New Reports

All, I’ve just finished adding some new reports to your monthly statistics templates. You should all now see three new monthly reports: Deleted Users, Expired Users, and Active Users. These reports will let you know how many of your users in the past month have been deleted, had their privileges expire or have had activity on their account. The first two combined with the Users Added report will let you keep a running track of your number of patrons. The active users report is interesting because it can show you how many of your patrons are using your library. Don’t be alarmed when you view this report. It will be quite a bit less than your circ numbers for the obvious reason that it is only counting accounts that have been used, so if that patron checks out 1 item or 20 it still is a count of 1. Also activity also includes editing the user profile, but since that does not happen very often it should not muddy things up, unless you want it to.

The last report I added I’ve added under the REPORTS login. In response to one of our libraries I’ve created a report that generates a list of patrons whose items have expired on the previous day. Your staff can then phone these patrons and remind them of this. We did this because by the item the first overdue notice hits the item would be 7 to 10 days overdue and if it is a couple of DVD’s it could be expensive. Now in creating the report I started thinking. Would your patrons rather be notified a day before their items went overdue? I can easily make that change to the report. Email and let me know and I will modify your library’s report template. Then you would have a list of patrons whose items are about to go overdue that you can call and remind them or ask if they want a renewal. Remember this is all up to you and your staff if you have the time/people to do this. If you have any questions just email them to me.