How to manage money in stake Family History Center?

Our stake is considering changing the way we manage the family history center funds. For many years a good brother managed things with an old system called REFIS but now we are supposed to switch to a special "MLS finance only" program. There seems to be another option and that is just running the finances in the stake (or a designated ward) "other account." I'm not sure that would help or just create new problems.
Does anyone have any experiences on the pros and cons with these options? Likewise, is there some way to simplify the need for frequent trips to the bank for just a few dollars each month? Thanks for any ideas.
Jim Franckum
stake clerk - Loveland Colorado

While I'm sure you'll receive some thoughtful replies here - most likely from the stake clerk point of view, I think you would receive more responses by posting the question in the Yahoo groups FHCNET. This is a unofficial email list primarily for FHC Directors. I'm sure they'll give you good insights into both methods.

Franckum wrote:Our stake is considering changing the way we manage the family history center funds. For many years a good brother managed things with an old system called REFIS but now we are supposed to switch to a special "MLS finance only" program. There seems to be another option and that is just running the finances in the stake (or a designated ward) "other account." I'm not sure that would help or just create new problems.
Does anyone have any experiences on the pros and cons with these options? Likewise, is there some way to simplify the need for frequent trips to the bank for just a few dollars each month? Thanks for any ideas.

Our stake has always held the FHC funds. The FHC just collects nickels and dimes for the most part, and monthly or so they give them to someone in the stake presidency and those funds are deposited as part of our normal deposit process for the stake. The expenses are occasional paper and toner, diskettes, CD Holders, etc.

There's a lot less activity in the FHC than most of the stake budget categories, so it's hardly any burden, since we're already set up to make deposits, write checks, fill out reimbursement forms, etc. Everything goes through the Other account and it works just fine. We've never used REFIS or the finance-only version of MLS, so I can't comment on those options, but I can't imagine why either the FHC or the stake would choose to do that in our situation.

Our Family History Center stopped charging for copies and diskettes and we just pay for them out of our budget. It only amounted to a couple hundred dollars per year and eliminated all the problems of daily logs and multiple people running a petty cash box. We don't even charge for film rentals. We represent 5 stakes and each Stake contributes to our FHC budget. It works much better. So our only transactions are from the check book for supplies, we don't collect dimes and nickels for supplies any longer, we just cover them in the budget like the Ward library does.