Bishop's Review List

The bishop's wife requested reimbursement for expenses incurred for a Church activity. The ward clerk submitted the expense and receipt. A bishopric counselor approved reimbursement of the expenses. The reimbursement issued electronically. Now, the transaction is on the bishop's review list. LCR does not apparently allow anyone other than the bishop to click the reviewed button. Is there a procedure for referring the review function to someone else, like the stake president?

Handbook 34.5.7 requires the bishop or branch president to approve all expenses. If he or a member of his family are the payee, two other authorized persons must also approve the payment.

The ward clerk and the bishopric counselor were the other two approvers in the case cited above.

I've been serving as a bishop for two years, but I am not one of the tech people from the church, so I'm willing to be corrected if I am wrong. My experience has been that there are two steps to processing the reimbursements. First, two people need to approve the expense--either two members of the bishopric or a bishopric member and a clerk. The person approving the expense cannot be a payee of the expense. If the bishop was not one of the approvers, then he must also do a final review, even if he or a family member was a payee. So, in your case, the bishop should just go ahead and review the expense and click the "Reviewed" button.

I'm actually glad that I always get to do a final review because I know that I'm the one that is going to have to face the stake auditor every six months and I want to be able to see with my own eyes that the clerks and counselors filled out the expenses correctly.

A separate but related issue that sometimes comes up is whether or not the stake president needs to review an expense in which the payee is the bishop or a relative. No, the stake president only needs to review it if the bishop is the payee of fast offering assistance. If it's just a reimbursement for an expense, then it would just need to be reviewed by a bishopric counselor and a clerk (or two counselors) and then, as always, the bishop himself needs to do a final review.