Recreating Pre-CUBS Budget Detail

It was my good pleasure last night to receive phone calls from a half dozen anxious clerks in my stake who just found out that they can no longer answer the age old question posed by ward leaders: "How much budget do I have left?"

I believe that there are only two options to recreate budget balances:

1. Follow this tech savvy advice to get the 10/17 budget reports and then use the transfer feature to recreate the balances as of 10/17. Only problem with using transfers is that all detail about individual transactions is lost on the budget report.

2. Go to view/update expenses and change the budget category for each expense for the entire year. Problems: takes a lot of time and the purpose field will be replaced with the recategorization information. Of course, if someone asks about an individual transaction, you can go back to the 10/17 expense report to get the original detail.

I am quite surprised (but trying to have a good attitude) that the CUBS people did not recommend printing a budget report. I welcome any other ideas for addressing this problem.

mlh78 wrote:It was my good pleasure last night to receive phone calls from a half dozen anxious clerks in my stake who just found out that they can no longer answer the age old question posed by ward leaders: "How much budget do I have left?"
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I am quite surprised (but trying to have a good attitude) that the CUBS people did not recommend printing a budget report. I welcome any other ideas for addressing this problem.

I share your disappointment. If I would have understood the magnitude of the changes, I would have printed not only a summary budget report on 17 October, but also a detail budget report for every budget subcategory. Then I could have felt okay about just giving that report to each auxiliary leader, and then a Oct 24-current report from the new system. Then they could go ahead and add the two numbers.

mlh78 wrote:I believe that there are only two options to recreate budget balances:

1. Follow this tech savvy advice to get the 10/17 budget reports and then use the transfer feature to recreate the balances as of 10/17. Only problem with using transfers is that all detail about individual transactions is lost on the budget report, as you noted.

2. Go to view/update expenses and change the budget category for each expense for the entire year. Problems: takes a lot of time and the purpose field will be replaced with the recategorization information. Of course, if someone asks about an individual transaction, you can go back to the 10/17 expense report to get the original detail.

I agree that those seem to be the only two options. The first one is the one that is recommended by the documentation, but then there's no way to generate a detail report for each subcategory.

One little note -- you won't lose the purpose field if you do recategorize the transactions. MLS stores the reason for the change in a separate field, so the purpose line for the expense is still intact.

mlh78 wrote: I am quite surprised (but trying to have a good attitude) that the CUBS people did not recommend printing a budget report.

You're not the only one... I'm half-considering just telling everyone all the money is gone...

At this point, my current plan is to wait to get my allocation check from the stake, re-allocate money to the quorums and auxiliaries as close to the pre-transition balance as possible, and then act like we're having a two month mini-year.

mlh78 wrote:1. Follow this tech savvy advice to get the 10/17 budget reports and then use the transfer feature to recreate the balances as of 10/17. Only problem with using transfers is that all detail about individual transactions is lost on the budget report.

There was a reply earlier today from a clerk who was able to load the backup from the 17th w/o getting locked out. The trick was to change the system time back to the 17th. Didn't think of that.

Do not do the restore on your "live" MLS.

I have a virtual machine (VMWare) running on my laptop that is installed with the same OS and patches as the church machine. I was able to load the Oct 17th file and by setting the date on the VM back to the 17th, have been able to go back in and access all the data prior to the CUBS install.