Other Account Reconcilation Problem

I am a stake finance clerk and was visiting with a ward finance clerk today about an old reconciliation issue. Here is the short story: Long ago, about 30 members donated $35 each for a youth activity. The old clerk put the donations in a budget category. The new clerk went into each donation and changed the category to an other category. Now the ward has a $35 discrepancy between MLS and the CUFS in the other category - MLS has $35 more in the other account than the CUFS. I have totaled the recategorizations in MLS and the recategorizations appearing on the CUFS. The CUFS is $35 short. Because this is old, I have not been able to tie each MLS recategorization to the related CUFS recategorization, so I cannot tell which particular donation is causing the problem. I am thinking of just calling local unit support to see if they can make an adjustement on the CUFS. Any thoughts?

mlh78 wrote:I am a stake finance clerk and was visiting with a ward finance clerk today about an old reconciliation issue. Here is the short story: Long ago, about 30 members donated $35 each for a youth activity. The old clerk put the donations in a budget category. The new clerk went into each donation and changed the category to an other category. Now the ward has a $35 discrepancy between MLS and the CUFS in the other category - MLS has $35 more in the other account than the CUFS. I have totaled the recategorizations in MLS and the recategorizations appearing on the CUFS. The CUFS is $35 short. Because this is old, I have not been able to tie each MLS recategorization to the related CUFS recategorization, so I cannot tell which particular donation is causing the problem. I am thinking of just calling local unit support to see if they can make an adjustement on the CUFS. Any thoughts?

One issue that people are sometimes unaware of is that adjustments made in MLS do not automatically get reflected on the CUFS. Sometimes local unit support will have a question about a transaction and not make it until the unit supplies additional information. You might look through MLS messages received about that time to see if that was the case (if you still have the messages).

But it is also sometimes the case that an adjustment gets submitted to CHQ, but it doesn't get made on the CHQ side of things. Even if you can't connect the issue to a particular donation, it still seems like you can call local unit support and say something like: In the January 15 batch, 15 $35 donations were made and categorized as Budget. On February 8, all 15 donations were recategorized as Other. But on the February CUFS, only 14 recategorizing transactions appear.

With that kind of information, local unit support should be able to figure out if they simply need to make one more recategorization transaction on their side.

I'll second what alan_brown said. Check your messages. I've had issues where, if two transactions look similar, they will ignore one of them considering it a duplicate. When they do that, I have received a message in MLS.

Can you run an income and expense report on that budget category to identify all those who paid $35? You could then verify they had all been switched.

Unfortunately, budget will always reconcile to $0 so that's no help in making sure you actually switched them all.

crislapi wrote:
Can you run an income and expense report on that budget category to identify all those who paid $35? You could then verify they had all been switched.

I have run the income/expense reports for the budget categories, and they show that each donation was switched to other. I then attempted to match each switched donation from the income/expense report to the related adjustment on the various CUFSs (the switching was a prolonged affair). I cannot tell which MLS entry correspondes to the CUFS entries, but I can tell that the CUFS has one less $35 adjustment.

mlh78 wrote:I have run the income/expense reports for the budget categories, and they show that each donation was switched to other. I then attempted to match each switched donation from the income/expense report to the related adjustment on the various CUFSs (the switching was a prolonged affair). I cannot tell which MLS entry correspondes to the CUFS entries, but I can tell that the CUFS has one less $35 adjustment.

Are any of them very similar? For example, did a couple donate twice (once for each) under the same name? If so, CHQ might have ignored one of the category changes assuming it was a duplicate.

If I were you, this would be the point where I'd call clerk support. If you can tell them which donations to look at, they can tell you if they have been switched or not. You could call, message them through MLS or send an email to msrmail@ldsmail.net

Thanks folks. I called support and they found the missing recategorization on their end.