Tithing Statement vs Donor Statement

Can someone explain why data will appear on the Donor Statement, but not on the Tithing Statement, in the Tithing Settlement section of MLS? The church recently sent out an email to clerks on how to fix this for a particular member, but didn't explain why. I found a couple of these, but short of going individually through every Tithing Settlement file and ever Donor Statement file, I don't know how you would catch the problem. But why does it occur? And is there a way to avoid the problem?

rexgj wrote:Can someone explain why data will appear on the Donor Statement, but not on the Tithing Statement, in the Tithing Settlement section of MLS?

A donor record is created in MLS for each person or organization that makes any payment to a Church unit. This permits non-members to make donations as well as for members to make donations to units in which their records are not kept. It is possible for a member to make a donation but the donation record is not linked to a member number. One such example is when a member moves into a unit and makes a donation before their record arrives. The donation record and the membership record must be linked once the member record is available in the unit. Until then, the donor statement and the tithing statement may not correlate for all the member donations. There is more information for donor records at the LDSTech Wiki articles Donor records and Tithing Settlement and in the MLS Help.

Well stated.

I'd point you to a good scenario hereand a little discussion about the donor, payee and membership databases here.