Inter Unit Transfer from Primary Budget

I'm the stake assistant clerk over finances and one of the ward clerks tried to transfer some money from the primary budget to another ward for some shared cub scout expenses. However, the only budget category in the drop down in source (from/left hand) side was Budget:Budget Allocations. All the Other categories and Ward Missionary categories were available as expected but none of the budget categories.

He did the transfer thinking he could then transfer from the primary category to the Budget:Budget Allocation category but there is still no option to transfer from Primary, even though this transfer is within the same ward.

I checked another ward's computer and it had the same problem; i.e. no budget categories available other than Budget:Budget Allocations for either the source or destination.

How can we properly show the reduction to the primary budget?

I'm no longer a Clerk, but I believe the only way to transfer money from one ward to another is the old fashioned way. The ward making the transfer writes a check to the other ward who then deposits it. We did this a lot when I was clerk I made up a simple form that served as a document for the bishop to approve the expense.

We used a separate form from the one the Stake assigned us to use for normal expense approvals due to the special nature of sharing expenses between wards. I can attach it if anyone is interested...

Thanks. MLS was recently updated (within the last year or so) to allow inter unit transfers. If this issue can't be resolved then we will indeed need to go back to transferring money the old fashioned way. I'd be interested in seeing what your form looks like.

danred99 wrote:How can we properly show the reduction to the primary budget?

When you made the transfer to the other ward, your Budget:Budget Allocation was reduced and theirs was increased. They then allocate the money to their Primary budget just as they would have if they had decided to budget for it in the first place. You reduce the allocation to your Primary budget as if you had not received the budget.

It doesn't make for a clean record of what happened. The MLS record shows that Budget Allocation was redistributed between wards, but not that it was due to a shared Primary expense. That's one of the reasons it may be better to write the check and send it to them.

We have limited inter-unit transfers to the stake allocation of budget and to the Other account, where you can transfer from a subaccount to the main Other account, then do the inter-unit transfer, then transfer in the new unit from the main Other account to the subaccount.

But the Budget category does not lend itself to that level of accounting in MLS.

danred99 wrote:I'd be interested in seeing what your form looks like.

Please see attached. I created it in excel and exported to a .pdf for printing at the church. I don't think they are using this form anymore - it has been a couple of years since I was clerk.

The other ward's clerk and I worked this out to make our life easier for shared expenses. When they moved the singles branch into our building, we added them for library and sacrament items, etc. This made it easy for one ward to "bill" another for part of a shared expense. This form linked to the other unit(s) in case an auditor wanted to investigate the original expense.

There are 2 forms on one page.

Sorry about my newbie on attaching forms to this forum. The .pdf is at the top and the excel is at the bottom...