontline staff have no idea what causes this message as a rule, so we're always explaining what might be the cause (although we never really know the reason) and patrons certainly don't understand why that staff member can't help them right now. It has also caused problems with our Bibliocommons catalog and fines payment through it where the payment is accepted and patron credit card charged but then the charges never clear the record in Sierra. That causes an even larger PR problem (thankfully these occurrences are rare but even rare is too often!)