Reconciling Check Adjustments

I erroneously charged some expenses to the Other:Stake and Telephone Services category. I went back into the original checks issued and changed the categories to Budget. Now those adjustments show up on my financial statement in the 'budget' and 'other' categories and I am out of balance. How do I fix this?

sgoodrich wrote:I erroneously charged some expenses to the Other:Stake and Telephone Services category. I went back into the original checks issued and changed the categories to Budget. Now those adjustments show up on my financial statement in the 'budget' and 'other' categories and I am out of balance. How do I fix this?

The adjustments in MLS will show up with the same date as the original expenses. But the category adjustments will not show up on the Church Unit Financial Statement until the month in which the adjustments were made.

The question I have, is what did you do to reconcile the month for which the adjustments were made? Because you must have done something then, since you would have had transactions dated in the original expense month that would not have shown up in that month's CUFS. Did you create one or more Temporary Items to balance that month? That would have been the correct action back then. If so, you should simply check off those Temporary Items as cleared for the month you are now reconciling, since those adjustment transactions have now appeared on a statement.

If you did something else, it may well be that something else that is causing you to be out of balance now, and you would need to reverse that transaction.

The only actions I took were to open up the original check and change the category from Other:S&WT to Budget. Should I have done something else?

I think the problem may be due to the fact that the Other:S&WT category is a reimbursable category, and I am probably not able to add money back in. Does this seem right? The money seems to have posted to our Other category instead of Other:S&WT.

sgoodrich wrote:The only actions I took were to open up the original check and change the category from Other:S&WT to Budget. Should I have done something else?

Well, then maybe you can help me understand the timing of these issues.

• What month was associated with the original expenses?
• In what month did you make the corrections?
• For what month's statement did the corrections appear? (should be the same as the last answer)
• Had you already reconciled the month of the original expenses when you made the adjustments?

sgoodrich wrote:I think the problem may be due to the fact that the Other:S&WT category is a reimbursable category, and I am probably not able to add money back in. Does this seem right? The money seems to have posted to our Other category instead of Other:S&WT.

I suppose that's possible, but you can't tell that distinction from the Summary section of the CUFS. You would have to look at the Detail section and see if there are any associated sweep transactions.

The original expenses were from various months beginning in May 2009.

I made all the corrections in November 2009.

The adjustments appeared on the November 2009 statement.

I had reconciled through October 2009 when the adjustments were made.

Alan_Brown wrote:

sgoodrich wrote:I think the problem may be due to the fact that the Other:S&WT category is a reimbursable category, and I am probably not able to add money back in. Does this seem right? The money seems to have posted to our Other category instead of Other:S&WT.

I suppose that's possible, but you can't tell that distinction from the Summary section of the CUFS. You would have to look at the Detail section and see if there are any associated sweep transactions.

Now that I understand the timing, that is sounding more plausible. Whoever made the correction at CHQ might have credited Other:S&WT without creating the corresponding sweep debits. If your examination of the Detail section of the CUFS confirms this, then you would reconcile November's CUFS by creating a Temporary Item for the pending debit of Other. You would need to call Local Unit Support to work this out, and they would create a transaction that would show up on your January CUFS. You would carry the Temporary Items forward for December's reconciliation, and then check them off as you reconcile January's CUFS.

I spoke with CHQ about this issue. We found that when I made the check adjustments through view/update expenses, it de-selected the checks in the reconciliation reports. I went back to the various reports and re-selected the checks. That seemed to balance everything out. Does anyone have any more insight on this?

sgoodrich wrote:I spoke with CHQ about this issue. We found that when I made the check adjustments through view/update expenses, it de-selected the checks in the reconciliation reports. I went back to the various reports and re-selected the checks. That seemed to balance everything out. Does anyone have any more insight on this?

Thanks for reporting back on the resolution of the issue. That really does explain everything. Clearly if you haven't checked off both expenses and associated transfers on the Reconcile screen, it's not going to balance. I'm sorry I didn't think of such a basic troubleshooting step earlier, but at least you got the help you needed.