Membership Audit

I am a challenged stake clerk and am overwhelmed as I read the forum.

I read somewhere that the membership audit forms are on MLS. As I visited the stake computer yesterday, I went to the audit menu and did not see the promised membership audit option.

Has it been removed from the latest update? What now?

Many thanks for this forum.

Michael Klobas

The membership audits are only found on the individual unit computers. It is not on the stake computer. If you have a unit colocated with your stake building, stop by their computer and take a look at the audit. It has multiple steps that check everything from Priesthood, to leaders taking training lessons, and quite a few things in between. With a ward clerk that is keeping up to date, the audit takes about 15 - 20 minutes and is relatively painless.

Jim

I have a suggestion for the Membership Audit, I completed the first one yesterday in my Stake and when it came to Single Adults over 30 who are not married yet - could this be expanded to show YSA also, I know of a number of YSA (normally LA who are married but this has not been picked up locally) I know that it is a thing that i can keep chasing up on by following up with Ward Clerks but it would be useful if this could be chased up through the Audit as this once completed goes to the Stake President for review.

I am a ward membership clerk. We just completed our audit but there was no "save" button at the end like I am used to with MLS. In fact, all I could do was close the audit. How do we show it completed?

rketcheson wrote:I am a ward membership clerk. We just completed our audit but there was no "save" button at the end like I am used to with MLS. In fact, all I could do was close the audit. How do we show it completed?

On the last step (the "Summary") there is a Print button at the bottom left. This will print a form that summarizes the audit results and provides a place for the bishop and clerk to sign the form.

Note that the instructions at the beginning say that the stake representative should sign the form as well, but there is no signature line provided for him. He should sign it anyway.

Thank you, Brother Brown. We did print the sheets and sign them at audit time, it just didn't feel complete without the ability to click a button.

According to our instructions, the Stake Clerk is supposed to do an audit of the wards yearly membership report. If there is no stake report that compiles the wards report, are we supposed to visit each ward and look at their report? If so, what are we supposed to be sending electronically, or is that done when the ward does their report? Is there plans for a stake membership report?

halpotter wrote:According to our instructions, the Stake Clerk is supposed to do an audit of the wards yearly membership report. If there is no stake report that compiles the wards report, are we supposed to visit each ward and look at their report? If so, what are we supposed to be sending electronically, or is that done when the ward does their report? Is there plans for a stake membership report?

The Membership Audit is only at the ward level. According to the MLS 3.3 Release Notes:

When the Membership Audit is completed, click the Submit button. This will cause the results of the audit to be sent to Church headquarters for statistical purposes. However, clerks should still print the report that is taken to the stake president.

So the audit results are electronically submitted from each ward, and also printed. The printed results from each ward are given to the stake president.

I just attempted my first Membership Audit as the Stake Clerk. When we went through the audit checks first one was High Priests - The list showed Elders. When I went to Elders - The list was for perspective Elders. When I went to Aaronic Priesthood - There was nothing listed. When we got to Baptisms there was nothing listed either, but this ward had had at least two baptisms. I did not see where I could set a date range for the audit.

Did I miss something?

bsglover wrote:I just attempted my first Membership Audit as the Stake Clerk. When we went through the audit checks first one was High Priests - The list showed Elders. When I went to Elders - The list was for perspective Elders. When I went to Aaronic Priesthood - There was nothing listed. When we got to Baptisms there was nothing listed either, but this ward had had at least two baptisms. I did not see where I could set a date range for the audit.

Did I miss something?

The lists you are seeing are to prompt you to look for potential ordinances that were performed, but not properly recorded. So if someone was ordained a high priest, but it wasn't recorded, the most likely individuals in that situation are listed as elders. Similarly, those who were ordained elders but were not recorded properly are most likely listed as prospective elders.

If nothing was listed under Aaronic Priesthood, then that means that it doesn't look like there are unordained members whose ordinations might have been missed. The empty baptism list is not inconsistent with the fact that you had two baptisms -- it would only show people who are not recorded as baptized but seem from their age that perhaps they would have been.

I'm a fairly new membership clerk, and at the end of this last year, I printed IOS's for the members in the ward to review as they came to tithing settlement. We let members know that if their membership records (really, the individual ordinance summary sheet) showed anything incorrect, they should let me know and I'd get it corrected for them. A couple members found that the name of the person who ordained them to an office in the Melchizedek Priesthood was missing, but they had the date. They provided the missing info and I updated it, but I thought it was kind of odd to have more than one. So, I looked at all MP holder ordination info and found that we had several more members who were missing the information for the person who performed their last MP ordination (a few were High priests), and all happened in previous wards (our ward is pretty new). This doesn't seem normal to me...
Any idea for what could be the source of this missing data? I haven't done this long enough to know if MLS has issues like this, or if the information just needs to be refreshed from Church Headquarters, or if it's an issue of the information just not having been entered when the ordination was performed...
Anyone heard of this before?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming this information needs to be gathered and updated in MLS...
What should I do if a member doesn't remember who it was that ordained him to be an Elder or HP, but we have the date it happened?

I appreciate the help!

joshhi wrote:Anyone heard of this before?

Please see: Blank ordinance "performed by"

RussellHltn wrote:Please see: Blank ordinance "performed by"

Thanks for the link! That was really helpful!

It seems that after the membership audit is completed that the results are submitted to somewhere, HQ or area office it seems.

Is it possible to be able as Stake Clerk access to see all the collated membership audits results or even see this in the new audit portal?

It would be nice to get a view like the one for Quarterly reports showing all units and have something similar for the Membership audits results.

ssio wrote:It seems that after the membership audit is completed that the results are submitted to somewhere, HQ or area office it seems.

Yes, the membership audit results are transmitted from MLS. I assume they go to CHQ.

ssio wrote:Is it possible to be able as Stake Clerk access to see all the collated membership audits results or even see this in the new audit portal?

There is no "audit portal" for membership audits. If you're talking about LUFAS, the new financial auditing website, that's not really a possibility for membership audits, since membership audits and financial audits are conducted under the direction of entirely different departments of the Church.

But I agree that it would be a nice ability to see the audit results somewhere on LDS.org (or possibly in stake MLS, but since so much is moving to LDS.org, that seems like the more forward-looking place to put it).

There is a ward in my stake that has an exception that notes, "A person should not be sealed to a spouse before being a member of the Church for a year." The member involved was baptized on 5 Aug 1972. He and his wife drove to Salt Lake City from Ohio to be sealed at the Salt Lake Temple about a year later. They arrived in Salt Lake a few days before the one year anniversary. As they were on a somewhat tight schedule they petitioned the temple to be allowed to proceed with their sealing and permission was granted. They were sealed on 3 Aug 1973, two days prior to the one year anniversary of their baptism. Now this shows up as an exception, what should be done to rectify this problem so it does not show up every year as an exception.

bblimes wrote:There is a ward in my stake that has an exception that notes, "A person should not be sealed to a spouse before being a member of the Church for a year." The member involved was baptized on 5 Aug 1972. He and his wife drove to Salt Lake City from Ohio to be sealed at the Salt Lake Temple about a year later. They arrived in Salt Lake a few days before the one year anniversary. As they were on a somewhat tight schedule they petitioned the temple to be allowed to proceed with their sealing and permission was granted. They were sealed on 3 Aug 1973, two days prior to the one year anniversary of their baptism. Now this shows up as an exception, what should be done to rectify this problem so it does not show up every year as an exception.

See Handbook 1, 16.1.10. Pay attention to the section on ordinances performed before the appropriate age. This is a similar situation.

We have many exceptions to our Membership Audit but nowhere can I find where I can send an explanation to these exceptions. Please help!

cheb23 wrote:We have many exceptions to our Membership Audit but nowhere can I find where I can send an explanation to these exceptions. Please help!

What kind of exceptions? Don't post personal details, but you can describe the problem. If it was a case of a ordnance performed too soon, then Handbook 1, 16.1.10 would be your starting point.

cheb23 wrote:We have many exceptions to our Membership Audit but nowhere can I find where I can send an explanation to these exceptions. Please help!

The exceptions won't be reviewed one-by-one by anyone at headquarters – they are mainly for your own benefit, to highlight record-keeping areas of focus. Your stake might also be interested in seeing the exceptions so they can follow up and provide training. So, you don't need to send a specific explanation for each case (except to your bishopric or stake leaders, if they request that). Instead, work with the bishopric and ward council to resolve all of the ones you can, and ignore those that you are unable to fix for legitimate reasons.

I was wondering why there isn't a step by step guide to assist stake clerks direct ward clerk on how to do a membership audit (especially in a Stake challenged by distances of each Ward/Branch.) Even more frustrating is finding a interactive guide to use MLS.

The membership audit itself guides you through the process – although it's frustrating that you can't see an outline of the audit beforehand, it's intended to be simple enough that external instructions aren't needed. There is a basic introduction here:
https://www.lds.org/help/support/member ... t?lang=eng