Ward budget allotment not received from stake

Budget allotments have been received by other wards in our stake but our ward still has not received it. We think it may have to do with the fact that our system date was advanced 1 month in December and when MLS asked us to close out 2010 we did. SLC then sent a transmission that reset our MLS to the correct date. It was during this time that the ward allocation should have been received.

We are not sure what to do at this point. Can anyone help?

Most everyone here, including myself, is just other clerks with no power to modify the system.

What I'd suggest is to check with the stake to verify that they did have a percentage entered for your ward. (If they had a zero, you won't be getting anything.)

If that checks out, it's time to call Local Unit Support

dnaelliott wrote:Budget allotments have been received by other wards in our stake but our ward still has not received it.

One other thing that can make an allotment zero can be caused by not submitting quarterly reports in a timely manner.

dnaelliott wrote:Budget allotments have been received by other wards in our stake but our ward still has not received it.

One other thing that can make an allotment zero can be caused by not submitting quarterly reports in a timely manner.

Not a single ward in my stake has received their allotment yet either, and I was there last night. It wasn't scheduled to come until the 6th anyway, so I'd just be patient.

When we recieve the alotment, how is the easiest way to transfer that money into each sub catergory we have? Everyone keeps talking about percentages, but I do not see where to put those in. All I have is the yearly budget that the ward council set up. I am new to this so I am just wondering how this works.

sportstats wrote:When we recieve the alotment, how is the easiest way to transfer that money into each sub catergory we have? Everyone keeps talking about percentages, but I do not see where to put those in. All I have is the yearly budget that the ward council set up. I am new to this so I am just wondering how this works.

The percentages are how the stake decides how much your allocation you will receive. As a ward, there is no automated way to transfer money around. It will automatically show up in your Budget:Budget Allocations subcategory. If you chose to them transfer it to your other categories, then you must use the view/enter transfers screen in the finance section to do so.

However, because you will receive allotments quarterly, I think the easiest option is to leave all the allocations in Budget Allocations and instead use the view/edit budget screen to enter your yearly budget. Then at the end of the year, make a single transfer from Budget Allocations to each sub-category equal to the total yearly expenses. Transfers can be back-dated, so you could even wait to the start of the next year to do this.

Throughout the year, monitor the status of the budget using the Budget Report.

This approach works best if all your committees start each year fresh, meaning at the end of the year all leftover funds are reabsorbed by the ward. If you allow your subcategories to keep the balance you probably don't want to use this approach.

PS - was in the stake center again tonight and neither the UFS nor the disbursements have been made yet. I'm not worried - it's year end and there is a lot of other things that must be done. It'll come when it does, and we'll survive just fine until it does.

sportstats wrote:When we recieve the alotment, how is the easiest way to transfer that money into each sub catergory we have? Everyone keeps talking about percentages, but I do not see where to put those in. All I have is the yearly budget that the ward council set up. I am new to this so I am just wondering how this works.

If I were you, I'd hold off on doing any transfers at all. Some significant changes are in the works as to how budget allocations are accounted for, and I think you would regret doing transfers to individual subcategories.

Entering annual budgets in the View/Edit Budget screen as crislapi just described will be much more compatible with the new system.

aebrown wrote:If I were you, I'd hold off on doing any transfers at all. Some significant changes are in the works as to how budget allocations are accounted for, and I think you would regret doing transfers to individual subcategories.

Entering annual budgets in the View/Edit Budget screen as crislapi just described will be much more compatible with the new system.

Just what changes are in the works? Anticipating our allocation within a few days, I have set up the budgets for our stake using the I/E method with transfers(we had left over stake funds so I allocated them via transfers into appropriate subcategories such as Combined Youth Events, Youth Conference, etc that are not on the allotted categories set up with CUBs). Are you saying this is going to cause problems when MLS 3.3 comes out? If so, why hasn't something been said earlier. If you have "insider information" it would be nice if you shared!

FFRsqpilot wrote:Just what changes are in the works? Anticipating our allocation within a few days, I have set up the budgets for our stake using the I/E method with transfers(we had left over stake funds so I allocated them via transfers into appropriate subcategories such as Combined Youth Events, Youth Conference, etc that are not on the allotted categories set up with CUBs). Are you saying this is going to cause problems when MLS 3.3 comes out? If so, why hasn't something been said earlier. If you have "insider information" it would be nice if you shared!

I'm not sure how much I should be sharing, but I thought I would just put out a caution that it might be wise to wait before making transfers. But if you have made transfers, I don't think it will cause any particular problems; it's just that you might very well wish that you had gone with the View/Edit Budget route. Transfers can be undone, in any case, so you certainly haven't done any irreparable harm.

I'll see if I can get permission to give a more complete answer.

Are you talking about the "anticipated allotment" portion of the view budget screen? I seem to recall from some documentation that I've read recently (could be MLS release notes, could be something else entirely) that the budget screen would be significantly more helpful that it is at present.

I could be wrong. It's happened before.

Alan, when you indicate that we would be wise to hold off on making transfers I assume you are referring to transfers for the purpose of establishing auxiliary budgets? I have gone ahead and made the appropriate transfers to zero out the Bring Forward amounts for 2011. I hope I haven't spent an unnecessary amount of time??

Your comments please.

Thanks.

Freedom55 wrote:Alan, when you indicate that we would be wise to hold off on making transfers I assume you are referring to transfers for the purpose of establishing auxiliary budgets? I have gone ahead and made the appropriate transfers to zero out the Bring Forward amounts for 2011. I hope I haven't spent an unnecessary amount of time??

Yes, that's correct. Zeroing out the balances to carry forward into 2011 still seems like a good idea. I'm only talking about establishing auxiliary budgets by transferring funds from Budget:Budget Allocations into various subcategories.

Understood. Thanks for the clarification.

crislapi wrote: the easiest option is to leave all the allocations in Budget Allocations and instead use the view/edit budget screen to enter your yearly budget. Then at the end of the year, make a single transfer from Budget Allocations to each sub-category equal to the total yearly expenses. Transfers can be back-dated, so you could even wait to the start of the next year to do this.

Throughout the year, monitor the status of the budget using the Budget Report.

If this were done and all budget $ was left in the allocations pot, wouldn't the budget report, with categories, show everything as negative? I guess the allocations pot would be positive enough to cover everything, hopefully, but I read in another post that it would not be a good idea to include the allocations pot in the budget report.

At what point is it too late to do this? I would assume I could transfer all of our budget money back to allocations to start fresh since the stake has not entered percentages and made allotments yet. Also if an auxilary had a large carry-over that they would rather not lose, after transfering it back to allocations and 0ing out the category to make room for a fresh allocation, would it be appropriate to add the carry-over amount to the normal allocation (not actually transfering funds)?

wrigjef wrote:If this were done and all budget $ was left in the allocations pot, wouldn't the budget report, with categories, show everything as negative? I guess the allocations pot would be positive enough to cover everything, hopefully, but I read in another post that it would not be a good idea to include the allocations pot in the budget report.

For the fresh new year of 2011, the Budget report should show a bunch of zeroes. Then once you enter the budget amounts in View/Edit Budget, you'll see a lot of positive numbers. That's because the Budget Report shows for each subcategory a balance which is Budget + Balance Forward + Income - Expenses + Transfers, where Budget is the amount entered in View/Edit Budget.

wrigjef wrote:At what point is it too late to do this? I would assume I could transfer all of our budget money back to allocations to start fresh since the stake has not entered percentages and made allotments yet.

If your stake has not entered percentages yet, then they missed the deadline for Q1. That means that your ward will be receiving 0 dollars through the automatic transfer of Budget:Budget Allocations dollars, and so the stake must be planning to write each ward a check to give them their Q1 dollars.

But you can do set your ward budget amounts or make transfers at any time.

wrigjef wrote:Also if an auxilary had a large carry-over that they would rather not lose, after transfering it back to allocations and 0ing out the category to make room for a fresh allocation, would it be appropriate to add the carry-over amount to the normal allocation (not actually transfering funds)?

Perhaps, perhaps not. I addressed a very similar question in this post.