Unit Statements delivered via MLS?

Whilst trying to find something else this past weekend, I happened to notice 3 PDFs buried deep in the Afaria folder: 200711_cfs, 200712_cfs & 200801_cfs. When I opened then I was (pleasantly) surprised to find our unit's Nov 2007, Dec 2007 and Jan 2008 unit financial statements. The file dates of 8 and 9 Feb suggest they were downloaded very recently.

Someone please tell me that this is going to be a pattern for the future!

I've long wondered why these statements were sent via US Mail (at least in the U.S.) In addition to having to remember to ask the Bishop each month, and then having to manually enter misc expenses, etc., it seemed it would be much quicker to deliver it along with MLS. Among other things, we can now pull that PDF up and copy and paste those long reference numbers and DCO order numbers into MLS -- reducing errors and making reconciliation a little faster and easer.

So, if this does portend things to continue, thank you very much for making this clerk's job just a little easier.

Walt Bristow
Lynchburg (VA) 2nd Ward Clerk

I'm glad to hear that this may be of some help. The reason they are buried in a folder for now is that MLS 2.8 will have a link that will pull them into MLS. So don't delete them for now. This will hopefully be a way of getting out of the mailings for financial statements. If you would like to get a beta of MLS 2.8, you can go to mls.lds.org and download it. We hope to add a few more months in the future.

DJC wrote:IIf you would like to get a beta of MLS 2.8, you can go to mls.lds.org and download it.

Does this still apply?

If your stake would like to use this pre-release version, the following guidelines will need to be followed.

1 The stake president must approve of the stake's participation.
2 Every unit in the stake, including the stake, must have the pre-release version installed.

It does still apply. I probably should have mentioned it. When you go to download the beta it should remind you of this.

I wondered if that was a beta thing ---- so I ran down to the office to peek and found three months of statements in there! Even January 2008!!! (We would be expecting to receive that via snail mail late Feb or early March)

In the final release of MLS 2.8 the Unit Statements are included as a 'Saved Form' in the 'Reports/Forms' panel. I've not been able to find an actual PDF of the statements (like found earlier buried under the Afaria folder). That's unfortunate. One of the advantages of the actual PDF was that in the reconciliation process you could simply open the PDF, select a reference number, item description, etc. and copy it and then paste it into MLS. That's not possible with the 'Saved Form' version (at least not without printing it to a PDF file and then doing an OCR on the PDF...)

Any possibility that the PDF versions might again be made available? Copying and pasting increases, I believe, accuracy in transcribing those 8 digit reference numbers and alphanumeric/0 distribution center order numbers.

Walt

Probably not any time soon. They will not be left out in a directory any longer for security purposes. I will see what we can do within MLS to see if we can get it to work in a future release.

wbristow wrote:One of the advantages of the actual PDF was that in the reconciliation process you could simply open the PDF, select a reference number, item description, etc. and copy it and then paste it into MLS.

Indeed a copy/paste would be a giant step forward, but the gold standard would be to have the ability to populate the statement balance and Reference items directly from the LUFS.

wbristow wrote:In the final release of MLS 2.8 the Unit Statements are included as a 'Saved Form' in the 'Reports/Forms' panel. I've not been able to find an actual PDF of the statements (like found earlier buried under the Afaria folder).
Walt

pdftk is a collection of tools for manipulating pdf files, and I believe it can merge form data on a .pdf form into a new filled-in .pdf.

Eric P

Eric, I'm not sure how that would help us. The statement in MLS is not a form pdf is it?

wbristow wrote:Eric, I'm not sure how that would help us. The statement in MLS is not a form pdf is it?

Sorry, I jumped to that conclusion because the statements found in the previous version were pdf, and your post mentioned saved forms. If I had read your post more closely (or checked in MLS), I would not have veered off course with my suggestion.

Eric P