Finance

The Alma acquisitions process includes ordering and receiving materials from vendors, which involves the handling of both orders and invoices by vendors.

Invoices are handled outside of the library’s scope, usually by the institution’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Invoices must therefore be exported from Alma to the institution’s financial system. For details see Invoice Export.

Institutions that want to receive confirmation about the invoice status in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, can import the invoices from the ERP back into Alma. For details see Invoice Import.

Some institutions may want to keep track of sent orders in their finance system, in addition to tracking this information in Alma. Such institutions can export POs from Alma. For details see Order (PO) Export. If ERP number is required in order to approve POs, orders will be imported back to Alma. For details see Order Import.
In addition, it is possible to update fund amounts in Alma in order to synchronize your financial system and Alma’s fund information. For details, see Synchronize fund information.

In general, the export and import processes between Alma and the financial system are performed using XML files that are placed at a predefined FTP location. These XML files can be fetched by the financial system (in the case of invoice or PO export) or by Alma (in the case of invoice import).

Note that the fund allocation loader process is different because the format is an Excel or CSV file.This is illustrated in the following diagram:

See also these related blog entries.