No Dues/Discharge Certificate for Library

Academic libraries often require issuing No dues/Clearance certificates to their patrons. In koha, you need to enable a  feature named discharge which is used to generate a discharge/ No Dues certificate that says the patron has no current checkouts, no holds, and owes library fines/ charges. 

After enabling this option, you can generate the clearance certificate through the staff interface. Patrons can also send the request for clearance certificates/discharges through the OPAC. 

Following are the steps to enable this option to generate the clearance certificates on the koha LMS

Step-1

(If you want to put your signature digitally on the library clearance certificate then follow step 1 otherwise you can skip it)

Make a digital copy of your signature and put it in the home directory in koha. Don't forget to remove the background of the signature image. Now copy this image to the webroot of koha OPAC through the terminal. 

Open a terminal and apply the following commands

sudo cp signature.jpg /usr/share/koha/opac/htdocs/

Change the file permissions

cd /usr/share/koha/opac/htdocs/

sudo chmod 755 signature.jpg 

sudo service apache2 restart

Step-2

Customize No Dues Notice 

Koha Tools ➤Notices and slips. Find the Discharge under the code column. Click on the edit option and Paste the following HTML scripts in the Message body. Now save it.

<center><h1>Library No Dues/ Clearance Certificate</h1></center>

This is to certify that <<title>>  <<borrowers.firstname>> <<borrowers.surname>>,

bearing library membership card  <<borrowers.cardnumber>>,  Staff/Student of <<sort1>> Department has returned all documents borrowed from the library. He/she owes no dues to the Library.

<img src="Your OPAC URL/signature.jpg" width="75" height="50">

<h2>Librarian</h2>

<<branches.branchname>>

Allow the feature from the administration 

Koha Administration ➤ Global System Preferences ➤ Patrons ➤ General ➤ useDischarge

Select Allow from the drop-down and click on the Save all Patrons preferences.

Now go to the Patron account. Click on the Discharge button which will you find the bottom of the Patron account in the left-side corner. 

Next click on the Generate discharge button. The certificate will download to your computer in pdf format.

Now Patrons can see the  "ask for a discharge" button on the OPAC  at the end of the left-side corner on their account login. They can send a request for the discharge/Clearance certificate by clicking on that button.

All requests for a Discharge/No Dues certificate will be listed below the menu buttons on the main staff client interface.

By allowing the Library staff, patrons will be able to download their No Dues certificate from the OPAC login

References:-https://koha-community.org/manual/17.05/html/04_patrons.html