Budget rollover and previous year receipts

I have a hard time getting people to turn in their receipts before year end, so I've been getting hundreds of dollars of receipts for 2017 that are now coming out of 2018's budget. Is there a way that i'm not aware of to "back-date" a check for the previous year when stuff like this happens in January for the previous year's budget? Or does it not matter because what I had left from 2017 just rolls over? I find the MLS software not always to be the clearest about this.

thanks

One of the things that irks me about church finances is there's two meanings to "budget". There the set of accounts and then there's the spending plan. They're two different things, but anyone handing one is involved in the other.

Unless something has changed, you can't backdate the expense. IIRC, the left over amounts in the accounts get swept into a single category. I think what you could do is do a transfer from that account into the budget sub-account charged so it doesn't impact this year's spending plan.

No, there is no way to back date a check for a previous year. But unused budget does carry over so you do still have the budget funds to cover the expenses. The tricky thing is to decide how to best track these expenses.

I've used a couple methods and both have positives and negatives.

1. You can put each expense in the category you would have used the previous year (e.g. Young Mens, Young Womens, ect) and then increase the amount allocated to that budget for this year to include an appropriate amount carried over. This keeps accurate track of the correct category for each expense but it distorts the amount of budget the organization has for the year. But as long as you communicate to each organization clearly that some of the budget is covering expenses from last year that can be OK.
2. You can create a separate category (I call it Prior Year Expenses) and put these expenses there. This way the budgets for each organization shows only expenses for the current year and the budget represents the amount they have for just that year. The disadvantage is that expenses from multiple categories are bunched together so if you're going back to see what expenses happened in a prior year (for planning purposes for instance) it's harder to do.

russellhltn wrote:IIRC, the left over amounts in the accounts get swept into a single category.

That's not quite accurate. All the budgets get reset to 0 at the beginning of the year but any surplus is added to the amount you can then allocated to each category when you set the next year's budget.

russellhltn wrote:I think what you could do is do a transfer from that account into the budget sub-account charged so it doesn't impact this year's spending plan.

You can't do a transfer but you can just allocate the extra amount when setting the budget.

I have been telling the ward council to not worry about their budgets. No ward budget funds have been lost. The MLS budgeting process is like a home budget, and there is room for slippage. Don't worry -- Be happy.

I’ve taken to telling folks that the deadline to submit receipts is two weeks before the new year. Invariably, there’s stragglers, but the manage to hit the current year’s budget for the most part instead of the next year’s.