[Koha] AMH sorters Backdating feature and Koha fines.

[Raymund Delahunty]

We recently installed three AMH sorters sourced from Bibliotheca and had a puzzling problem where almost 3,000 items appear to have been returned at 6am on 28th August. We now believe this is down to the Backdating feature on one of the sorters being turned on, and accidently left on for weeks. When the items were actually returned, Koha set the old_issues.returndate field to the 28th of August, but the old_issues.timestamp was stamped with the moment the item is actually returned. This has caused havoc with the fines calculation, where it appears the full fine was calculated right up to the actual return date and then a *credit* is applied to deal with Koha thinking the item was retuned on the 28th August. We are on 18.11 and with the new way Koha now handles debits and credits, fixing the problem on hundreds of user accounts would be tricky (even if we had the capacity to start doing it!). If you use the new AMH sorters and see lots of lines in old_issues.returndate field having a 6am time stamp (5am now that the clocks have changed here in the UK) that should ring alarm bells. I did suggest to Bibliotheca that it would be great if there was an on-screen warning when the Backdating feature was in force, but this enhancement request wasn't rated highly. So it is a staff training matter I guess.

Ray Delahunty

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