I agree this would be useful for statistical purposes, and a dedicated field would improve reporting workflows. I also agree with Jeremy and Kimberly that this feature must avoid any accessibility issues for staff beyond the accounting unit holder.

Currently, Sierra does allow staff to retain order record information by importing those details into an item record in a variable-length field, and this information includes the vendor code used, fund code used, and amount paid (full details here: https://documentation.iii.com/sierrahelp/Default.htm#sgil/sgil_maint_imp_order.html). Once that information is in the item record, Create Lists can be used to query that variable-length field for a specific fund or vendor code. However, this does require an added step in staff workflow to remember to import this order information before that record is deleted from the system.

I would like this. But I agree with Jeremy: those items need to be accessible beyond their accounting unit owner.

This is quite important information that we would love to see in item records for all sorts of statistical purposes. Just calculating cost per circ by fund alone would be a game changer.

My one big concern with it however, which would need to be addressed, is to make sure that items wouldn't have to become bound to accounting units, similar to orders and checkin records. Items must remain accessible to libraries beyond the accounting unit owner.

I was just talking with our Cataloging department a few weeks ago about trying to find an easy way for staff to find non-hot pick/patron request items that were building up a holds queue so we could do some lists in our discovery layer.

This would solve that problem and is exactly what we've been trying to figure out how to do.

Having a link between an order and the items created from it could be useful, even if we delete orders older than 3 years. Could just be the order number added to a text field?

Having a fund code field wouldn't hurt either.

This would be incredibly useful.

Besides the record count report mentioned in the idea we've had many requests over the years for cost per circ reports, which we've only ever been able to estimate given that our items generally contain list prices (for billing purposes) and not the library's cost (residing in the order record paid field).

I have reservations about establishing a direct link between an order and an item given the need at many libraries to routinely delete old order records, but just having the fund code available as an item field could be a decent compromise and enough to provide some additional reporting options.

I was asked recently to create a list of items added to the database based on a fund code. I don't believe that I can do that in Create Lists. This is because order records and item records have no common field to link them.

I also cannot use Create Lists to pivot item records to their attached order records or vice versa.

We need to be able to do this because 1 bibliographic records may have items attached that were purchased from different funds. Example. 1 Fiction title may have items purchased from an ARP (automatice release program), and "SAI" (suggest an item).

If the item record included a field called "fund code" that would link the 2 record sets together. Alternatively, a field called "order record" would work as well.

NOTE: We cannot run this type of report in Decision Center, so without using SQL we cannot run a report of items that were purchased using a specific fund code.