Moving Beginning balance from Missionary to Ward Mission

We currenty have a begining balance in Missionary. that was input when the system migrated to the new MLS system. However, we write all they checks and all deposits go to the ward mission account. So, I was wondering if anyone knows how to move this begining balance from the misison account to the ward mission.

This only causes problems when I creating reports and I end up getting two accounts with balances in them to get net amounts available for Ward Mission.

I tried to go back to the year and just change the beginging balance, but the system would not let me.

So, any suggestions, Thanks?

gholt wrote:We currenty have a begining balance in Missionary. that was input when the system migrated to the new MLS system. However, we write all they checks and all deposits go to the ward mission account. So, I was wondering if anyone knows how to move this begining balance from the misison account to the ward mission.

This only causes problems when I creating reports and I end up getting two accounts with balances in them to get net amounts available for Ward Mission.

I tried to go back to the year and just change the beginging balance, but the system would not let me.

So, any suggestions, Thanks?

It depends on how your categories are set up.

1. Some installations have a Missionary parent category and Ward Missionary is a subcategory of Missionary (Missionary:Ward Missionary). If this is the case, you can simply create a transfer (in MLS do Finance > Enter Transfer) and move the funds from Missionary to Missionary:Ward Missionary.
2. Most installations that I have seen, however, have Missionary and Ward Missionary as top-level categories. That makes it trickier, since you can't do a transfer across major categories, and you also can't write a check out of the Missionary category.

In this latter case, I would use the only mechanism I know of to create unbalanced transfers -- the Other Items area of the Reconcile process. This process would be most conveniently done during your next reconciliation.

• On the Other Items step of the Reconcile screen, click the Add Item button
• Specify a negative amount in the Missionary category equal to the current balance.
• Click the Add Item button again, and create a second transaction.
• Specify a positive amount in the Ward Missionary category to match the other transaction.
• Since Missionary and Ward Missionary are added together in the reconciliation process, these transactions will cancel out and your reconciliation will be unaffected, but you will have succeeded in moving the Missionary funds to Ward Missionary.

Thanks Alan. neither our Stake or SL could find a solution to this problem. Thanks again.

Is the Transfer instructions given in Alan_Brown's response in item #1 also appropriate to use if you want to reallocate an expense from a check to a different budget account? For example, the Young Women bought food for Girls Camp and then the Scouts took what they didn't use to Scout Camp. We entered the original check all to the Young Women's budget and now would like to move part of it to Scouts.

jandrus12 wrote:Is the Transfer instructions given in Alan_Brown's response in item #1 also appropriate to use if you want to reallocate an expense from a check to a different budget account? For example, the Young Women bought food for Girls Camp and then the Scouts took what they didn't use to Scout Camp. We entered the original check all to the Young Women's budget and now would like to move part of it to Scouts.

You could do a transfer from one Budget subcategory to another, but in my opinion it is better to edit the original Expense record in MLS to change the categories. That way the expense itself would accurately reflect what the funds were used for.

Either way, you should make some sort of note on the paper documentation for the check explaining what the new categorization of the expense is so that there is a proper audit trail of what you did.