Tithing Settlement

The new tithing settlement instructions are at the Official Communication Library for this year. There are some significant and interesting changes.

The requirement for the clerk to print out all of the donor statements one week prior to the beginning of tithing settlement is still there. But if you go into the Help Center under Tithing Settlement, there is an interesting note. If a member . . . has chosen to print his or her own statements from lds.org/donations, a Donor Statement of Contributions will not be included in the pre-generated statement link.

So this year I do not need to tell my clerk not to print my statement. If I print it first, he will not get it to print. I like that.

I like the other changes, too.

lajackson wrote:So this year I do not need to tell my clerk not to print my statement.

I just noticed something interesting in the Online Donations Settings. I don't know if it has been there or if it was just added during the upgrade last night.

There is a check box option that says "My financial statements do not need to be printed by my Ward."

I checked the box. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Great news! I just went in and checked the box as well.

Do you think "a member . . . has chosen to print his or her own statements" is triggered by the member printing any statement (for example, last year's statement), or by the member printing the current year statement, or simply by checking that box in settings? Or any combination of the above?

Also, another letter from a few days previous indicates that donation history will be available outside the United States (the letter was directed to leaders outside the U.S.) through the LDS.org Donations tool, by October 1st. It's not clear if the full Donations tool will be available outside the United States, but at least the history and reports for their donations will be!

sbradshaw wrote:Great news! I just went in and checked the box as well.

Do you think "a member . . . has chosen to print his or her own statements" is triggered by the member printing any statement (for example, last year's statement), or by the member printing the current year statement, or simply by checking that box in settings? Or any combination of the above?

I tried to print my YTD statement and that didn't set the option. I didn't try printing last year's tax statement.

The file under "Pre-Generated Donor Statements" for my ward is a statement from 2015, instead of the current (2016) year. Also, when trying to generate a statement under the "Individual Donor Statements" section, the files include members that have not made any donations. Anyone else with the same issues?

Schetselaar wrote:The file under "Pre-Generated Donor Statements" for my ward is a statement from 2015, instead of the current (2016) year.

2016 won't be available until after 15 October.

Schetselaar wrote:Also, when trying to generate a statement under the "Individual Donor Statements" section, the files include members that have not made any donations.

Donor reports for everyone, including those who have not made any donations, need to be made available to members so they can either confirm the record is complete or to identify any possible errors.

jdlessley wrote: 2016 won't be available until after 15 October.

I hope it's sooner than that. We have to pass our the statements the week before tithing settlement. What if we want to start it right on the 16th?

jdlessley wrote: Donor reports for everyone, including those who have not made any donations, need to be made available to members so they can either confirm the record is complete or to identify any possible errors.

I hope not. That would be an enormous amount of "blank" statements to hand out for me.

mfmohlma wrote:

jdlessley wrote: Donor reports for everyone, including those who have not made any donations, need to be made available to members so they can either confirm the record is complete or to identify any possible errors.

I hope not. That would be an enormous amount of "blank" statements to hand out for me.

It appears from the instructions that members with no contributions will not have statements included in the pre-generated statement link as well as those who have chosen to print their own statements.

mfmohlma wrote:

jdlessley wrote: 2016 won't be available until after 15 October.

I hope it's sooner than that. We have to pass our the statements the week before tithing settlement. What if we want to start it right on the 16th?

We usually hand out tithing statements as people come in for interviews, and they can review it as they wait. If you do that, it may be helpful to set their appointment time to 15 minutes before they actually go in to see the bishop.

sbradshaw wrote:We usually hand out tithing statements as people come in for interviews, and they can review it as they wait. If you do that, it may be helpful to set their appointment time to 15 minutes before they actually go in to see the bishop.

I like to review mine beforehand, so that during the 15 minutes the clerk can make the corrections. [grin]

Actually, that used to be the pattern. Now, with online donations there has been nothing to correct, so we spend the 15 minutes looking at my IOS and commenting on how a married family with lots of children moved here many years ago from a single student ward in Rexburg, Idaho, something my wonderful clerk cannot fix.

True, if there are mistakes it can be nice to get them corrected before your interview, but it's not required for corrections to be made before you declare your tithing status. They can just as easily be made after the interview or within the next few days.

It looks like if you tick the "My financial statements do not need to be printed by my Ward" option now it won't have any effect this year - the "Donor Statement of Contributions - 01 Nov 2016 - " document has already been generated so unless the file will be regenerated on a regular basis the statement is going to be printed. I also don't see anything online indicating that my records do not need to be printed.

aclawson wrote:It looks like if you tick the "My financial statements do not need to be printed by my Ward" option now it won't have any effect this year - the "Donor Statement of Contributions - 01 Nov 2016 - " document has already been generated so unless the file will be regenerated on a regular basis the statement is going to be printed. I also don't see anything online indicating that my records do not need to be printed.

This is the behavior we've noticed as well. We only became aware of the "opt out" setting after the Pre-Generated report was generated. We were hoping to announce over the pulpit that there is now a paperless option for Tithing Settlement. I'd even take a separate report of those who have opted out, and manually check boxes to generate a new report, simply to resolve the timing issue.

aclawson wrote:It looks like if you tick the "My financial statements do not need to be printed by my Ward" option now it won't have any effect this year - the "Donor Statement of Contributions - 01 Nov 2016 - " document has already been generated so unless the file will be regenerated on a regular basis the statement is going to be printed. I also don't see anything online indicating that my records do not need to be printed.

I put a note in our sacrament program encouraging people to check the box and then the statements got generated the day before people saw the note.

But I assume it will also affect whether tax documents are generated in January so I'm still encouraging members to check it if they don't need a paper copy.

Would it affect the generation of tax documents? Those still have to be signed by the bishop, no?

aclawson wrote:Would it affect the generation of tax documents? Those still have to be signed by the bishop, no?

The combined statements from CHQ in the last few years came with a signature by someone in SLC. The same is true for the one you can download from the donation page on lds.org. So I don't think the Bishop will have to sign them this year.

I see no reason why they would generate statements for those who say they will get theirs online.

Does that mean that any tithing paid after mid-October won't show up on their statement, even if their tithing settlement is in December? That seems strange to me – maybe they do regenerate the statements periodically, or if there are changes.

sbradshaw wrote:Does that mean that any tithing paid after mid-October won't show up on their statement, even if their tithing settlement is in December?

The report just generated is the one given to members as tithing settlement begins. If the member continues to donate and a new report is not generated, it will only show information to mid-October.

I am quite certain that new reports will be generated in January to cover the entire 2016 calendar year for tax purposes.

In addition to the check box at the Donation site, the tithing settlement instructions also said if a member generated their own statement, they would not be included in the group of statements generated by the clerk. As others have noticed, the current reports seem to have been generated before the change, so it is difficult to tell if the new policy actually has been implemented.

Is the pre-generated list of donations updated? I see the one for 2016, but it does not include any donations made during the month of October. If presented to members, they will wonder what happened to their most recent donations.

One alternative is to generate a new donor statement -- but that has no option to omit members who made no contributions or have selected to print their own statements (to emulate the "pre-generated" list.

rjhidaho wrote:Is the pre-generated list of donations updated? I see the one for 2016, but it does not include any donations made during the month of October. If presented to members, they will wonder what happened to their most recent donations.

It doesn't look like it, and it deceptively has the "through" date of 1 Nov. We handed most of ours out on Sunday so I'll see if anyone starts complaining. (If they do, I may just tell them to check their donation history online. )