Item Aggregate Checkout Activity Report in TinyCat

I am finding that the Item Aggregate Checkout Activity Report in TinyCat includes renewals. This creates a somewhat misleading total for checkouts, as sometimes there are 2 or even 3 renewals for an item. While this is good information to know, our library doesn't consider a checkout to be the same thing as a renewal. Is there any way to just total up the "first checkouts" of the books?

>1 follenlibrary: Great question! Unfortunately the data system doesn't differentiate between checkouts and renewals so there isn't a built-in way to distinguish them right now. It is on our list of long-term goals, but might require some heavy lifting on our development team. Here's one workaround, and there may be better options than this one: you can get an idea of how many times an item has been checked out vs renewed by sorting a Transactions export:

1. Go to your Transactions page (https://www.librarycat.org/admin/transactions)
2. Click All, then Export Transactions: All
3. Open that spreadsheet
4. In Excel, I click Data > Sort
5. Sort first by Item Title, then Patron Name, then Item Entry Date
6. Filter Item Status to only display "Checked Out"

You can now scroll through and see how many times and an item has been checked out, and glance at the patrons and dates to see how many were really/essentially renewals. Tips: move the Patron Name and Item Entry Date columns closer to the Item Title, and highlight rows in a single column to generate a count of them at the bottom of Excel.

I know it's not perfect but it may be helpful. Let me know if you have any other questions!

>2 ZephCraven: Thank you so much--we do hope that at some point checkouts and renewals will be separated. For now, I'll try your workaround!

I'm thrilled to see that an Item Aggregate Activity report has been added that removes renewals! But--when I run the report, a column that I think is the date the item was checked out is just numbers, and when I format that column/those cells for date, it just turns into a row of number signs, no matter how wide I make the column. Any advice?

>4 follenlibrary: Yes! I'm so glad Lauren was able to add that for us! Sorry for the trouble with the other column. Is that in the Item Aggregate Actviity Report? I'm not seeing any date columns when I export these. What's the title of the column you're seeing? Feel free to email me the file at tinycat@librarything.com, if that's helpful.

>5 ZephCraven: Sorry, I was mistaking one of the columns in the Item Aggregate report for a date column. I'm not finding a good way to get monthly or yearly checkout totals, except with the Patron Individual Checkout report. And the problem with that is that it doesn't remove the renewals, so I have to do that manually. And for some reason, a few patrons show two checkouts of the same book on the same day (maybe that was just my error? But hard to believe I do that regularly...)

>6 follenlibrary: Aha! These are some data points we hope to make much, much easier to find when we finally do a big overhaul of the Reports. It's on the horizon but it's not the first thing on the agenda unfortunately. You can get this data now though — it's not too difficult! Simply download all transactions (Transactions > All > blue Export button). Open that spreadsheet, sort by Item Entry Date column (this is a bad name, it is the transaction date and should be renamed eventually to "Transaction Date").

You can filter the Item Status column (i.e. what kind of transaction it was) to just Checked Out, etc. You can filter down by date further and most spreadsheet systems like Excel will let you highlight the data and will give you a quick count of the transactions.

If you do this and still have questions or hesitations about your transaction data, let me know and I'll be happy to dig into it with you! Let me know if you have any other questions.

>7 ZephCraven: Thanks so much; that will be an ok work-around for now. Its only problem is that items that have not yet been returned don't appear--I guess they have to be checked in before they can be counted as checked out? Or is it that this month is not yet over? I was hoping to include March data in a report but it just won't show that.

>8 follenlibrary: Hi again! Make sure you're going to Transactions and clicking the All tab before you export. I exported yours just now and am seeing items recently checked out including those that are still due or overdue. I sorted the exported file by Item Entry Date and can see a few still-checked out items near the bottom (e.g., Real Happiness checked out 2/8/26 and still due). If there are any specific books that you expected to see in the report that appear to be missing, please let me know and I'll investigate!