Tithing Declaration for members who have moved

I'll preface this by saying that we are a new bishopric so I've probably missed something somewhere. We are trying to finish out tithing settlement. When I go to enter the tithing declarations, it still shows the names of nearly 50 members who have moved out of the ward or are deceased. I've doubled checked and their records are no longer in our ward. What do I do with these former members and their tithing status?

Thanks,
Joel

There should be a category for "no longer in ward".

Where would I find that category? I don't see anything on the Tithing Declarations section.

What are the choices you can make?

Some of those names may need to be associated with membership records. I'm not sure if you can do that if they're no longer in the ward.

joelrossc wrote:I've doubled checked and their records are no longer in our ward.

If you are certain that their actual membership records are no longer in your ward, you should not be able to declare their tithing status. There used to be a drop down selection "not a member of the ward" (or similar) that you could use.

I haven't been into that section of MLS is a while, so I do not know what is there this year.

If the selection is not there, then perhaps you have to change the donor's status.

I believe that the bishop is responsible to declare the status for all members of the ward as of the end of the year. It's possible that the list just hasn't been calculated and frozen since it isn't the end of the year yet. I'm not exactly sure how that works. I've never been directly involved with setting the declarations until this year.

russellhltn wrote:What are the choices you can make?

Some of those names may need to be associated with membership records. I'm not sure if you can do that if they're no longer in the ward.

My options are Undeclared, Full-Tithe, Part-Tithe, Non-Tithe, Exempt.

eblood66 wrote:I believe that the bishop is responsible to declare the status for all members of the ward as of the end of the year. It's possible that the list just hasn't been calculated and frozen since it isn't the end of the year yet. I'm not exactly sure how that works. I've never been directly involved with setting the declarations until this year.

I'm not sure either. We have had other records move out and the names were removed from the list. I can't figure out why some go and some stay.

joelrossc wrote:I can't figure out why some go and some stay.

I'm guessing the ones that went were connected to a membership record. So once it moved out on the membership side, it knew not to show it to you on the finance side.

Sometimes new members will donate to a ward before their records arrive. In that case, a donor record is created, but not connected to the membership. No one thinks to connect them later.

When I was involved in entering the tithing declaration information in MLS I noticed that if you enter anything in the "notes" column then you aren't required to enter a status. Otherwise, MLS won't allow you to "finish" the report without those missing declarations. So, in other words, we could enter "Moved out of Ward" in the notes column and that was that.

That may be one answer, but I find it odd there's no instructions on what to do. I still think there may be a disconnect between the donor record and the membership record that's the root problem.