At the end of the year you have to receive books back from students and check them back into their stores.

The main reason for receiving books into their stores is to keep track of who still owes you books. If a book is not in the store it means that it’s still with a student or teacher. So as you receive books from students you should scan them back into the stores a.s.a.p. otherwise the Outstanding Books report will be of little use to you because the data of books received is not up to date.

There are three different methods for receiving books.

Method 1: Receive Selected

You would normally use this method of receiving books when you want the students to bring in all the textbooks issued to them, one student at a time. This method allows you to check whether the students are handing in the correct books that were assigned to them and you’ll be able to catch them out when they try to hand in someone else’s book. PS. Remember that students sometimes accidentally swap books, so just keep that in mind. After all, at the end of the day, BookTrack will tell you exactly who still owes which textbooks to the school.

So imagine Omphile is standing in front of you with a stack of textbooks that were issued to him at the beginning of the year and you want to receive the books into the store.

Go to Student Admin and the select Receive Outstanding.

Search for Omphile’s name and when you’ve found the details of his outstanding books. You may have to sort the info by StudentLastName if there’s more than one Omphile in the school. Now take the stack of books from him and go through the physical books one-by-one to check that the unique barcodes match with those recorded in BookTrack. If they match select the book’s tick box on the left. See tick boxes circled in red on the left in graphic below.

And once you’ve selected all the textbooks Omphile has given you, you can click on Receive Selected, circled in yellow at the top left in the graphic above, which will check all these books back into their appropriate store/s. If you now refresh the Outstanding Books report and search for Omphile again, you will only see the books that are still outstanding from Omphile.

Method 2: Receive Now Link

In the Method 1 above you can also simply click on the Receive Now link on the right, which will immediately check the textbook into the store, but Method 2 is more widely used when you want to scan the book’s unique barcode into the search box and search for the book by barcode.

To do that, go to Student Admin and select Receive Outstanding

Scan the textbook’s unique barcode into the search box and click Search.

Once the book is found, click on Receive Now link on the right and the book will be checked into it’s store.

Method 3: Bulk receive books with Receive Books

Many schools make students hand their textbooks the same day they write their last exam of the year for that subject.

So lets for instance say a class has just finished writing their last grade 10 mathematics exam for the year and the teacher collects all their mathematics textbooks from them and send the textbooks to the bookstore. In this scenario the textbooks get to the LTSM or textbook administrator in random piles, which they now have to receive into their stores.

Fortunately this is not a problem because BookTrack knows to whom these books were issued, so it will automatically handle the logic in the background.

So even if Zak lost his textbook during the year and snatched Paul’s textbook, BookTrack is smart enough to know that it’s Paul’s book being received into the store. So Zak won’t be let off the hook by handing in Paul’s book. The system will still show that Zak owes the school a book.

To use the Receive Books method, go to Student Admin and select Receive Books.

Click on Create New to create a new book receiving session. Remember web sessions can time out, so don’t leave the session open for too long.

Under Student you can select any student. It doesn’t matter which student name you pick here.

Now scan the unique barcodes into the Selected box, about 30 at a time, and click Save before the web session times out.

BookTrack will take care of the logic in the background receiving books from the relevant students and placing them in the appropriate stores.