Subscription Acquisitions

General Information:

• EDI invoicing involves running a series of 3 reports to load EBSCO serial invoices into Sirsi Workflows. The process creates Sirsi invoices with invoice lines for each title, its price, and coverage which is the volume and year being invoiced.
• As of November 2021, the only serial vendor set up for EDI invoicing is EBSCO.
• The EBSCO accounts that are usually invoiced in this way are the DV47460-00 (print and print+online journal subscriptions) and DV47460-02 (online-only journal subscriptions.) These are titles that are ordered individually or in small packages or small combinations.)
• The Wiley e-journal package on the DV47460-68 account which included about 180 priced titles used to be invoiced by EDI as well, but we stopped paying this package through EBSCO due to various problems not related to the EDI invoicing process. This is just to say that titles on other accounts could be invoiced this way.
• The EDI invoicing only loads titles or subscriptions that have prices above zero. A title may not have a price if the publisher has not provided one or if the title is part of a package, combination, or membership. The package, combination, or membership title usually has a price, so it is loaded. However, the other titles that come with the package, combination, or membership have a price of zero or no price listed, so they are not included on the EDI invoice.
• EBSCO also emails PDF and Excel versions of the invoices which do list the unpriced or zero priced titles. (These invoices are also available in EBSCONET in the Financial Information tab.) These invoices need to be saved on the Technical Services drive in the "Acquisitions\EBSCO Journal Invoices 2010-present" folder which is further divided by fiscal years; eg. "FY2021 EBSCO invoices".
  • The reason the files are saved here is to have all of the EBSCO invoices together, along with other invoices, to make it easier to locate them to provide proof of payment for perpetual access purposes.
  • The PDF version of the invoices will also be filed in the "BKB PMTS 2016-present" by fiscal year and vendor, when they are ready to submit to the university Disbursements & Travel Department for payment.
• Another file is also emailed which is called the "Invoice Action Information Report." This report contains information about titles that are ceased, changed titles, changed formats, or have some other situation that needs to be addressed. This file is saved in the same folder as the invoices.

Their were many steps involved in the initial setup of the EDI invoicing in 2013. The attached Powerpoint provides the details but some of the steps included:

Setting up the FTP fields with EBSCO

Setting up the Sirsi Workflows vendor record 

Creating funds in Sirsi to which invoicelines that did not load properly could be attached: 

• One for e-journals (online-only journals): EBSCO-EDIPROB-EJ
• One for print/print+online journals: EBSCO-EDIPROB-JR

Creating Dated Orders for journals and creating funds for EBSCO service charges: (E-S-EJ-LIB-SC for e-journals, and S-LIB-SC for print/print+online journals) (EBSCO charges a 3% service fee per subscription; current as of 11/16/2021)

Setting up the reports in Sirsi Workflows (Note: the fiscal year of the report name and in the report criteria needs to be updated every fiscal year):

• EDI File Retrieval Via FTP--EBSCO-SER--FY21--SIR0078 (before running this report, check the FTP version of the files on the EBSCONET website and for each invoice included, check the first invoiceline PO# against the Sirsi Acquisitions PO# to make sure they match. If they don't match, change the Sirsi PO# either temporarily until after the invoice loads or permanently if the FTP invoice information is correct. Otherwise, you will have difficulties loading the invoices. See the Powerpoint below for more details. POWER POINT DOES NOT EXPLAIN THIS OR SHOW HOT TO CORRECT THE FIRST INVOICE LINE IN THE SIRSI SERVER. TRY TO GET BETTER INFO TO REWRITE THESE INSTRUCTIONS. 
• EDI File Receipt--FY21 (This is the same report used for book EDI invoicing and will update book invoices, if any, as well as the subscription invoices, when run. Before running this report for the subscription EDI invoicing, notify the person doing book EDI invoicing in case they need to complete their processing before the report is run.)
• Serials X12 Invoices--EBSCO-SER EJ--FY21
• Serials X12 Invoices--EBSCO-SER JR--FY21
  • The Serials X12 Invoices reports contain the problem fund and the service fee fund. Originally, I thought I could load the e-journal and print journal invoices separately and use the appropriate funds for those formats, but both e-journal and print invoices load at the same time, so after the invoices load, you have to edit the invoices to be sure they have the correct service fee fund. I usually use the Serials X12 Invoices--EBSCO-SER EJ report because the amount of the invoice is larger than the print invoice.

The Powerpoint below provides more details about the steps above.

1. Display the invoice in Sirsi after it has been loaded by EDI.  Invoicelines that don't have titles could not be linked to an order so they were linked to the problem fund specified in the Serials X13 report (ESBCO-EDIPROB-EJ or EBSCO-EDIPROB-JR.).

2. When displaying the invoice, if you click on the invoiceline and select the Display Invoice helper, you can see in the Invoiceline Extended Information Comment fields, the coverage (volume and dates), order number, ISSN, EBSCO title number, and EBSCO Order number may be displayed. Those elements can be used to look up the order or title in Sirsi or EBSCONET.  (This is the same information that appears if you display the EBSCO-EDIPROB fund, select the Invoices tab, select an invoice, and select the Display Invoice helper.)  

• The order number did not match Sirsi, so don't use it to search in Sirsi, but you can use it in EBSCONET to look for the title.
• The ISSN can be searched in Sirsi and might bring up the title and the Sirsi order if attached.
• In EBSCONET, you can search by the ISSN, title number, or PO number as the ILS number

To identify missing titles, you can also look on the PDF or Excel versions of the invoices in the place between the 2 titles that surround the blank title to see what is there.

3. EBSCO sends an Invoice Action/Information Report by email with the invoices which provide information about titles that may require action. These include titles that have been suspended, ceased, changed to another format, changed title numbers, etc. These could be related to some of the titles that didn't load properly during the EDI invoicing.

4. To check which invoices loaded by EDI, you can display invoices by Vendor ID; i.e., EBSCO-SER, or vendor name in Sirsi, add the year in the "Created in fiscal cycle" field, click on the invoices tab and see the list of invoices. The date the invoices were created is listed so you can see if the date matches the date of the EDI load.  If any are unexpected, you can click on the invoice and display it.

5.