How the make-up of a Collection differs by job description: Updating and future proofing a fund structure from the perspectives of a Librarian and Accounts Payable

In FY18 the library had reworked the fund structure in our ILS Sierra. Our Acquisitions librarian retired at the end of 2018 and a new Budget Specialist was hired. Once a new Acquisitions Librarian was on board in 2019, both the Budget Specialist and Librarian started noticing discrepancies with fund codes and university account lines. At first we thought we were just speaking different languages since one of us had more experience in accounting, while the other had been brought up in libraries. In FY20 we started to meet to run through invoices and work on our jargon. It wasn’t just our words that were mixing us up. When the fund structure in Sierra was redone the underlying university lines were not properly assigned. The university lines themselves were a bit outdated and inflexible, aligned to Books, Video, Subscriptions & Periodicals, Database fees. Almost all of the heavily used funds in Sierra were being coded as books, even the electronic subscriptions. Our lightning talk will cover how we worked within the limitations on the university funds lines to overhaul our fund codes to fit administration and collection development needs. As well as discuss the unexpected collaboration between the library and University Accounting during FY21, which ultimately yielded a better more flexible system that satisfies both the Library’s and University Accounting’s needs. We implemented this new structure beginning in FY22 and completed the bulk of our cleanup by the end of that fiscal year. Cleanup involved the Acquisitions Team and the Budget Specialist working together and updating over 150,000 records. Which brought us down from 1,302 funds to just over 300. A much more sustainable number. Moving forward the new fund codes and the university lines will help create budgetary visualizations and more stable projections year over year.