Evergreen sites will now have more control over whether a negative balance can be applied to a user’s billing record and when that negative balance can be applied. Through a series of Library Settings, a site can prohibit negative balances on bills or can allow those negative balances to be applied for a specific period of time after a lost or overdue bill is charged to the user. Sites can set a default for all types of bills or can apply distinct settings for lost bills and for overdue fines. The more specific settings will override the default.

Sites that opt to allow negative balances for a specific period of time must 1) enable the relevant "prohibit negative balances" setting(s) and 2) specify the time period in the relevant Negative Balance Interval setting(s).

In addition to the new library settings, the system now has a new account adjustment payment type. This payment type will be utilized for libraries prohibiting negative balances to replace the previous voiding behavior that caused the negative balances to occur. The account adjustment payment type will also be used for all libraries, regardless of the state of negative balance settings, in cases where overdue fines are adjusted when an overdue item is marked lost.

An Adjust to Zero option has been added to the bills interface of the patron record. This option will always adjust the selected bill to a zero balance. It can also be used to easily clear a negative balance from the patron’s record. A user must have the new ADJUST_BILLS permission to see and use this option.

This new feature also changes the behavior for the client option to void a bill from the patron record. If a user does not have the VOID_BILLING permission, the option to void bills will be hidden in the bills interface and in the Full Details view of a specific bill.

To truly remove the ability to produce negative balances on a transaction, administrators need to 1) enable the relevant setting in the Library Settings Editor and 2) remove the VOID_BILLING permission from staff accounts since manual voiding will continue to produce negative balances.

The Selfcheck interface now warns patrons when they are about to be logged out due to inactivity 20 seconds prior to logging them out.

The inactivity timeout is also reset with each checkout to avoid timeouts while checking out lots of items.

When registering a user, the system checks to see if there are already exiting users with the same name, address, email, etc. Now this duplicate user search includes inactive users so that matches can be re-activated if desired, rather than creating duplicate accounts.