Individual Missionary Fund Surplus

I am an assistant clerk over finances. A father who's son had recently returned from a mission asked me what balance was left on his son's missionary fund. I told him the amount and he made the corresponding donation.

I later noticed that his son's account now has a surplus in the amount of his donation and informed the member. I'm not sure how this happened and would like to resolve this with the member, but have read the handbooks statement about not refunding missionary donations.

As I misled him into donating the incorrect amount is there no way of returning these funds?

It can't be returned, but it can be recategorized into something else - like tithing.

Just to confirm it wasn't necessarily you misleading him:

We experienced the exact same problem this evening: The summary for a missionary that returned home this week left off several donations from this year. We only caught it because one of them was mine.

We called LUS and let them know. But clerks may need to exercise caution.

OK I will re-categorize it for him then.

TinMan, I've noticed a similar bug with other funds, where if I'm viewing the past year's transactions it reports a different final balance then if I show all. I would have expected them to match.

Thanks for the help!

As I have said numerous times, I only have enough "tech knowledge" to be dangerous, so forgive the following:

As I understand it, I asked for a report on all the funds paid into a specific missionaries account. My clerks gave it to me and I gave it to the parents. They said: "That's not right, our figures show we paid $1300 more than that." So I reviewed it and noticed that a payment I had made was not included, so I knew something was wrong.

We re-ran the report tonight. When you select "all" to get the years that you want to show donations, it cut off in January of this year. Nothing else showed up from then until present. However, when you select "custom dates" and put in the beginning date and today's date, all the donations show up.

We called LUS to find out why. We didn't get a lot of help, but was basically told "don't select 'all'!"

Sort of like when you go to the doctor and say "It hurts when I bend my elbow, and the doctor says, 'Then don't bend your elbow.'"

corybrinck wrote:OK I will re-categorize it for him then.

Discuss this with the donor and be sure you're both on exactly the same page, so-to-speak. Tell him you're not allowed to refund the donation but you can re-categorize it to any other charitable category. The most useful would seem to be tithing (because the donor would likely pay that much more in tithing eventually) but it could also be split and applied to fast offerings, humanitarian aid, perpetual education fund, etc. Make sure it's the donor who decides for certain.

As far as the income/expense report being misleading... even a report that only shows the current year should accurately show the "balance forward" from the previous year. So the bottom line of a current-year-only report should still show whether there were enough donations to cover the total number of months where CHQ has drawn from that individual missionary's fund. As long as donations were properly placed in that individual missionary's sub-category the tracking should stay accurate. ...or maybe I don't fully understand the problem being discussed.

Did you print an "Income" report or did you print a report showing both income and expenses?

Nope, you understand. We printed a report showing both income and expense using the default "all" for the date selection. The "incomes" stopped mid January, but the $400 monthly "expenses" went all the way up to May. Thus it showed a "balance due" of like $2800.00, when actually only $475 was due.

(We didn't really think that suspect since his family has been very spotty in making contributions, and the surplus in the ward mission fund was covering his expenses. They got very far behind at the first of his mission, but we enlisted ward members to help cover the cost. So instead of just $400 in income showing up each month as is usual, there were dozens of small donations from many ward members.)

When we re-ran the very same report using "custom dates" of his mission start date up to today's date, all the incomes from January until now showed up and the balance due was $475, as it should be.

We tried it several times and got the same result.

I always wait two months after the missionary returns before I make any adjustments, that way I sure that all expenses have come in an I have a good balance.

That is all good and fine, but if your report is missing incomes from several months, the report is misleading. Thus my original comment to the OP, and a possible caution to others.

According to the release notes, this particular bug
is noted as being fixed in MLS 3.6.
Once the upgrade comes through in the
next few weeks, this problem should go away.

atticusewig wrote:According to the release notes, this particular bug
is noted as being fixed in MLS 3.6.
Once the upgrade comes through in the
next few weeks, this problem should go away.

I am not privy to those release notes because we still are not running 3.6.

What is the description of the bug? Which time periods are affected? Are they not going to notify the rest of us until after it is fixed in the next general release?

The release notes are on the Clerk Support page
under Apps, MLS Release Notes.
While a there isn't currently a MLS 3.6 release
to download (there is a beta, if you are part of that),
the notes are available already.

Last item under Financial Issue resolved reads:

"Resolved an issue on the Income and Expense Detail Report where selecting All for the date range on the Ward Missionary Fund Details by Subcategory section was not displaying all transactions."

It sure is annoying to discover it on your own when other people already know about it.