Question about adjustments made to tithing

Last week when I entered the tithing in we had a bit of a unique situation come up, I entered the tithing in the category that I figured I should but after talking about it to my Stake Clerk he mentioned that the amount should've gone into another category and that it isn't a big deal to change it.

I go in today and change that individual's tithing slip so that the one category became zero and the other one was increased and that was that. However, when I checked afterwards I noticed that the slip had now become out of balance with the box stating 'difference.' My tithing slip was now over by $40 instead of staying the same. I thought I maybe had made a mistake entering the adjustment so I made adjustment again, looked at it afterwards and now the slip was over by $80 and the batch report was now off by $80 as well.

After thinking about it, I thought perhaps it stays incorrect on my computer until someone from SLC makes the change. So I'm curious if that is indeed the case because all I was doing was moving the amount from one category to another. The amounts were correct.

19nazzy wrote:Last week when I entered the tithing in we had a bit of a unique situation come up, I entered the tithing in the category that I figured I should but after talking about it to my Stake Clerk he mentioned that the amount should've gone into another category and that it isn't a big deal to change it.

I go in today and change that individual's tithing slip so that the one category became zero and the other one was increased and that was that. However, when I checked afterwards I noticed that the slip had now become out of balance with the box stating 'difference.' My tithing slip was now over by $40 instead of staying the same. I thought I maybe had made a mistake entering the adjustment so I made adjustment again, looked at it afterwards and now the slip was over by $80 and the batch report was now off by $80 as well.

After thinking about it, I thought perhaps it stays incorrect on my computer until someone from SLC makes the change. So I'm curious if that is indeed the case because all I was doing was moving the amount from one category to another. The amounts were correct.

From your description of the actions you took to correct the donation category I can not tell if you followed the correct procedures. You may want to review the procedures in the Question and Answerssection of the Donations page at the LDSTech Wiki. If you followed those procedures all should be well.

jdlessley wrote:From your description of the actions you took to correct the donation category I can not tell if you followed the correct procedures. You may want to review the procedures in the Question and Answerssection of the Donations page at the LDSTech Wiki. If you followed those procedures all should be well.

Yeah I followed that. I had two items in the Other area when just one of them should've had the entire cost. I just thought it was weird that the amount of the tithing slip increased when all I did was change x amount to 0.00 and added x to the other one.

19nazzy wrote:Yeah I followed that. I had two items in the Other area when just one of them should've had the entire cost. I just thought it was weird that the amount of the tithing slip increased when all I did was change x amount to 0.00 and added x to the other one.

I don't know anything about any of this, but I do have a guess at why it may be increasing each time. Perhaps instead of changing the values to $0, you were supposed to do a negative dollar amount in order to truly balance? It appears you are dealing with increments of $40, so perhaps it's -$40?

Somebody with financial experience should probably verify if my statements have any validity whatsoever. :rolleyes:

mkmurray wrote:I don't know anything about any of this, but I do have a guess at why it may be increasing each time. Perhaps instead of changing the values to $0, you were supposed to do a negative dollar amount in order to truly balance? It appears you are dealing with increments of $40, so perhaps it's -$40?

Somebody with financial experience should probably verify if my statements have any validity whatsoever. :rolleyes:

No, that really doesn't make sense. You're dealing here with a donation, where all amounts are positive. When you make an adjustment, you may make a number smaller than it was, but you would never enter a negative amount.

After the adjustment has been made, the Review step of the donation batch will show the original donation, and then immediately below that a line that shows the adjustment. That line will show something like -$40 in the Tithing column and +$40 in the Fast Offering column. But that is simply the result of the adjustment -- there is nowhere in the donation batch that you would ever enter the -$40.

So I would ask 19nazzy, what does the adjustment line look like in the Review panel of View/Update Donation? Does it have a -$40 in one column, a +$40 in another column, and a 0 (it actually shows in MLS as blank) in the Total column?

Alan_Brown wrote:So I would ask 19nazzy, what does the adjustment line look like in the Review panel of View/Update Donation? Does it have a -$40 in one column, a +$40 in another column, and a 0 (it actually shows in MLS as blank) in the Total column?

I'm going from memory but I do not believe so. I know for sure there are no negatives. And each adjustment has $40 in the total column and as my Batch totals are $80 more than what actually in the deposit, I assumed that they were adding to total for some reason. In the review panel with the exception of the *** and note that mentions that is an adjustment, it really looks like those were additional donations.

The thing is the adjustment report that it printed out looked correct but the totals in the computer do not. I know for sure that when I go to edit that specific donation, it has the red 'difference' box there showing that the cheque amount does not equal the totals on the left.

In my other section:
Category X shows as $40 as it should.
Category Y shows as $80 when I know I changed it to zero.

Category X & Y were both originally $20 and I made the initial adjustment as Category X to $40 and Y to $0. When I reviewed it I had Category X as $40 and Category Y as $40 and my total balance was off by $40. I then went in with the 2nd adjustment and kept Category X the same but changed Y to $0. Upon reviewing after, Category X remained $40 but Category Y is now $80. And my total batch amount is off by an additional $80.

My question was if it will stay this way until SLC makes the adjustment? At first I was worried about it screwing up the deposit but as it was made on Sunday, it would've cleared by now.

19nazzy wrote:My question was if it will stay this way until SLC makes the adjustment? At first I was worried about it screwing up the deposit but as it was made on Sunday, it would've cleared by now.

CHQ will not actually adjust any deposit amounts in MLS, so it will stay this way forever unless you can fix it. CHQ has its own record of what your MLS transmitted to them. This will include:

• The original transmission of the donation batch. You should have the Transmission Report that will tell you exactly what the total amount of the batch was.
• Any adjustments. These are sent as MLS Messages, so you should be able to go into the "Sent Messages" section of "Messages" and find one or more messages with a subject of "MLS Adjustment". The message will list the batch reference number and date, and then for each category it will list the old amount, new amount, and change. The sum of the changes should be zero.

Based on the original batch transmission and adding in any adjustments, CHQ will have its record of what the batch total is, by category. This is what will be sent to you on the CUFS for May, and you will not be able to reconcile if it doesn't match MLS.

I'm having a hard time understanding how a slip could get out of balance. MLS won't let you adjust a slip and save the change if the left side (donation categories) and right side (funds received) don't match. I assume you are simply editing the existing slip and not clicking either the "New Slip" or "New Donation" buttons.

You may want to ask another clerk in your ward, or your stake clerk or stake financial clerk for assistance. These things are much easier to track down with a fresh set of eyes seeing what's actually happening in MLS.

Alan_Brown wrote:I'm having a hard time understanding how a slip could get out of balance. MLS won't let you adjust a slip and save the change if the left side (donation categories) and right side (funds received) don't match. I assume you are simply editing the existing slip and not clicking either the "New Slip" or "New Donation" buttons.

It let me with no issues, the only thing it prompted me to do was print out a new batch report. And I clicked the save donation on the right side of the slip, not the New Slip or New Donation buttons.

Alan_Brown wrote:You may want to ask another clerk in your ward, or your stake clerk or stake financial clerk for assistance. These things are much easier to track down with a fresh set of eyes seeing what's actually happening in MLS.

Yeah. I sent an additional message to CHQ basically explaining the same thing that I did here. I'll have a talk with my Stake Clerk too. It's just weird, the adjustment reports I printed out look absolutely correct but the MLS totals seem incorrect.

I'll see if they get back to me and go from there. As I said before, it's not a huge deal if this takes some time to fix the amount would've cleared into the bank already so it's just some issues on our end to complete. We just had some issues from months before I was called just fixed on our last statements.

19nazzy wrote:I go in today and change that individual's tithing slip so that the one category became zero and the other one was increased and that was that. However, when I checked afterwards I noticed that the slip had now become out of balance with the box stating 'difference.'

When you try to save a slip that has a difference, you get a pop-up error like this:



After making an adjustments you should also have to deal with another pop-up like this:




When you make an adjustment, the review screen will have an entry like this one from the test database:

The three asterisks indicates the previous donation slip that no longer counts.

I am still confused about how and where MLS is showing you are out of balance.

At the very worst, your database may be corrupted. I would get the stake clerk to check this error to be sure.

Another possibility is that MLS has become corrupted some how. The easiest way to fix that is to download and do a clean installation of MLS.

Another possibility that might explain what you described is that you have a computer with components that are beginning to fail.

jbh001 wrote:When you try to save a slip that has a difference, you get a pop-up error like this:

That never came up for me. And really it shouldn't as I never added more than what was originally there. I'll explain the 'out of balance' thing down in a bit.

jbh001 wrote: After making an adjustments you should also have to deal with another pop-up like this:

That I did get and entered my reason.

jbh001 wrote: When you make an adjustment, the review screen will have an entry like this one from the test database:

The three asterisks indicates the previous donation slip that no longer counts.

I do have the 3*** and the name/reason in the next box. I do not have a negative total where the -180.39 is. However, I do not believe I should as my error wasn't in the total amount, just the wrong category. Where the $219.61 is, I have the category entries there that I did make the changes to, but they are the original ones. X says $20, Y says $20 when I changed it to X $40, Y $0. And then where the $39.22 is, mine says $40.

Now because I made another adjustments, there are two of those same entries in the list. So mine looks like:
000|John Smith|$VVV.00||X $20/Y $20|$ZZZ
***|John Smith|$VVV.00||X $20/Y $20|$40
***|John Smith|$VVV.00||X $20/Y $20|$40
--------
Today I double checked the adjustment report that printed out and indeed it says that:
Old:
X $20
Y $20

New:
X $40
Y $0

Which is exactly what I want. But it wasn't showing that in my review screen as X/Y still both showed $20 as indicated above.

jbh001 wrote:I am still confused about how and where MLS is showing you are out of balance.

When I click on John Smith's receipt it shows me:
Tithing/Fast Offering/Etc.. Categories: Correct
Other: Is higher than it should be. - The adjusted amounts appear to have added themselves into the Y category when I have changed them to zero, twice!

So my total's for his tithing slip (left side of the screen) are more than what he actually paid (right side of the screen). I have the box on the lower right hand screen in red that says -$80.00 difference. It appears to me, that the total value of the adjustments (-$20 from one, +$20 to the other, twice) are placing themselves in Category Y for an unexplained reason.

On the batch report that it printed out after my adjustments, the total deposit amount on the first one increased by $40, and increased by another $40 after the 2nd adjustment. Thus currently, my total deposit report for that week is $80 more than it actually was.

jbh001 wrote:At the very worst, your database may be corrupted. I would get the stake clerk to check this error to be sure.

Another possibility is that MLS has become corrupted some how. The easiest way to fix that is to download and do a clean installation of MLS.

Another possibility that might emplain what you described is that you have a computer with components that are beginning to fail.

I guess those are possible but this is the only error that I see. I did my April reconiliation and everything was fine. I did both tithing/expenses today and everything looks fine. The only thing I can see is that something is messed up when trying to do an adjustment [edit: See my next post]. Unfortunately my Stake Clerk is away for a little while (of all the times!), which is why I came here to see if anyone had seen something like this before.

There is something that possibly may have messed things up. When I initially entered my first adjustment I brought up the other category and did this:
Category X $20
Category Y $20
-->
Instead of making Category X $40/Category Y $0, I wasn't sure if I should just change the totals or if that would put things out of whack so I changed category Y to category X:
Category X $20
Category X $20
---
I received a pop-up mentioning something about having duplicate categories and do you want MLS to combine the amounts into 1? I said sure and then it did it. I then finished up the process and when looking at the adjustment report, as I said above it did say:
Old:
X $20
Y $20

New:
X $40
Y $0

Which was exactly how I wanted it, so I assumed the combining thing it did was fine.

Perhaps there's a bug in the system when someone has the same two categories with an amount in them when there's an adjustment being made that it does this? To be fair, what I did is probably not a very common procedure at all. If you still have that test data in front of you, perhaps you could try the same thing I did to see if the error is replicated?

I have tried to replicate the error in the test data base and have been unsuccessful.

You should have also encountered a pop-up like this one:


Here is what the batch report in the test data base looked like when I tried to replicate your scenario Before the adjustment:


And after:


I created an Other:X category and an Other:Y category just for this test, but that detail did not show up the screen print above. Here is what the result looked like from a previous test before creating those categories. Other:Humanitarian aid was my Other:X, and Other:Member items and magazines was my Other:Y in the screen print below:



I hope this is helpful in determining what happened, instead of just adding confusion.

jbh001 wrote:The three asterisks indicates the previous donation slip that no longer counts.

Correction: they indicate how and where the original slip was adjusted.

Yet another problem with the test database is that some slips come up already out of balance, as in the following examples.

Example 1 (funds do not balance slip).


Example 2 (funds only)


If this is also what you have been experiencing and have been trying to describe, I would highly suspect that your database got corrupted somehow. At any rate, this is at least a problem to bring to the attention of the stake clerk, and more likely something that will eventually be escalated to Clerk Support to resolve.

Part of my reasoning for this is that the test database contains some obsolete categories, such as Missionary instead of Ward Missionary and General Missionary. If your live database has those also, there might be something that Clerk Support needs to update/upgrade with your database.

jbh001 wrote:I have tried to replicate the error in the test data base and have been unsuccessful.

You should have also encountered a pop-up like this one:

I did indeed and when I saw it, it looked correct. The adjustment report looked similarly.

I hope this is helpful in determining what happened, instead of just adding confusion.

Oh, not only did it not add to the confusion I think I now *may* know what the issue is. Our reports look completely different.

We both have the *** and the person's name/note. The tithing and fast offering on my are empty as well which they should be on the adjustment. However, here is where our reports differ. It appears to me that your 'Additional Donations' for your adjustment look like just that, an adjustment. Mine doesn't. Your Humanitarian Aid (X) and Member Items & Magazines (Y) show that you added $20.00 to X, and minused $20 from Y (which is what I thought I did).

On mine however, it has:
$20.00 - Category X
$20.00 - Category Y
And that's it.

No minus, no $0.

Also, your total box is empty next to it. Mine says $40 in it. [Just as a note, keep in mind I've got 2 adjustments that look exactly like this]

Currently on 'John Smith's' slip, the Category X is correct. It has $40. Category Y however, has $80. It now *appears* to me that the system has took my 2 adjustments and turned them into actual donations for the Category Y. Which would be why my slip is off $80 and the batch total has $80 more than it should.

The reason though is beyond me. My notification:

was correct. And the printed adjustment report was correct.

jbh001 wrote: If this is also what you have been experiencing and have been trying to describe, I would highly suspect that your database got corrupted somehow. At any rate, this is at least a problem to bring to the attention of the stake clerk, and more likely something that will eventually be escalated to Clerk Support to resolve.

Part of my reasoning for this is that the test database contains some obsolete categories, such as Missionary instead of Ward Missionary and General Missionary. If your live database has those also, there might be something that Clerk Support needs to update/upgrade with your database.

It is *only* with this specific slip and I think I know the reason why as I mention in the above post. I think the system now thinks my adjustments were actual additions to his donation slip. It has the extra $80 on the left side but obviously not on the right side as the total amounts were originally entered correctly.