Caution when Comparing CUBS income & expense report Sunday

Just received this little tip and thought I'd post it here for those who are interested.

The instructions we received were to print among other things the Income & Expense report before the CUBS transition and then again after the CUBS transition and compare the results. These reports will NOT match if the unit has even a single unreconciled item before the transition to CUBS on the 17th of October (that means any missionary commitments or distribution center charges etc). You can still compare the reports but would have to take into consideration any unreconciled items that the unit has.

A potential "fix" might be to just compare the donations/expenses and wait until you receive the new ‘Unit Financial Report’ to deal with the Income & Expense discrepancies. The unreconciled items will be listed in the Action Items section of the statement. Take the appropriate/suggested action on the items that CUBS identifies in their reconciliation process.

crislapi wrote:Just received this little tip and thought I'd post it here for those who are interested.

... and I added a similar note to the wiki article Church Unit Banking Services (CUBS).

Ok, I just finished verifying all Stake donations (about 10 over 4 years) and expenses (a more respectable 1000 or so over the last 4 years. I have finally gotten them to match exactly. Here's what I've learned.

It appears that what the "conversion" did is essentially replace all the local financial data with CHQ's financial information. Check numbers, payee's and purpose now are exactly as they appeared on the CUFS. Because CHQ did not keep track of local sub-categories, all that information is gone.

At the stake level, we kept track of each ward's monthly expenses. It was a short-cut way to monitor their budget status. Because that information was purely local, we have lost all of it. However, that also artificially inflated our expense total in the pre-CUBS expenses report by over $320,000 (I printed out for all 4 years just to be safe).

Despite verifying monthly expenses for all 4 years using the SFS, I still found several credits that were not entered pre-CUBS, as well as many phone expenses (they were paid for by CHQ, so previous clerks just didn't enter them. We also didn't have the reimbursed Other category until more recently anyway)

All phone expenses now show up in the new category Reimbursed Expenses:Local Telephone Line. Most other expenses appear to have been placed in Budget:Administration, including DC charges.

All budget allocations for the past 4 years have been placed in Budget:Budget Allocations.

Credits I entered in the past now show up in the expenses screen.

One tip - if you printed your reports as PDF's AND have the full version of Adobe (NOT the reader), you can copy tables into excel. You do have to do it one page at a time, but it makes comparing pre and post reports much easier.

I was given the following advice (again) while trying to figure out the pre- and post-CUBS Income and Expense report.

First was confirmation that yes, the local finance information was completely overwritten with CHQ's official information. There is therefore huge potential for wards that did not record their DC, Staples, and other EFT payments pre-CUBS to have a large number of new items in their post-CUBS expense reports. It also means that credits now appear in the expenses screen. Pre-CUBS these appeared as transfers and therefore will not appear on your pre-CUBS expense report.

Second was encouragement not to try and compare the Income and Expense report. In fact, they are so different pre and post CUBS that they don't really compare at all. In summary, "don't worry about the income/expense report; just compare donations and expenses. When you get the new financial report then you can review it. It's going to be a little bumpy but its going to be so much better to have all finance synchronized with HQ in real time"

This all sounds like a much bigger mass of confusion than I was led to believe it would be. (Insert pouting face.)

GregAnderson wrote:This all sounds like a much bigger mass of confusion than I was led to believe it would be. (Insert pouting face.)

It is actually pretty simple, I think. We used to have to adjust MLS so that it showed what CHQ had. Now CHQ adjusts MLS for us. [grin]

lajackson wrote:It is actually pretty simple, I think. We used to have to adjust MLS so that it showed what CHQ had. Now CHQ adjusts MLS for us. [grin]

That is the intention. It may be a bit bumpy trying to understand the two-way communication with CUBS. This was not possible previously. However, most international units outside of the U.S. or Canada have had this functionality all along so it won't be as confusing for them (hopefully).

FYI it appears the migration and data conversion is progressing on schedle so you should be able to process finances on Sunday.

Was the CUBS upgrade a phased approach? One thing I read made me think they didn't just put everyone on it overnight. Does anyone know?

happy-one wrote:Was the CUBS upgrade a phased approach? One thing I read made me think they didn't just put everyone on it overnight. Does anyone know?

As I understand it, it has been rolling out over the last 3 years worldwide. They are not capable of just switching a couple stakes at a time, however. I don't know the specifics of what defines the "area", but when the US switched, the entire US had to switch at the same time. They couldn't do it by states or regions.

crislapi wrote:All budget allocations for the past 4 years have been placed in Budget:Budget Allocations.

We have 10 units in the stake and indeed I see 10 entries on 7 Oct 2010 for the Q4 allocations. However, the comment "CFAR LUBA Standard allocation for Q4 2010" appears for each entry. How are we to discern which allocation is for which unit? I thought unit numbers might be imbedded in each individual Ref. No., but it isn't.

lajackson wrote:Now CHQ adjusts MLS for us. [grin]

...and I did NOT like the way CHQ adjusted it for us!

JLRose wrote:We have 10 units in the stake and indeed I see 10 entries on 7 Oct 2010 for the Q4 allocations. However, the comment "CFAR LUBA Standard allocation for Q4 2010" appears for each entry. How are we to discern which allocation is for which unit? I thought unit numbers might be imbedded in each individual Ref. No., but it isn't.

Stakes still receive a Budget Allocation report (I have our stake's Q4 report in hand), explaining exactly how the allowance was calculated for each ward. So you can consult that report and line up the numbers. But I agree that it would be helpful to have something in the description of the allocation entries that let us know which ward is which.

There seem to be quite a few questions and quirks and dare I say problems with this massive roll-out. Did any hear that you should never get version 1.0 of anything.

Thanks for all your help. This has helped a lot. I am just an old truck driver, but have been financial clerk for 11 years total, 3 wards and 5 bishops starting when there were NO computers involved at all, just paper. Hopefully this will be as great an improvement as when we went to computers in the first place.

wcooke wrote:There seem to be quite a few questions and quirks and dare I say problems with this massive roll-out.

CUBS is functioning exactly as the developers intended. Everything that has happened was expected. What has been problematic was the instructions given to us (provided by the MLS team. not CUBS). Remember, CUBS is just the financial system running in the background. Any of the actual problems so far are MLS related.

Yes, instructions were the real problem here. I dare say that I would have had no complaints if I had received a memo like this (which I'm writing as if I were at CHQ and this were 10 days ago).

"Please be aware that the MLS conversion will overwrite all financial data on your unit's computer including all sub-category information from every parent category. In order to retain this data, you will need to print hard copies of ALL detail reports for every sub-category of Budget, Other and Ward Missionary categories."

That's all I needed. We have a PDF utility which works like a printer driver so I could have "printed" every kind of report avaiable without using any paper and the reports would never have left the hard drive. Oh, well. Spilled milk. But I can't help thinking it will take a long time before I fully trust instructions from the MLS powers-that-be again. I foresee lots of "PDF Printouts" whenever I notice new versions of MLS installing themselves.

I guess that I misstated myself a little. The *Ver. 1.0* was a bit of computer humor. I, too, feel that the problem was information. I looked at the email that was sent, and had questions before I even knew what was happening. It was the *roll-out*, not the software that seems to be the problem. This forum has really helped me out. Thank you all.

I guess that I misstated myself a little. The *Ver. 1.0* was a bit of computer humor. I, too, feel that the problem was information. I looked at the email that was sent, and had questions before I even knew what was happening. It was the *roll-out*, not the software that seems to be the problem. This forum has really helped me out. Thank you all.