Accounting Units or Serials Check-in Units

Libraries that have acquired Additional Accounting Units or Additional Serials Units can allow departments (or other units) to create and maintain separate non-bibliographic records while sharing a bibliographic records database. In a system with multiple units, each unit is assigned a range of records (e.g., .c10000000 to .c1199999 for unit one, .c1200000 to .c1299999 for unit two, etc.).

If your library has acquired multiple accounting and/or serials units, each login is assigned to one (and only one) accounting/serials unit. Staff can see all record numbers associated with a bibliographic record. However, staff members in one unit cannot view or edit records in the record range belonging to another unit. If a user attempts to view or edit a record in another accounting or serials unit, the system displays a message similar to the following:

.c10400709 does not belong to this accounting/serials unit.

See Administering Basic Info for information on how to change the accounting / serials unit assigned to a login.

Additional accounting and serials units can be combined as follows:

single accounting unit, single serials unit
single accounting unit, multiple serials units
multiple accounting units, single serials unit
multiple accounting units, multiple serials units (in this case, each serials unit is associated with an accounting unit)

Serials and Accounting Unit Limits

Sierra supports up to 63 unique entries for accounting and serial units. Each accounting unit can be associated with a serial unit, and this accounting and serial unit pair counts as a single entry against the 63 available entries. Serial units not paired with an accounting unit (and likewise, an accounting unit not paired with a serials unit) each count as individual entries against the 63 entries.

You can edit the names of the accounting units with Advanced System Access & Administration. See Account Name for more information.

Additional Accounting Units

The Additional Accounting Units feature provides separate funds, as well as separate order, vendor, and invoice records for different institutions or departments that share a single database on the Innovative system. Note that each accounting unit is limited to 30,000 invoice records.

Additional Serials Units

The Additional Serials Units feature restricts the following tasks to the login's assigned serials unit:

checking in, claiming, or binding serials
editing and creating holding and order records
routing serials