EOY Tithing Discrepancy

I was contacted by our Stake Fin. Clerk regarding approx a $400 discrepancy in a report they run vs. what we have on our batch reports. This was an end of year 2009 report.

Is anyone familiar with the stake report he is referring to? As we only have access to our own records, I have nothing to compare our information with to see where they may be a difference (I assume it is probably a returned check or something like that).

I spent 60+ minutes on hold each of the past two Wednesday nights before I had to hang up so I wasn't able to ask HQ...

fletch wrote:I was contacted by our Stake Fin. Clerk regarding approx a $400 discrepancy in a report they run vs. what we have on our batch reports. This was an end of year 2009 report.

The stake clerk has a report that compares what your MLS submitted in batches during 2009, and what the bank received in actual deposits during the year (after adjustments by the bank and Church headquarters).

The difference is usually an item that went through the Other account (such as a bad check you mentioned) that was not resolved locally. The monthly reconciliations during 2009 would normally have caught something like this. The drill is to figure out where the bank/CHQ differs from MLS and get MLS back into sync again.

fletch wrote:I was contacted by our Stake Fin. Clerk regarding approx a $400 discrepancy in a report they run vs. what we have on our batch reports. This was an end of year 2009 report.

Is anyone familiar with the stake report he is referring to? As we only have access to our own records, I have nothing to compare our information with to see where they may be a difference (I assume it is probably a returned check or something like that).

The report and the reconciliation process are described in detail on the wiki under Deposit Transaction Report. I'm a stake financial clerk and very familiar with this process (and I wrote the wiki article). The stake financial clerk has enough detail at hand that he should be able to tell you precisely which batches and which categories for each batch are involved.

Basically, the stake financial clerk will be comparing the Deposit Transaction Report the stake receives from CHQ with the Batch Summary Report the ward submitted to the stake in January. The ward financial clerk may have to generate an updated BSR if adjustments have been made to last year's donation data.

An issue we had with this was related to when the tithing settlement report was completed and transmitted. One ward finished tithing settlement a few weeks early and submitted their report. Their transmitted totals therefore differed by the amount of the remaining weeks of 2009 (which hadn't been included in the first transmission). We retransmitted the report in 2010 and haven't heard anything since.

A similar issue may be caused by having added a batch in 2010 but backdating it to 2009. I'd start by running a new year end donation report (view/update donations and select previous year). If your total matches the stake total, you are good. You may need to retransmit the report.

Guys, thanks for all of the feedback! I re-ran a new BSR for the stake to look over again...