If you were unable to attend the Soprano Development Update webinar on Thursday 26th May or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on the latest developments by watching the video of the webinar, below, or by downloading it.

The webinar covers:

• Demo of recent features, including:
  • Acquisitions
  • Till
  • Serial issue check-in

• In development, coming soon:
  • Transit on return
  • Item messages
  • Inter-library loans
  • Wrapper for handling RFID tags
  • Borrower position in the reservation queue
  • Item Query
  • View borrower notifications
  • Receipt at branch
  • Add a miscellaneous charge to a borrower
  • Alerts displayed separately
  • Reservation shelf specific treatment
  • … and more

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service. Details of the inclusions are described in the preview release notice.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release includes:

• Till functionality
• Serial holdings enhancements
• Create Supplier
• Acquisitions fixes
• Recently viewed Borrowers and Works
• Process Reservations focus in the input box
• Search information display in the browser tab
• More exception alerts

Till functionality

The Till functionality is an integrated till interface which records the amounts and methods of payment used to pay for library charges and products. To have the Till functionality enabled, please open a Support case.

To connect to a till and receipt printer you’ll need to have the Soprano Wrapper for Windows installed on the relevant machines. The Wrapper provides the hardware link to enable the printing of receipts and the opening of the till drawer. You can download the Wrapper and the release notes from the Customer Support Portal.

Access to different aspects of the till, such as Banking, Cash up, Define float and Refunding, are controlled through the enablements.

This new feature includes:

• Accessing the till
• Recording an audit trail
• Paying library charges
• Paying for products
• Carrying out a refund by till transaction id or product
• Setting the float
• Viewing the till roll
• Cashing up and reconciling the contents of the till
• Generating an X report

Accessing the till

To use the till requires:

• The LDS has to be at version 2.2, which requires you have Alto 5.8
• Parameters relating to the till need to be configured in SetConfig
• The till functionality has to have been enabled by Capita in the tenancy
• A printer to be accessible by the PC being used, set up in Windows printers and faxes
• The setup program TillSetup.exe has to have been run on the PC to record in the database the detail of the till configuration and the site it belongs to
• To open the till drawer and print the receipts without going through a Windows dialog, the Soprano windows wrapper has to have been installed.

The first time you access the till, the system it will ask you to choose the till you wish to access. Only tills for the location you are logged in at will display. You can re-access this configuration at any time using the CONFIGURE button. Access to this can be switched off using the operator’s Utilities enablement in Alto SetConfig.

Recording an audit trail

The environment variable TILL_ OPERATOR_PROMPT = YES requires till users to authenticate before the till can be opened. These logins need to be defined in SetConfig: Names > Operators > Operator, and the passwords created in the Operators tab. This is to ensure that the passwords are secure. The operator needs to be associated with the appropriate site profile and a set of enablements which can access the till interface in SetConfig > Enablements Link.
Paying library charges

Under the Borrower > Current Charges tab, when a till is enabled, you can waive but not pay individual charges. Clicking on the PAY button beside the Current Outstanding Total carries all the charges into the till interface. (The operator may need to authenticate at this point if the TILL_OPERATOR_PROMPT environment variable is set.) From here individual charges may be removed if they are not to be paid.

If a part payment is to be made then the Price field can be amended to reflect this on specific charges.
Click the Pay button to proceed to the Make Payment page.

The Till option in the blue navigation bar shows the number of items in the till. The amount buttons (now with fixed values on i.e. not matching the parameters in SetConfig) or the keypad on the right are used to record the amount tendered. Then choose the method of payment from the list on the left – it will default to cash (reflecting the parameters in SetConfig). Click the tick button when you are ready to proceed. It will not proceed unless the amount you entered is equal to or higher than the Amount Due.

The system opens the till draw, where configured, displays the Change due and provides the option to print a receipt.

Clicking or tapping the DONE button returns the user to the till or requests authentication. The user can navigate away to another area of Soprano or authenticate again if needed to use the till.

Paying for products

Where someone wants to purchase something, you can click/tap the Till option in the navigation bar to bring up the till. (You may need to authenticate if the TILL_OPERATOR_PROMPT environment variable is set.) The quick products buttons on the left will reflect those set up in the parameters except for products that prompt for information. Other products can be found using the search box. For products where details need to be entered, fields are displayed.

Once the fields have been populated, click/tap the ADD button to move the item into the till for payment.

Carrying out a refund by till transaction id or product

In the till page if you select the Refund button, you can either search for a product or enter a Transaction till receipt id to access an existing receipt.

You need to select a refund reason from the drop down and then choose how the refund is to be carried out, such as cash or credit card, before clicking the REFUND button. The system will display the amount of refund due and open the till and offer an option to print a receipt.

Setting the float

When the till is accessed for the first time and after cashing up you are prompted to enter the amount of the float. You will not be able to access the till functionality until the float has been entered.

Viewing the till roll

At the foot of the Till page there is a button for accessing and printing the till roll for the current session.

Cashing up and reconciling the contents of the till

Only people who are enabled to access this functionality will see the CASH UP button. Where the till is shared by a number of users, the person cashing up needs to check that other users have finished with it and then click on the CASH UP button. This records the expected amounts in the database and locks the till.

The system shows the Z report, which can be printed and lists the methods of payment that are enabled in the system showing the EXPECTED totals. At this point you might count the money, check/amend the ACTUAL amount and then click/tap SAVE COUNTED TOTALS to save the actual amounts in the database. Alternatively, if someone else is due to count the money then click/tap the COUNT LATER button.

When you are ready to count the money, where the counting has been deferred you need to access the till and click/tap the Z-REPORTS button. The system displays a list of incomplete reports for the location you are logged in at.

Click or tap on the required Z report to check/amend the expected amounts. Click or tap on SAVE COUNTED TOTALS when you’ve finished.

Generating an X report

You need to have enablements set to see the X-REPORT button. Provided you have access, clicking on it displays the X report and a button to print it.

Serial holdings enhancements

Serial issues displayed under the Holdings tab of a Work can now be filtered by Location (i.e. delivery site), Year, Volume and/or Issue.
Expected issues now appear, if they exist. You can use the new Receipt Issues button to check in issues if you have the necessary enablement. You can also add new issues by specifying a year, volume, issue and/or number and clicking Create Issue.
The Issue column now displays between Volume and Number rather than before Year.

Create Supplier

The Suppliers page now has a Create Supplier button next to the search box. This gives you a form for entering the supplier’s name and address, default discount and service etc. There are buttons for selecting how orders are sent to this supplier. The options are Post, EDI or Do Not Send. Clicking EDI brings up a field for entering the supplier’s Global Location Number (GLN, formerly known as an ANA number).

Acquisitions fixes

Various corrections have been made to terminology in the Purchasing area. For example, the buttons on the Fund page for adding money to a fund and transferring money between funds have been changed from Add Funds and Transfer Funds to Add Money and Transfer Money to avoid confusion. Some of the text on the pages for these functions has been amended.
On the Supplier detail page the Orders and Open Orders buttons are now View Orders and View Open Orders for consistency.
Please note: changes to existing text is already live as well as in preview

Recently Viewed Borrowers and Works

We’ve improved the performance of fetching recently viewed Borrowers and Works. Alongside that, we’ve changed the behaviour of the display. Soprano now displays only the latest 12 recently viewed borrowers and works. The paging has been removed and the number of items shown is no longer governed by the Maximum Search Results Per Page parameter in the Admin Console. We’ve also fixed issues involving duplicate or missing entries.

Process Reservations focus in the input box

The cursor focus is now automatically in the input box when you are on the Process Reservations input page, either arriving from selecting the option in Tasks, or after processing the previous reserved item. This means you can simply scan the next item to get its reservations without having to select the input box each time.

Search information display in browser tab

The search query is now displayed in the browser tab for a page of search results. This allows you to see at a glance which browser tab you want when you have multiple tabs open with different Soprano pages.

More exception alerts

In Issue, the Borrow record now shows alerts to both reservations waiting collection  and forced messages  . Previously if there was a reservation waiting collection alert, the forced message one was suppressed. The alerts also now show in Return items.

To preview this release

You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses you live data.

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Monday 25th April 2016.

Comments and contact

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service. Details of the inclusions are described in the preview release notice.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release delivers some Circulation features and further development of the Acquisitions module, which we are currently testing and refining in collaboration with a few libraries prior to making it generally available.

This release includes:

Acquisitions

• Receipting Orders
• Filter the Orders list by more Types
• Create an Order from scratch
• Invoice totals
• Pay an Invoice
• Open Order Subscriptions – Add new, and Edit
• View and Create Open Orders from Work
• Add money to a fund and Transfer money between funds
• Supplier detail page
• Acquisitions display and enablements fixes

Circulation

• Borrower analysis, interest and courses
• Editable borrower name style
• Reservation last useful date display
• Offline duration extended
• Miscellaneous fixes

Receipting Orders
In Tasks a new option, Receive, is available to operators who are enabled to receipt items either in Circulate Item or in Acquisitions Order Item. So it can be used for receipting stock that has been delivered either direct to branch or to a central location.
<Image: Tasks – Receive option>

It stays on the same page allowing you to scan multiple items to receipt them quickly. An outcome row is displayed for each item including any action required, such as when the Item Home Site is not the current site. Outcome rows remain on the page with the latest at the top, so that you can refer back and take action as needed. The status of Items is changed to the value defined in the environment variable  TAL_RECEIPT_STATUS in SetConfig, giving the same behaviour as in Alto.

There is also a new button, Receive, against items at Order sent status in the Items list for an Order in Purchasing > Orders. This performs the same receipting action.

Filter the Orders list by more Types
Two more Order Types have been added to the filter options in the Orders list. All allows you to list Orders of all types. Part Complete allows you to list Orders where some but not all copies have been received.

Create an Order from scratch
The Orders page now has a Create Order button next to the search box so that you can create an order without having to find the Work under Resources first. The new button gives you a form where you can search for a Work in a similar way to the Create Work form – it searches both the local catalogue and Base by ISBN or other identifier.  If a record is found, the Create Order form is displayed with the Work at the top. Alternatively, a Create Work button is also provided, giving you the Create Work form to add a new Work prior to creating your Order.

Invoice totals
The Invoice detail page has two new fields in the header: Total value and Total paid, allowing you to see at a glance whether the the invoice has been fully paid.

Pay an invoice
The Invoice detail page now includes a button allowing you to Pay the invoice when appropriate. When an invoice is paid you can undo it with an Undo Pay button. A Completed button is also provided, allowing you to indicate the end of the invoice process.

Open Order Subscriptions – Add new, and Edit
The list of Subscriptions under an Open Order now has a pencil edit control on each row, which opens an edit form in situ. This allows you to edit any of the fields, selecting from menus where appropriate, including the ability to add or remove funds and to adjust the percentage distribution to each fund. An alert is given when you try to save a subscription where the fund distributions do not add up to 100%. You can also change the status of the Subscription to Cancelled or Closed.

At the foot of the list is a new button, Add New Subscription. This adds a new row to the list as an empty edit form for you to fill in.

View and Create Open Orders from Work
For serial Works there is a new tab, Open Orders, giving  a list of the Open Orders for the serial. You can click/tap the order number in any row to navigate to the detail page of the selected Open Order. You can also click/tap a fund to navigate to the detail page of the selected Fund.
<Image: Open Orders tab under Work>

At the top of the list is a button to Create a new Open Order for the Work. This gives a new page with a form to enter core details for an Open Order. After pressing the Create button the Open Order is created with a single Subscription;  the Work is re-displayed at the Open Orders tab and the new Open Order at the top of the list. select the Open Order number to go to the Open Order detail page where you can edit the Subscription and add more.

Add money to a fund and Transfer money between funds
Two new buttons on the right of the Fund header open forms enabling you to add money to a fund or to transfer money between funds.

In the form to add money you specify the amount to be added and select the fund from a menu. The before and after allocation on the fund is dynamically displayed. After successfully adding money to a fund the empty form is displayed enabling you to make another addition.

In the form to transfer money between funds, you can specify both the source and destination funds. When you enter the amount to transfer a warning is displayed if it takes the source fund below the currently committed level. After a successful transfer the empty form is displayed enabling you to make another transfer.

Supplier detail page
In Purchasing, you can now select a row from the list of suppliers to view the detail of a supplier. It includes buttons allowing you to view the Orders and Open Orders that have been placed with the supplier.

Acquisitions display and enablements fixes
Various terminology corrections and improvements have been made throughout the Purchasing area of Soprano. Two of the more noticeable ones are:

In the Funds column of the Orders list funds are now displayed in the same colour as the rest of the row rather than in blue, to avoid drawing undue attention.

The name Supplier Quotes on the button to Filter by Type and in the list heading has been replaced by Proposed Orders on the button and Orders in the heading.

Please note: changes to existing texts are already live as well as in preview.

Acquisitions features have been reviewed to ensure they are available only when the operator has appropriate enablements (configured in SetConfig).

Borrower analysis, interest and courses
In Borrower > Information > Membership there are four new fields: Primary Course, Other Courses, Interests and Analyses.

Primary Course has been moved from the Borrower Header. Other Courses allows you to select multiple other courses that the borrower is on. In both fields you select from a menu of course names as defined by the library in Alto SetConfig > Parameter Management > Names > Circulation > Course Types.

The Interests and Analyses fields each allow you to select multiple values from menus of interest and analysis names as defined by the library in Alto SetConfig > Parameter Management > Names > Circulation > Borrower Interest / Borrower Analysis.

In the multi-select fields you click/tap in the field to open the menu. The list is filtered as you type to matches on any word in a name. An ‘x’ control allows individual selections to be removed.

Editable borrower name style
The edit form for the borrower header information now includes a Title field where you select from a menu of name styles as defined by the library in Alto SetConfig > Parameter Management > Names > Circulation > Borrower Styles.

Reservation last useful date display
Lists of reservations under Borrower, Work and Item now have a Last Useful column and the date is emphasised when it is in the past.

Offline duration extended
Soprano Offline has a time-out after which it must be refreshed by an online connection. This period has been seven hours. It has now been extended to 24 hours, which means that  you could  pick up at the start of the day a device that has Soprano Offline in a browser that was last online at the end of the previous day and start using it, for example on a mobile library, or on housebound user visits, or at an event signing up new users.

Miscellaneous fixes
* The Borrower Joined Date is no longer changed when you change the Expiry date
* The Manual return date setting now remains in place as items are returned until the operator leaves the page

To preview this release
You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses you live data.

Release to the live service
This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Wednesday 23rd March 2016.

Comments and contact
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service. Details of the inclusions are described in the preview release notice.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release primarily delivers further development of the Acquisitions module, which we are currently testing and refining in collaboration with a few libraries prior to making it generally available.

This release includes:

• Invoices
• Open Orders
• Fund detail
• Filter buttons work without submitting search
• List Orders from an Official Order Number on an Order
• Stock Purchase Suggestions Order Number bug fix
• Issue Item Manual due date bug fix
• Return Items Manual due date bug fix
• Issuing items from the reservation shelf, bug fix
• Borrower Charge waivers display, bug fix
• Serial Work header ISSN
• Various other fixes to functionality and styling

Invoices
We’ve added an Invoices option to the sub-menu under Purchasing. This gives you a list of your invoices in date order latest first.
The list columns are Invoice Number, Date, Payment Due date, Amount Payable, Supplier and Status.
You can filter by Supplier and Status, and search by invoice number.

You can select a row to view an invoice in detail. Within the invoice you can select an order line to go to the order.

Open Orders
We’ve added a Subscriptions option to the sub-menu under Purchasing. This gives you a list of your Open Orders sorted by Order Number descending. The list shows Order Number, Effective Date, Work Information, Price Per Annum, Subscriptions (quantity), Supplier and State.
You can filter by State and Supplier, and search by Order Number, Supplier Ref or Official Order Number.

You can select a row to view an Open Order in detail. Within the open Order you can select the Work to view its page and follow the e-resource link when there is one. The Subscriptions are listed and you can link to a Fund from a Subscription line.

Fund detail
You can now select a Fund from a list to view it in detail. In addition to summary information about amounts, you can view a list of Orders against a base Fund and view a history of transfers including links to the Funds to or from which amounts were transferred. With an aggregate Fund you can list and link to the member Funds.

Filter buttons work without submitting search
Filter buttons now work as soon as you click/tap them, without having to click/tap the search submit button. This includes the Orders filter by Type (Active Orders / Supplier quotes), the Funds filter by type (All/Base/Aggregate) and the Suppliers filter by active (On/Off) and by type (All/Parent/ Base).

List Orders from an Official Order Number on an Order
On the Order Detail page you can now click/tap on the Official Order Number to retrieve all orders with that number.

Stock Purchase Suggestions Order Number bug fix
In the Acquisitions Task Review stock purchase suggestions the Order request number is now displayed in the list rather than the Order ID.

Issue Item Manual due date bug fix
If you set a manual due date and issue an item and then switch off the manual due date and issue a second item to the same borrower, the calculated due date is now applied to the second loan rather than the manual due date.

Return Items Manual due date bug fix  
An operator who is not enabled to set a manual return date can now return items from loan.

Issuing items from the reservation shelf, bug fix
When an item that is reserved and awaiting collection is issued to the reserver and it is the only one for that borrower, the alert on the borrower information in the Issue form is now cleared, so it doesn’t look as though they have another item waiting to be collected.

Borrower Charge waivers display, bug fix
In Borrower > Current Charges and All Charges, if you waive parts of a charge with different reasons and then view the payment details (click/tap the amount under Paid/Waived), the reasons are displayed correctly rather than repeating  the first waiver for all the other waivers.

Serial Work header ISSN
The header for a serial now displays the ISSN, when there is one.

To preview this release
You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses you live data.

Release to the live service
This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Tuesday 23rd February 2016.

Comments and contact
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service. Details of the inclusions are described in the preview release notice.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release primarily delivers further development of the Acquisitions module. We are currently testing and refining the Acquisitions module in collaboration with a few libraries prior to making it generally available.

This release also includes:

• Performance improvements
• A fix to an issue when using IE11 where the borrower page becomes unresponsive after adding and removing many messages
• Ensuring Manual Return Date is only available when the LDS version is one that supports it, i.e. LDS 2.0 or higher
• Some styling adjustments to the Borrower and Item headers
• A correction to the borrower icon on the reservation page

To preview this release
You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses you live data.

Release to the live service
This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Monday 25th January 2016.

Comments and contact
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.