Other Authorized Member Financed Activities Issue

I am the District Auditor helping a clerk in one of the branches. In this particular branch there are several "Other Authorized Member Financed Activities" accounts that I see as inappropriate because they are obsolete, example "Friends of Scouting 2013". On the mid year audit the clerk said he was going to zero out all of these obsolete accounts and delete them. When I did the year end audit last week I found that these accounts were still there with funds in them, but the funds were different amounts (less and more) than during the mid year audit. The clerk told me that he did in fact zero out all of the accounts after the mid year audit and has no idea how funds got back into them. In fact he told me that he did not know the purpose of these accounts. I directed him to the help section at https://www.lds.org/help/support/other- ... y?lang=eng and let him know the purpose of these accounts is for short term pass-through funds gained through activities like fund raising. He then told me that he had no idea how to even put funds into these accounts. Since as an auditor I do not have access to MLS and do not know the process to put funds into these accounts please let me know how this is done and if there has been anyone with this experience with funds showing up in these accounts unexpectedly without the clerk knowing about it. Any help would be appreciated.

The clerk needs to run a report that shows all the transactions on that account. That would show where the funds came from/went to.

My knee-jerk thought is that someone made a donation to "Friends of Scouting" on their paper donation slip and the clerk doing the weekly data entry put it in "Friends of Scouting 2013". There is no automation (such as from on-line donations) that would be able to place anything in that account. Some clerk did that. Just maybe not the one you were talking to.

The only other thought is that perhaps a check got canceled - which might have returned money to that account.

Once we get these accounts zeroed out how do we go about deleting them?

I don't think you can delete them per se, but you should be able to deactivate them - that will prevent any donations from being added or checks written on that account.

evlarson wrote:Once we get these accounts zeroed out how do we go about deleting them?

Hide them so that they do not display. After they are not used for the financial retention period for your country, they will be deleted automatically.

Can you outline the steps it takes to hide them so that I can advise the clerk I am working with? Thanks.

evlarson wrote:Can you outline the steps it takes to hide them so that I can advise the clerk I am working with? Thanks.

I'm interested in learning how to hide the Other accounts, too.

lajackson wrote:

evlarson wrote:Once we get these accounts zeroed out how do we go about deleting them?

Hide them so that they do not display. After they are not used for the financial retention period for your country, they will be deleted automatically.

How can I check the retention period for my country? Also how do you go about hiding them?

evlarson wrote:How can I check the retention period for my country? Also how do you go about hiding them?

I'm not aware of any list available. For the US it's 3 years but the current year. For other areas, if you know contact information for your area administration office they may be able to tell you. There is some information in the comments section of the help center article on filing expenses but there is no guarantee that those are correct and current.

To hide the category in MLS select the Finance > Budget > Add/Update Categories menu option, expand the option for Other and then Authorized Member Financed Activities, select the category in question and uncheck the Active checkbox. This will hide the category from the list shown when processing donations. For reports it will hide the category if there are no transactions for the time period of the report. But, for example, it will still show up in the Finance Income and Expense Reports for the current year if there have been any transactions in the category during the current year.

For the US, it's 3 years plus the current year. Right now it's 2017, so anything before 2014 can be discarded. (2014, 2015, 2016 being the 3 years.)

I'm not sure what it is for other countries. I thought it was five years plus current, but I'm seeing reports of 10 for Europe and 7 for New Zealand. It's all dependent on local laws.