Acquisitions & Financial Systems

Polaris
1

The final steps in the Acquisitions workflow is for staff to submit a “Pay” entry by supplying a Check # (issued by the Fin Sys) or printing a Voucher that can then be used by a financial system to get the suppliers paid. The actual payment is managed outside of Polaris, requiring manual work by staff to get these tasks done in another system and hopefully matching in both systems.

Based on the workform, below are the only options that come to mind;

  1. ILS Pay > Voucher > Financial.
  2. ILS Pay > Voucher & Supplier Invoice > Financial.
  3. Supplier Invoice > Financial > Check > ILS Pay.

I am curious to know…

  1. What actions are your staff taking outside of Polaris to actually pay suppliers?

  2. Are you automating or integrating the two systems in anyway?

  3. Do you reconcile Polaria & Financial System?

  4. Would Financial System integrations be of interest for your library?

I appreciate any insight on this topic. Thanks

2

What financial system is your organization using?

I think we have one library that has worked out some integration, but most prefer to make the actual payments “by hand”.

3

I’m glad you brought this up Eric - this is something that worked a lot better for us when we were on Horizon.

  1. Actions we take outside of Polaris: Our acquisitions staff submit a PDF of a voucher from Polaris to our Business Office. The financial people enter the details into our system (MS Dynamics GP) and issue payment from there. Even EDI transactions ultimately go through MS Dynamics.

  2. Current automation / integration: Not much. We would love to as we used to when we were on Horizon.

  3. Reconciling Polaris / Financial System: Yes. Or rather, we reconcile Polaris against MS Dynamics.

  4. Interest in Integrating Financial System: Yes! We used to integrate a prior ILS to our financial systems and that was so much easier. We’d love to get back to that. We do realize that it might be a bit tricky given that we’re part of a consortium where the members most definitely don’t share finances.

4

Almost identical for us, Lynn. Except Accounting uses Quick Books and coordinates cutting the checks via the County. All reconciliations are manual (and take too much time.) Would love to have integration!

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