Vendor Problems Lesley Tweddle 15 Jan 1998 08:11 UTC
This may sound like a gripe, but I really need advice. We are in Egypt, so can't pick up a phone and dial a toll-free number. We have an Unsatisfactory Vendor (UV). Last June we asked them to cancel about 600 titles which we were transferring to another vendor, but we had to leave some titles with UV for certain reasons - we think we left them with a small but viable list, not all the cheapies or all the hard cases. It was in our interests to do so. On July 23 1997 UV prepared us a credit for nearly $10,500. We assumed this was a pleasingly prompt action to reimburse any subscriptions we'd paid for volumes that were now cancelled, in cases where UV had not irrevocably committed the money for those volumes. We had to assume, because UV did not send us confirmation of the last volume they had committed money to. Five months after our list of cancellations was sent, they did send us a list of titles they had cancelled, BUT in the field which should have informed us what was the last volume paid for, we found very out-of-date data. Therefore as a confirmation that our cancel instructions had been accurately carried out from the volume or period we'd stipulated, this list was useless. I emailed to point this out, and received the reply "when our system converted last year, incorrect data populated the 'last part received' field... I realise that this does not help you in determining what volume your new vendor should continue with... I will be willing to research... it will take a while..." Obviously, we had already given our new vendor instructions about the takeover volume, but we wanted to keep and eye on UV's performance in order to alert them about, and claim credit for, and titles which they had ordered or paid for beyond the reasonable 'benefit of the doubt' period. From five titles UV has researched for us, titles whose cancellation we requested in June, we discovered that UV were still ordering and paying the publisher for further volumes as late as October and December 1997, so the outlook for overlaps is pretty grim, and the research into each individual title which will take "a while" may permit ever so many more subscriptions to be prolonged and paid. Now, today, UV emails us as follows: "it was discovered that credit [July 23 1997, value approx $10,500] was generated in error. In July 97 we processed cancellations on your standing orders and our system responded by crediting all items with certain statuses. ...we must now reverse all transactions made against this credit... " OK. The invoices for our remaining subscriptions with UV have been coming in, none of them worth anything approaching $10,500, and we've been emailing UV to say "please offset invoice X against credit Y", and marking our records for each title - amount paid, invoice number, invoice date - offset against credit. We shall now be re-invoiced for all these titles, and have to go through our records again writing in the new invoice numbers and dates. But worse than that is: can we trust their system? How do we know that these credits were "generated in error"? Their system can't even confirm that they stopped our subscriptions at the volume requested. The faults in their system actually permit them to prolong our susbcriptions without our being aware of it. We are, it seems, at the mercy of the faults in their system, and they can simply, it seems, tell us that their system has this or that wrong with it - always a this or a that which is to _their_ advantage, I can't help noticing, and we... just have to take their word for it? Do we? If anyone has persisted through this long exposition, and has any energy left, could you advise? Since I have mentioned no names, I hope you'll feel free to reply to the list. Thanks for your patience. Lesley Tweddle Serials Unit, American University in Cairo Library LTWEDDLE@ACS.AUC.EUN.EG