This is an overview of the steps you need to take to do the initial BookTrack setup. You should perhaps print this page out to use as a guide during the setup process. Just click on the small print icon just to the left of the Table of Contents to get a printer friendly version of this web page.

Step 1: Setup grades

Here you create all the grades or groups which students and teachers will fall under. The typical high school for instance will have grades 8 to 12 and a teachers group.

Then you need to create an archive grade/group to move students and teachers into when they leave the school.

See Setup Grades

Step 2: Setup stores

Stores are physical locations where books are stored when they are not with students and teachers. Most schools will have only one store, but some have stores for each grade and some who are using BookTrack as a library book management tool, will have a Library store configured also.

Here too you will need at least two archive stores into which you can move discarded or lost books.

See Setup Stores

Step 3: Stick barcode labels

Now is a good time to start sticking the unique barcode labels onto the first page of your textbooks. You don’t have to do all of them at once, but you cannot perform Step 5 with books that don’t have barcode labels stuck onto them.

Only use barcode labels supplied by BookTrack otherwise you may create duplicate data and have your account suspended pending payment of penalty fees to repair the data damage you may have caused. There is a minimum penalty fee of R5000, but not limited to R5000, for using your own barcode labels. Just don’t go there.

See Adding Textbooks to BookTrack

Step 4: Add book titles

In this step you make the BookTrack system aware of the book titles your school has. You don’ have to add all your book titles before proceeding to the next step, but you have to add a book title to the database before you can receive books with that title into the stores in the next step.

See Adding Book Titles

Step 5: Adding textbooks to BookTrack

In this step you enter the barcode data for the individual books into the database so that BookTrack can track the whereabouts of these individual books.

See Adding Textbooks to BookTrack

Step 6: Enter student information

In this step you enter the name, surname, student number (if any) and grade of the students and also the same for the teachers. You cannot continue to the next step until this step is done.

See Adding student information

Step 7: Issue books to students and teachers

In this step you issue or assign books to students and teachers for the educational year by scanning the unique barcodes out under their names. This step can be performed at the beginning or the end of the year depending on the strategy you choose to follow.

In this step you can print out a receipt with a list of the books you’ve just issued to the student and have them sign for the books as is now required by the Department of Education.

See Issuing books to students for more info on your strategy options.

Step 8: View reports and export data

In step 8 you can now view reports on all the data which you’ve captured in the steps above and export the data to a .xlsx spreadsheet format for further data filtering and manipulation.

See How to view reports

Step 9: Receive books from students & teachers

At the end of the year you will want to scan the books back into the stores a.s.a.p. so that you can update the data regarding the outstanding books, or i.o.w. who still owes you books.

See Receive books from students

Using BookTrack is as simple as that.