New statements are here (UFS and CFS)

The new Unit Financial Statement (UFS) and Consolidated Financial Statement (CFS - stakes only) are here! Both just downloaded on my computer and I've got to say I really like them! It didn't take too much getting used to, and I really like how quickly accessible the information is. I didn't think I would care for the trend plots, but actually I found that quite insightful as well.

I just got mine tonight. Fairly straight forward, but I don't care for the Action Items section. i.e.-the date of the UFS is 31Oct2010 and they have listed in the action items section for me to check on deposits that were made that day. Not a big deal though.

This did bring a question to mind:
Under the View / Update Expense or Donations, what is the "STATUS" column showing the status of? If a check shows a status of "Cleared" does that mean that the check has been depositted and cleared the bank? Or does it just mean it has cleared MLS?

ralitaco wrote:Under the View / Update Expense or Donations, what is the "STATUS" column showing the status of?

See this thread.

I'm not sure if MLS 3.2.4 patched this. I did compare some of my outstanding expenses and the status did not match, so I'm guessing the discussion in the linked thread still holds.

I recieved the above mentioned forms but I have not yet received the Stake Financial Summary for Oct 1-19. One mls message on Nov 7 said it would come by mail. We had a change in stake presidents in the middle of Oct so I suspect it may have been mixed up in the mail. But without that, I can't calculate what the stake owes the wards, right? My wards are upset that they do not have a budget to work with. I just tell them to use as a target what they were allotted before.

Has anyone else out their not received their Oct 1-19 Stake Financial Summary? It I don't get it soon, how do I get a new one? Does the stake president have to make the call?

stott wrote:Has anyone else out their not received their Oct 1-19 Stake Financial Summary? It I don't get it soon, how do I get a new one? Does the stake president have to make the call?

Many (I would guess nearly all) stakes have received their SFS. It came by mail.

But if you don't have yours, I do know that the SFS can be emailed to the stake president, and also to the stake clerk or stake financial clerk if their email address is in CDOL. You'd have to call Local Unit Support to request that. I know because I (as stake financial clerk) called and because they could verify who I was and my email address was in CDOL, they emailed it to me.

Rats!! I should have asked my question earlier today or a couple of days ago. Then I would know that I could get the needed form by making the call to support. I will be gone next week up to Utah for Thanksgiving with family so I guess my wards will have to stay in the red a little longer.
Thanks for your answer.

I assume they are not open for Saturday calls.

I have still not received mine. However, the stake president has been gone on business the past 2 weeks. If I don't receive it Sunday, I will be making a phone call.

crislapi wrote:The new Unit Financial Statement (UFS) and Consolidated Financial Statement (CFS - stakes only) are here! Both just downloaded on my computer and I've got to say I really like them! It didn't take too much getting used to, and I really like how quickly accessible the information is. I didn't think I would care for the trend plots, but actually I found that quite insightful as well.

Same here. On the CFS, I was able to immediately identify a ward that has 3 missionaries out. They just went negative this month in their ward missionary fund, but the charts show a direct negative trend over the past few months that will be a major issue if not immediately addressed.

As a stake finance clerk, I do wish the ward pages in the CFS summarized what the outstanding financial transactions better. All I have is a number, and now I get to call several wards to basically tell them I have a warning buzzer going off, but I don't know why.

Bro_West wrote:As a stake finance clerk, I do wish the ward pages in the CFS summarized what the outstanding financial transactions better. All I have is a number, and now I get to call several wards to basically tell them I have a warning buzzer going off, but I don't know why.

I agree. Some of those are probably simply outstanding checks. That's perfectly normal, and not a concern until at least two months have passed. But if the issue is a deposit shortage or some problem with a returned check that was not handled automatically, I'd like to know sooner.

OK just call me a whiner. After waiting over 3 weeks to get my Stake Financial Summary for Oct 1-19 it was suggested above by Alan to just call support. Today is Tues Nov 23 and I have been trying for 2 days to get in. I get the same message that the mailbox is full. Then it says if you want to speak to someone now, press 0. When I do, it justs starts the same recording again. I have a lot of ward clerks very upset with not having a budget. Oh well. I guess the wards will have to wait on figuring it out for another couple of weeks. They will either underspend for fear of going over their budget or they will overspend and the stake will have to bail them out.

stott wrote:Today is Tues Nov 23 and I have been trying for 2 days to get in. I get the same message that the mailbox is full. Then it says if you want to speak to someone now, press 0. When I do, it justs starts the same recording again.

Two options: 1) call as soon as the office opens. I called today at 8 am and, after waiting 15 minutes, spoke to an analyst and had them email a pdf of it to my stake president.

2) Send in an email. I sent one in Sunday afternoon about another issue and received a reply first thing this morning answering it.

LUS will have extended hours tonight until 10pm but will close Wednesday at 5 pm for the Thanksgiving holiday and will not reopen until the following Monday. I'd therefore get an email sent in ASAP if you want any chance of getting your statement by this Sunday.

stott wrote:Then it says if you want to speak to someone now, press 0. When I do, it justs starts the same recording again.

Pressing 0 should send you to the church operator/main switch board. Once there, they will send you back to LUS, but now at the back of the queue. You are better off just being patient.

stott wrote:I have a lot of ward clerks very upset with not having a budget. Oh well. I guess the wards will have to wait on figuring it out for another couple of weeks. They will either underspend for fear of going over their budget or they will overspend and the stake will have to bail them out.

While you wait, you could at least give them an estimate of how much they have left. Two approaches for that: 1) Use the Sep SFS YTD expenses. You know how much money you gave each unit for the year. Subtract their Sep YTD expenses and that will give them a very close approximation of where they were at the time of conversion to CUBS.
2) Use the expenses recorded in MLS. Have your units run budget reports from 1 Jan 2010 to 19 Oct 2010 and make not of what the total expenses in Budget:Administration are. This should be the same as the amount in the transfers column, just opposite in sign. The balance should be zero, but if it's not that's ok for now. The wards should know how much their 2010 budget was. Have them subtract the total expenses from this report from their 2010 budget and that will give them an idea of how much money they had left as of 20 Oct 2010.

The stake will not have to bail them out. That is one of the new features of CUBS. Unit balances stay with the unit now. If a ward is negative, it is their problem and their future allocations will have to be used to get back in the black. There is no need for other wards or the stake to have to use their budget funds to bail out any other unit.

Has anyone experienced long wait times printing the CFS and UFS? My ward clerks are complaining that it takes a minute per page - not that bad when they are only printing an 8 page statement.

I had 3 - 40 page CFS to print. The first 24 pages took 1/2 Hr then the printer shut down and I had to requeue the remaining pages - times 3!

Am I missing something or are our old computers just max'd out?

Thanks for any comments.

Freedom55 wrote:Has anyone experienced long wait times printing the CFS and UFS? My ward clerks are complaining that it takes a minute per page - not that bad when they are only printing an 8 page statement.

I had 3 - 40 page CFS to print. The first 24 pages took 1/2 Hr then the printer shut down and I had to requeue the remaining pages - times 3!

Am I missing something or are our old computers just max'd out?

I printed a 35-page CFS in just a few minutes with no problems.

The previous statements had no graphics to speak of, but the new ones have many graphs. So if your printer driver takes a lot of memory to process images and your computer is slow and perhaps tight on memory, I could imagine such behavior.

You might check your printer properties to see if it has some sort of setting like "Image Quality" or "Image Resolution" to see if you can scale back the resolution the images are printed in.

The HP 1100 and 1200 were a bit slow. When MLS first came out there were painfully slow. I used to reset them to use the "LaserJet 4" driver. But if you can speed them up by changing the DPI, that works too.

Good tips, thanks. I'll check the printer properties - didn't think of that.

Our computers are old! I checked the CPU usage and noted that as soon as MLS is booted up, the usage jumps to 98-100%. Not much room for anything else to be working in the background.

Thanks again.

ralitaco wrote:I don't care for the Action Items section.

If I understand this part of the report correctly, I see that our stake has 17 action items to take care of in our units that are more than 30 days old.

But we have no idea what those action items are? We just go out and visit the unit and see what they come up with? And hope we have with us what we need to have in order to help them?

I guess we will go to the unit with the most action items first.