Declaration Report Showing Moved Out Members?

Is there a simple answer as to why my Declaration Report is listing a couple of families who moved out of the ward and their memberships are not in our ward any longer?

We have had other families move in and out and the report is listing (or not) them properly -- but I have two families (one moved out mid summer and the other about a month ago) that are showing up on the Declaration Report.

ckmcdonald wrote:Is there a simple answer as to why my Declaration Report is listing a couple of families who moved out of the ward and their memberships are not in our ward any longer?

The most likely cause is that MLS thinks they are still in your ward. It is possible that you did the Send/Receive to move the records out, but the return confirmation from CHQ did not update your local MLS. There are a number of other possibilities, including that the records were sent out and returned.

While not always reliable, a quick check of your LUWS may show them still in your ward, and a Request Unit Refresh Data via MLS will be nearly definitive.

lajackson wrote:The most likely cause is that MLS thinks they are still in your ward. It is possible that you did the Send/Receive to move the records out, but the return confirmation from CHQ did not update your local MLS. There are a number of other possibilities, including that the records were sent out and returned.

While not always reliable, a quick check of your LUWS may show them still in your ward, and a Request Unit Refresh Data via MLS will be nearly definitive.

It has been a number of years since I was a Membership Clerk so I'm not all that familiar with the process of moving a family from the ward in MLS. For the two families in question I simply look under "Individual Member Records" and they are not listed there. Is it possible they are "moved out" but remain "unconfirmed" such that they don't show up in the list of members of the ward but are seen as members when MLS generates the Declaration Report?

The two families in question do not show up on the LUWS either.

Related question: Is it strictly true that MLS will not allow submission of the Declaration Report without a declaration for every member on this list? Or, is a note (such as "moved from ward 6 months ago") along with no declaration sufficient?

ckmcdonald wrote:Related question: Is it strictly true that MLS will not allow submission of the Declaration Report without a declaration for every member on this list? Or, is a note (such as "moved from ward 6 months ago") along with no declaration sufficient?

If there is a comment, that is sufficient. Every person on the Declaration Report must have a declaration or a comment; then you can submit the report.

If you look carefully, you'll see that initially the Notes field is yellow, indicating that it is required. But once you specify a declaration, the Notes field turns white, indicating that it no longer has to be specified. Or if you enter something in the Notes field, even if the status is "Not declared", the Notes field also turns white.

ckmcdonald wrote:Is it possible they are "moved out" but remain "unconfirmed" such that they don't show up in the list of members of the ward but are seen as members when MLS generates the Declaration Report?

By any chance were they moved out to "Address Unknown"? I think there was some kind of glitch when that happened. I don't remember the details.

RussellHltn wrote:By any chance were they moved out to "Address Unknown"? I think there was some kind of glitch when that happened. I don't remember the details.

I'll check the move-out addresses. It's very possible the family that moved out last summer went to an unknown address. However, the family that moved out last month is very active and just moved into a neighboring ward - I'm pretty sure we had their address when we moved them out.

Our Bishop is very hesitant to declare for these folks so given the comments in this thread I think I'm going to tell him we can just put a note in the report that they are no longer members of the ward and leave them undeclared.

ckmcdonald wrote:Is there a simple answer as to why my Declaration Report is listing a couple of families who moved out of the ward and their memberships are not in our ward any longer?

I believe anyone who made donations during the year will show on the Declaration Report, whether they have moved out or not. In the process of completing the report, you would need to do as aebrown has suggested: select the appropriate declaration or leave it as Undeclared with a note the the comments field "Moved."

As a side note, for all those who have moved and have donations with your unit, you should make an effort to mail them an end-of-year tax receipt that they can use for tax purposes.

mamadsen wrote:I believe anyone who made donations during the year will show on the Declaration Report, whether they have moved out or not.

This is not the case for me - at least with the default settings. Of the many who moved from our ward and did donate at one time, only two such families are populated on the Declaration Report. It might be that this is a selectable parameter of the report. I do know there are a few choices on what the report contains but I'm not sitting at MLS at the moment so I can't look and see what they are. One might be "All Donors".

ckmcdonald wrote:This is not the case for me - at least with the default settings. Of the many who moved from our ward and did donate at one time, only two such families are populated on the Declaration Report. It might be that this is a selectable parameter of the report. I do know there are a few choices on what the report contains but I'm not sitting at MLS at the moment so I can't look and see what they are. One might be "All Donors".

Current ward membership is not a filtering parameter on the Tithing Declarations screen. The filtering options are:

• All Members
• Donors
• Nondonors
• Undeclared

aebrown wrote:Current ward membership is not a filtering parameter on the Tithing Declarations screen. The filtering options are:

• All Members
• Donors
• Nondonors
• Undeclared

I believe All Members is all members of the ward (have memberships).
I believe the other 3 are subsets of All Members.
If this is correct, the report should never include anyone whose records aren't in the ward?

ckmcdonald wrote:I believe All Members is all members of the ward (have memberships).
I believe the other 3 are subsets of All Members.
If this is correct, the report should never include anyone whose records aren't in the ward?

Donors are not always Members. And some Donors who are Members are not among the All Members of the current ward. So Donors is not a subset of All Members. It includes any of the All Members who actually donated, along with those from outside the membership of the unit who also donated.

All Members includes each person who currently has a membership in the ward. That way, the bishop can see that there is a tithing declaration for All Members of the ward.

Nondonors and Undeclared would be subsets of All Members. Some members will not have donated, and will be included in the Nondonors filtering parameter. And the bishop, needing to see that there is a declaration for All Members can filter the Undeclared to concentrate his inputs with those records.

lajackson wrote:Donors are not always Members. And some Donors who are Members are not among the All Members of the current ward. So Donors is not a subset of All Members. It includes any of the All Members who actually donated, along with those from outside the membership of the unit who also donated.

While it's true that there may be donors that are not part of the All Members group, I don't believe they show up in this particular report. Selecting Donors from the drop-down will only show member donors. (I'm no longer in a finance clerk position, so I can just base my remarks from playing with the test unit data.)

I experimented a little with MLS (3.2.4) today and found:

All Members: Is a list of all members with memberships in the ward*.
Donors: Is a subset of All Members - those who have donated.
NonDonors: Is a subset of All Members - those who haven't donated.
Undeclared: Is a subset of All Members - those who aren't declared.

* I started this thread based on the observation that the All Members list for my ward included 2 families that had moved and we don't have their memberships.

First I need to make some corrections to my earlier comments in this thread. 1. I have 3 families being populated on the list for whom we don't have their memberships, not two as I stated earlier. 2. I stated one of the families moved out last summer and stated that's when the memberships left as well. After discussing this with our Membership Clerk, I have discovered that all 3 families memberships were moved out during the first 2 weeks of December.

Given the above, I'm guessing what happened is that I first generated the Declaration Report before the memberships were moved out and that MLS isn't designed to drop names later if the memberships leave. The reverse isn't true... you can use the Add Members button and add members whose memberships arrived since the report was first generated. I have done this and seen it indeed add new members.

So I believe the mystery is resolved - however I must state the above is a conjecture as I don't remember for sure when I generated the first Declaration Report or the actual date the memberships were moved out.

I entertained the idea that maybe MLS had a fixed date in December sometime for which it "froze" the membership list for the Declaration Report but this doesn't seem likely. It seems much more likely that it has to do with when the report is first created.

ckmcdonald wrote:Given the above, I'm guessing what happened is that I first generated the Declaration Report before the memberships were moved out and that MLS isn't designed to drop names later if the memberships leave. The reverse isn't true... you can use the Add Members button and add members whose memberships arrived since the report was first generated. I have done this and seen it indeed add new members.

So I believe the mystery is resolved - however I must state the above is a conjecture as I don't remember for sure when I generated the first Declaration Report or the actual date the memberships were moved out.

This does sound correct -- thanks for following up with the investigation and reporting your findings.