You may choose to implement one or both of the two strategies which you can use to issue books to students.

Note! It goes a whole lot faster if you have at least one person helping you by getting and opening the first page of the books so that you can scan the unique barcodes.

First strategy

In the first strategy, you issue or assign books to students as they stand in front of you, usually at the beginning of the year.

Go to Student Admin and select Issue Books and select Create New.

Enter the student’s name or surname into the Student text box and select the student from the dropdown that appears. Make sure you’re selecting the correct student name.

Move on to the Selected text box and start scanning the unique barcodes of the books that you’re issuing to the student.

Once you’ve scanned all the textbooks that will be issued to the student, you may select either to Save or Print. Both actions will save the entered data, but Print will bring up a page which will enable you to do a printout of the list of books which you just issued to the student. You can ask the student to sign the printout in acknowledgement of receiving the books in the list.

This printout can be done at a later stage also under the students name under Student Admin and Students.

You can either use a helper to hand the books to you for scanning or you can have someone hand the books to the student beforehand and then the student opens to books they just received to the first page, one-by-one, so that you can scan the unique barcodes.

Note! You may use as many barcode scanners as you wish to scan books out to students to speed things up. No extra licensing required. The more scanners, the faster it goes.

Second strategy

With the second strategy you issue the textbooks to students right after you have received all the textbooks from the students at the end of the year. Some schools have adopted this strategy whereby they create book bundles for each of the students, which the students can simply pick up and sign for at the beginning of the following year. These schools have had better results than those implementing the first strategy because the second strategy enables more room for error and delays.

Note! You may use as many barcode scanners as you wish to scan books out to students to speed things up. No extra licensing required. The more scanners, the faster it goes.

Issuing the textbooks works the same as with the first strategy.

Go to Student Admin and select Issue Books and select Create New.

Enter the student’s name or surname into the Student text box and select the student from the dropdown that appears. Make sure you’re selecting the correct student name.

Move on to the Selected text box and start scanning the unique barcodes of the books that you’re issuing to the student.

Once you’ve scanned all the textbooks that will be issued to the student, you may select either to Save or Print. Both actions will save the entered data, but Print will bring up a page which will enable you to do a printout of the list of books which you just issued to the student. Print out the list and place it in-between the pages of the bundle of books. Some schools place the bundle of books in a cheap transparent plastic bag and stick the printed list on top inside the bag and bind it closed.

With this strategy it’s best to have a helper or two who can fetch and open the books for scanning, and then put the bundles and printouts in the plastic bags.

Issuing books that are still issued to other students

Sometimes you may run into a scenario whereby you want to issue or assign a book or books to a student, but the books are currently issued to other students. So it has not been received or returned to it’s appropriate store yet.

See still-issued-to-other-students for more info on how to deal with this scenario.