Budget:Budget Allocations:* Balances on 12/30 were zero but now have balances

I happened to be at the church on 12/30/2010 doing some financial stuff. I printed out a few reports to have a hard copy of things.

On my printed report I had cleaned up all my budget categories, including the Budget:Budget Allocations:* categories (all the old categories from pre-CUBS). Each "pre-CUBS" category had zero in it.

This morning, I did a send/receive and clicked the action for completing the year (I forget what it is called). Now all my Budget:Budget Allocations:* categories have money in them again (whereas on 12/30/2010 they had zero because I transferred the money from Budget:Budget Allocations:* to Budget:Budget Allocations.

Is this something I need to worry about? I'll do the transfers again... but it is kind of awkward that things keep changing in these old categories.

Thanks!

I guess I am curious if it exactly undid everything you did or if the as-yet unfixed bug is reappearing. I just checked my computer. I did many transfers to clean up my old categories and a quick check shows that they are all still $0.

Do your former transfers still appear under view/enter transfers? If they do not then yes, I would try re-entering them. If they are still there then I would investigate what transaction caused the balances to reappear.

I don't know if it would make any difference, but I have loaded MLS3.3 and unchecked the Active box on those Budget:Allocations:**** categories. So if you can get them back to zero, I would disable them.

nathangg wrote:On my printed report I had cleaned up all my budget categories, including the Budget:Budget Allocations:* categories (all the old categories from pre-CUBS). Each "pre-CUBS" category had zero in it.

This morning, I did a send/receive and clicked the action for completing the year (I forget what it is called). Now all my Budget:Budget Allocations:* categories have money in them again (whereas on 12/30/2010 they had zero because I transferred the money from Budget:Budget Allocations:* to Budget:Budget Allocations.

Is this something I need to worry about? I'll do the transfers again... but it is kind of awkward that things keep changing in these old categories.

I checked my MLS on Wednesday and all was good. Today I'm seeing your same problem plus some. I had cleaned up the CUBS conversion, year-end balances, and deactivated all my old categories. However, today, the zeroing transfers are missing, my old budget categories (Budget:Budget Allocations:BU-***) are visible and active again while all the subcategories I created are now inactive. Also, I now have 3 identical subcategories in Budget:Miscellaneous for each one I created, but all are inactive.

Also, my UFS is wrong, as it shows my budget as being about $9.000 less than it actually is. Also, there are 10 checks listed 2x on my UFS. I had contacted LUS about cleared checks not showing as cleared in MLS. The analyst said my expenses were posting 2X and it appears they sent down a bit of code to clean it up. That's probably what erased all my transfers. However, I'm now curious about my balance being so far off.

I'm not expecting any solutions here other than to contact LUS. I did want to confirm that I am seeing something similar to what you are seeing.

I found out what happened to mess up at least some of my categories. Many of my checks were posting 2X. It looks like the patch sent down to fix this recategorized the original expense back to Budget:Administration. Do I switch them back or wait? That is the question.

As for the duplicate categories, I was told that is a known bug that will be fixed (hopefully) in 3.3.1, set to be released at the end of Feb or beginning of Mar. Don't know that I want to wait that long...

I found the new update (CUBS and 3.3) to be as bug ridden and problem prone as the previous iterations of MLS from a financial point of view, coupled with confusing, and severely lacking documentation on how to use it (devoid of the all important details). The memo from HQ about accounts we got Sunday was a beautiful example of how to obfuscate and confuse users and generate more questions than answers. No examples, no details, just do this general thing. Since we have now to go to our stake for help, I have just gone into the mode of do what I understand and ignore what I cannot understand and get no help on.

I am responsible for software documentation, and user guides at work, and what we got Sunday would never be acceptable and the base documentation is equally lacking.

MLS is easy to use in many places, but is full of what I call dungeons and dragons lurking to get you when you least expect it. The CUBS "upgrade" is a great example. My view is a ward financial clerk, and while the Stake may love it, the financial clerk I know in our building hates it just like I do. As a CPA told me some time ago about MLS, when it is good it is very good, but when it goes awry it is awful and the details are just not there to help you figure anything out.

As far as audits go, I consider them a total joke. Holding us to a commercial financial standard with software that is no where near that standard is a bad joke. When we get software that upholds the same standard they want on audits then we can do the job.

While I agree the roll out of recent MLS updates, including CUBS, has not been without problems and probably deserves a bit of criticism, let's try to keep our comments on the constructive side.

I for one am very grateful for MLS and the increased power and ease of use it affords us. The custom report functionality is my favorite recent feature. Yes, CUBS was(is) a challenge and no, I am not yet comfortable that I know what I'm doing in the new system - especially with the rules changing as we go along.

However, I trust that things will be alright. The Lord is at the helm and while individuals make mistakes, I will try to be as forgiving to the programmers for their honest errors that I would like them to be with me.

jaleake wrote:. . . and while the Stake may love it, . . .

I am not sure what stake that would be. I have yet to find one. [smile]
However, it is what it is, and it is what we have to work with.

That said, our poor stake clerk is in the process of individualy visiting nine units because:

We got a projected 1Q budget allocation of (A).
We got a reported 1Q budget allocation of (B).
The units received a 1Q budget allocation of (C).
The stake received a 1Q budget allocation (D).
The amount transfered out of the stake account (E) does not match the amount transfered into the ward account (F) in seven of the nine units.

Other than that, everything is just fine. Except that the Finance department is using the (G) numbers.