Payee's Are Rapidly Growing

I'm our Stake Finance Clerk, and right after the change to CUBS I was looking at my Payee list and noticed that each unit in our Stake had two listings, both identical. I merged the two and did a "send/receive" which produced about 3 pages of "Add participant" information. A couple of days later when I did another "send/receive", I got another 3 pages of "Add participant" info and, what do you know, I now have four identical enteris for each unit. To make a long story short, I now have 7 enteries for each unit in my payee list, all active, and all identical. There must be a bug somewhere that needs to be fixed, either that or I'm going to have to start up my own paper factory (10 units in our Stake). Any one else had this problem?

brodine wrote:I'm our Stake Finance Clerk, and right after the change to CUBS I was looking at my Payee list and noticed that each unit in our Stake had two listings, both identical. I merged the two and did a "send/receive" which produced about 3 pages of "Add participant" information. A couple of days later when I did another "send/receive", I got another 3 pages of "Add participant" info and, what do you know, I now have four identical enteris for each unit. To make a long story short, I now have 7 enteries for each unit in my payee list, all active, and all identical. There must be a bug somewhere that needs to be fixed, either that or I'm going to have to start up my own paper factory (10 units in our Stake). Any one else had this problem?

Yep, I noticed that, too. It seems like every few days I get the "Add Participant" info for each unit listed on the Finance Transmission Report. I've taken to printing transmission reports to PDF; I can then commit to paper if it seems important. I was really glad I instituted that practice when I had a 39-page transmission report.

On the ward level, I just went thru all our donor's and made Hidden anyone that had not made a donation this year. That resulted in a 23 page report that also included the checks I had written.

I hope they fix it so they don't always print

ralitaco wrote: I hope they fix it so they don't always print

...or at least change the format so we get more than 6 on a page...

oregonmatt wrote:...or at least change the format so we get more than 6 on a page...

Barring that, we need an increase in budget allocation to pay for all the additional paper being used.

We now have 16 copies of our Stake in our donor list that cannot be edited or merged. Interestingly, all but one of them shows as a nonmember record. It seems to grow by two or three each week.

Apparently this is an issue that the CUBS team is aware of and are working to fix. My ward has 7 different payees for my stake. It has to do with MLS not recognizing the payee list that is held in CUBS.

I noticed that today on the stake MLS. I had 8 payees for each of my units as well as 4-6 donors for each. I merged them all into one and, in the process, noticed that new temporary member numbers were given every single time.

After merging them all down to one for each unit, I then was prompted to print financial transmission reports. There were about 7 reports to print, and each of them was 32 pages long. Each report looks remarkably similar to the one that just printed. Luckily, since we've switched to CUBS I've been printing all reports to PDF and then, if I need/want to file a paper copy, I then print it.

Why couldn't they have figured these things out before rolling it to thousands of units?

That is what "de-bugging" is all about.

wcooke wrote:Why couldn't they have figured these things out before rolling it to thousands of units?

That is what "de-bugging" is all about.

Good question. However it is a question usually asked by outside observers not involved in the process of such a significant change. All we can do is speculate on the entire process without knowing the timelines and issues that had to be worked out to implement this change. Waiting for all the bugs to be worked out could possibly have pushed the transition beyond the established deadline. We don't even know how many times the deadline was actually pushed out before the decision was made to procede as it was. We do know that there was at least one transition date that was pushed out for the US because they discovered unacceptable issues with the system when rolled out in Canada.

At some point they had to make the decision that the existing bugs were acceptable and that the rollout must be made.

At least for this issue there is an alternative to killing all the trees necessary to print the reports. Just print them to PDF and then only print to paper from the PDF when warranted.

I feel the excess paper pain as well. What is the requirement related to printing transmission reports anyway? I believe you can just cancel out of the option to print that report while still printing the other stuff required for files and audits.

wrigjef wrote:What is the requirement related to printing transmission reports anyway? I believe you can just cancel out of the option to print that report while still printing the other stuff required for files and audits.

There is certainly no audit step that examines transmission reports, and I know of no documentation that says you must keep them or even print them initially. I've rarely used them pre-CUBS. Now with CUBS, I look at them to see that I have just gotten another big set of duplicate payees -- not that I can do anything about it, but it's interesting.

wrigjef wrote:I feel the excess paper pain as well. What is the requirement related to printing transmission reports anyway? I believe you can just cancel out of the option to print that report while still printing the other stuff required for files and audits.

Instead of actually printing to paper, you could print to a PDF creator and save the file that's created. It can always be printed at a later date if needed.

I just noticed that the finance transmission report keeps printing out donors as added new donor, even though they have donated previously. Is this a bug? I noticed the 3.2.4 patch was sent yesterday. Are they looking into this? Also it took almost 15 minutes to write one check today. I actually watched the clock as I waited for the system to let me go to the next option. It was 5 minutes after I put in the name and then another 10 minutes after I put in the category.

ecotim wrote:I just noticed that the finance transmission report keeps printing out donors as added new donor, even though they have donated previously. Is this a bug? I noticed the 3.2.4 patch was sent yesterday. Are they looking into this?

I suggest reading the 6th post in this thread.

ecotim wrote:Also it took almost 15 minutes to write one check today. I actually watched the clock as I waited for the system to let me go to the next option. It was 5 minutes after I put in the name and then another 10 minutes after I put in the category.

I did four today and they went very quickly. However, a significant increase in time lag has been reported elsewhere on the forum, although I'm pretty sure nothing has come close to the time you report. See this thread.

Is this report that is printing out these additional donors anything more than a test report accidentally left from internal testing? If it is to be useful or intended for ward use, perhaps those at CHQ could provide a description and synopsis of the intent of this report and then send out a bug fix ASAP to eliminate the loss of budget over excessive paper use.

As a side note, it would be really helpful if at some future point MLS (if still on the computer and not moved online) would be able to save and archive reports in PDF format internally instead of using a third-party PDF printer like CutePDF. That way the intended fonts could be embedded and perhaps a move to more electronic archives would be more officially sanctioned and save resources used in paper, file folders, binders, envelopes, and an eternal pile of paper archives.

kgthunder wrote:Is this report that is printing out these additional donors anything more than a test report accidentally left from internal testing? If it is to be useful or intended for ward use, perhaps those at CHQ could provide a description and synopsis of the intent of this report and then send out a bug fix ASAP to eliminate the loss of budget over excessive paper use.

I did ask one of the developers about these. His reply:

[font=&quot]I don’t know why they show all that useless information. It just shows what information is going to CUBS.[/font]

As for what they are doing about it, I was hoping 3.2.4 would take care of that. However, I cut some checks yesterday and it still produced all the reports.

Part of the problem seems to be that the system is not recognizing payees/donors, so every time you cut a check or process donations, it adds new participants even if you already had one for that member. It's easy to see how this could result in a large report being generated. I have stopped printing financial reports to paper.

I am still getting additions to the Payee and Donor list for each unit in our Stake... 22 entries for each unit and counting

As of Sunday, we have 35 donor entries in our ward MLS for our stake.

It might be interesting to note that this doesn't seem to be affecting everyone. My ward is not seeing this problem.

I looked at the multiple Stake donors and noticed
that one of them is listed as the "Church" type
and the rest is listed as "nonmember" type. I'm
pretty sure the "Church" type one is the original
donor pre-CUBS.

Trying to merge the donors gives an error that
"Donors involved with Donation redeposit cannot
be merged".

You can however hide them. So, every once in a
while you can "hide" all the visible "nonmember" type donors
with your Stake's name, so when entering donations
it won't overwelm the donor list.

I've only done it this recently, so I can't confirm if
each transmission "un-hides" all the donors or just
adds a new visible Stake donor.

- Atticus

atticusewig wrote:You can however hide them. So, every once in a while you can "hide" all the visible "nonmember" type donors....

I've only done it this recently, so I can't confirm if each transmission "un-hides" all the donors or just
adds a new visible Stake donor.

I've been doing this for somd time. Once hidden, a donor record stays hidden, but new nonmember donor records will still be created.

With MLS 3.3, I am no longer getting "participant added" entries on financial reports, but I am still getting a duplicate payee entry for each unit in my stake each time I do a send receive changes. I thought I saw somewhere a post that suggested that this problem had been fixed in 3.3, and I was no longer getting the entries on financial reports so I decided it was time to clean them up. I merged all the duplicate payees (it took a couple of hours), then I noticed that I was still getting duplicates. Are others still having this problem?