Death of Spouse in prior year -Correcting donations/year end statement

We have a situation where a couple has been donating prior/since the inception of MLS under, let's say, "Mr. & Mrs. John Doe". John Doe passed away in 2009, and we unfortunately did not update/correct the donor name at the end of 2009, and so all donations by the widow until the CUBs transition continued to be "incorrectly" entered by clerks under the "Mr. & Mrs. John Doe" donor name. Now at tithing settlement, this error is noted, since CUBS by default separated and classified all the donations prior to Oct 17th under the name of the deceased husband. (Those after CUBS were correctly entered under the wife's name.)

We tried by correct by merging donors (hiding the deceased husband as donor 2), but MLS would not allow it -- error that cannot merge two donors, or to that effect. (The deceased spouse is reported as an "out of unit" donor).

I know we can correct by going back and changing all the donations during the previous year in each individual batch (probably 15+) to the living wife, but is there an easier way I am missing?

Lesson learned to properly "clean up" donors, names, deaths, etc at year end.

mrdunk45 wrote:We have a situation where a couple has been donating prior/since the inception of MLS under, let's say, "Mr. & Mrs. John Doe". John Doe passed away in 2009, and we unfortunately did not update/correct the donor name at the end of 2009, and so all donations by the widow until the CUBs transition continued to be "incorrectly" entered by clerks under the "Mr. & Mrs. John Doe" donor name. Now at tithing settlement, this error is noted, since CUBS by default separated and classified all the donations prior to Oct 17th under the name of the deceased husband. (Those after CUBS were correctly entered under the wife's name.)

We tried by correct by merging donors (hiding the deceased husband as donor 2), but MLS would not allow it -- error that cannot merge two donors, or to that effect. (The deceased spouse is reported as an "out of unit" donor).

I know we can correct by going back and changing all the donations during the previous year in each individual batch (probably 15+) to the living wife, but is there an easier way I am missing?

Lesson learned to properly "clean up" donors, names, deaths, etc at year end.

The easiest way is to change the donor record that the donations are all linked to. Change the name to be the wife's name and change the linked member record to be her record.

Of course, this will only work if there is no donor record for the wife. If there is a donor record for the wife, but no records are linked to it, you can change that record to be some sort of record not linked to a member. If there are donations tied to her record as well, then it still might be easier to change the few donations tied to her record to be tied to his before you make the change I described above.

Our Bishop died early this year and we had the same issue. I created a new doner and linked it to his wife. Then I attempted to merge them. The merge error said "You can not merge two members" all official like. I clicked ok, but noticed it did it anyways. Did you look to see if it actually did merge though it gave you the error.