FO and old Other categories.

I think I have the missionary category figured out. I am still waiting on budget information from the church. So for now I need some info. on fast offerings and the old other categories. I am the stake fin clerk and our ward fin. clerk, so please don't tell me to go see the stake fin. clerk. He is as lost as I am.

1. There are several FO subcategories and several of them have negatives balances on my mls now. Do I want to get rid of these and have a zero balance like in the old system or do they have a running total just to show us how much we have spent in each of the FO subcategories?

2. The Other subcategories are a mess. The amounts are totally messed up.
My Oct 17 I&E has $2820. My 19 Oct Church Unit Financial Statement has $2820. So far so good.
My Oct 24 I&E has $1876 with all sorts of jumbled numbers. My Unit Financial Statement for 20 Oct-31 Oct has $2820 as the starting balance. The old reconcile had an other item section where we could adjust the computer to get our mls to match what the church had. If my I&E is off $944, how do I correct this with the new system? I can't transfer money from nowhere to a subcategory that is short or viceversa to a category that has way too much money.

3. On Oct 17 I&E we had $430 in girls camp. On the Oct 24 I&E we showed $4805 in girls camp. For those stake fin. clerks, give me a game plan on what I need to do with each ward to correct their other accounts.

stott wrote:1. There are several FO subcategories and several of them have negatives balances on my mls now. Do I want to get rid of these and have a zero balance like in the old system or do they have a running total just to show us how much we have spent in each of the FO subcategories?

I have not seen this, but I wouldn't worry about it. Fast offering expenses have been and still will be reimbursed by the Church. So although a negative balance shouldn't happen in MLS, it can't be happening on the Church side of things, so there will be no repercussions from having a negative balance.

stott wrote:2. The Other subcategories are a mess. The amounts are totally messed up.

Yes, just about everyone had a mess in the Other subcategories' balances forward. You just need to make transfers (dated October 18 works best) from the subcategories to the Other:Authorized Member Financed Activities category such that each subcategory has a balance as of October 18 under CUBS that matches the October 17 balance pre-CUBS. Make sure when you run your I&E reports to correct balances that you choose a Custom date range that ends before October 24 so that you don't include any activity that occurred in donation batches or expenses after the CUBS transition. Hopefully the total balance of all your Other categories matches the pre-CUBS figure -- the dollars are just distributed incorrectly among the subcategories. That's what happened in just about every case throughout my stake, so correcting the opening balances via transfers fixed the problem.

Alan_Brown wrote:Yes, just about everyone had a mess in the Other subcategories' balances forward. You just need to make transfers (dated October 18 works best) from the subcategories to the Other:Authorized Member Financed Activities category such that each subcategory has a balance as of October 18 under CUBS that matches the October 17 balance pre-CUBS. Make sure when you run your I&E reports to correct balances that you choose a Custom date range that ends before October 24 so that you don't include any activity that occurred in donation batches or expenses after the CUBS transition. Hopefully the total balance of all your Other categories matches the pre-CUBS figure -- the dollars are just distributed incorrectly among the subcategories. That's what happened in just about every case throughout my stake, so correcting the opening balances via transfers fixed the problem.

I determined that in the CUBS changeover all deposits to the Other categories were credited to subcategories, while all expenses were posted to the parent category. As Alan_Brown stated, you just need to do transfers until the (now called) Authorized Member Financed Expenses parent category is zero.

Alan_Brown wrote:I have not seen this, but I wouldn't worry about it. Fast offering expenses have been and still will be reimbursed by the Church. So although a negative balance shouldn't happen in MLS, it can't be happening on the Church side of things, so there will be no repercussions from having a negative balance.



Yes, just about everyone had a mess in the Other subcategories' balances forward. You just need to make transfers (dated October 18 works best) from the subcategories to the Other:Authorized Member Financed Activities category such that each subcategory has a balance as of October 18 under CUBS that matches the October 17 balance pre-CUBS. Make sure when you run your I&E reports to correct balances that you choose a Custom date range that ends before October 24 so that you don't include any activity that occurred in donation batches or expenses after the CUBS transition. Hopefully the total balance of all your Other categories matches the pre-CUBS figure -- the dollars are just distributed incorrectly among the subcategories. That's what happened in just about every case throughout my stake, so correcting the opening balances via transfers fixed the problem.

Alan, let me see if I understand this right. Do I run an I&E for Jan 1- Oct 18? Then let's say that my other scout camp is $5000 now but it was $1000 before the change, I trasfer $4000 from the scout accout to the parent AMFA account correct? Bu using Oct 18 we avoid having to account for any money in or money out after Oct 24, correct? Later the church will send a magic patch to the parent AMFA account to exactly correct the imbalance, correct?

I don't know yet, but what if a ward didn't run the requested oct 17 and oct 24 reports? Where do we start with them?

stott wrote:Alan, let me see if I understand this right. Do I run an I&E for Jan 1- Oct 18? Then let's say that my other scout camp is $5000 now but it was $1000 before the change, I trasfer $4000 from the scout accout to the parent AMFA account correct? Bu using Oct 18 we avoid having to account for any money in or money out after Oct 24, correct?

Yes, that sounds correct.

stott wrote:Later the church will send a magic patch to the parent AMFA account to exactly correct the imbalance, correct?

In the vast majority of cases, you should be in balance after doing the above procedure. But there are a couple of known bugs that can make the balance nonzero, in which case you will indeed need to wait for a software or data update from CHQ to fix it.

stott wrote:I don't know yet, but what if a ward didn't run the requested oct 17 and oct 24 reports? Where do we start with them?

The October 24 reports can be regenerated at any time by specifying the correct Custom date range. But if the October 17 reports were not run, the only way to print them is to very carefully restore a backup from October 17 (yes, I know that the official instructions say not to do this, but it really can be done). If you are at all unsure about this procedure, have your stake technology specialist help you. See the thread Retrieving Old Budget information for details.

stott wrote:He is as lost as I am.

Or, said another way, he is you! :rolleyes:

stott wrote:1. There are several FO subcategories and several of them have negatives balances on my mls now. Do I want to get rid of these and have a zero balance like in the old system or do they have a running total just to show us how much we have spent in each of the FO subcategories?

I have noticed this in a couple of my units. We have received no instructions to make transfers in anything but Budget and Other (AMFA). I would therefore leave FO alone for now.

stott wrote:2. The Other subcategories are a mess. The amounts are totally messed up. My Oct 17 I&E has $2820. My 19 Oct Church Unit Financial Statement has $2820. ...My Oct 24 I&E has $1876 with all sorts of jumbled numbers. My Unit Financial Statement for 20 Oct-31 Oct has $2820 as the starting balance. The old reconcile had an other item section where we could adjust the computer to get our mls to match what the church had. If my I&E is off $944, how do I correct this with the new system? I can't transfer money from nowhere to a subcategory that is short or viceversa to a category that has way too much money.

It is clear to me the correct balance is $2820. We can no longer reconcile. Reconciling was an approach used to get MLS to match CHQ's financial records. The CUBS system is "live", meaning MLS now shows exactly the same thing as CHQ.

You mention your I&E date as being 24 Oct 2010. What does it show if you run it for 20 Oct 2010?

The only logical reason I can think of that your I&E is off -$944 is due to a negative balance forward from 2009. If this is the case, there is nothing you can/should do. This is a bug in CUBS that should be fixed at some point.

stott wrote:3. On Oct 17 I&E we had $430 in girls camp. On the Oct 24 I&E we showed $4805 in girls camp.

Rewording what got stated previously, all expenses got recategorized with the conversion. Your financial information was replaced w/ CHQ's which did not have subcategory info. Therefore, all Budget checks got recategorized to Budget:Administration and all Other checks got recategorized to Other:Payable to Local Unit. However, donation information was NOT recategorized. Therefore, your girls camp category is showing an income equal to the total of all donations made to that category over the past 4 years. I would therefore recommend transferring all but $430 of it to Other:Payable to Local Unit (the name is now actually Other:Authorized Member Financed Activities).

When running reports, I would recommend using the same dates that are used on the old CUFS and new UFS.

stott wrote:My 19 Oct Church Unit Financial Statement has $2820. ...My Unit Financial Statement for 20 Oct-31 Oct has $2820 as the starting balance.

All pre-CUBS info should show on reports run from 1 Jan - 19 Oct 2010. All post-conversion reports should start on 20 Oct 2010. If you run a report from the 24th on, you will be missing some information needed to create the correct balances (excluding, of course, the bug that causes wards to have negative balances on 20 Oct 2010 instead of $0).