Is it Normal to have AMFA Sub-Categories

Prior to 3.3 my I/E Summary by Sub-Category screen looked correct, other than the old (pre CUBS) budget sub-categories that I zeroed out earlier (as per instruction) which are said to go away someday.

After I installed 3.3 a bunch (13) new entries showed in this report, all of them are our old Other sub-categories which are now labeled "Authorized Member Financed Activities". Is having these on the report expected?

ckmcdonald wrote:After I installed 3.3 a bunch (13) new entries showed in this report, all of them are our old Other sub-categories which are now labeled "Authorized Member Financed Activities". Is having these on the report expected?

Many reported those showing up a month or so ago. Yes, this is normal. Part of it is to avoid confusion with "Budget-Other" category.

You have 13 new subcategories that showed up under AMFA that were not there before? I haven't seen that yet, but my unit never uses AMFA so I might not be a good case.

Yes, it is normal to have AMFA sub-categories. It's actually policy. However, there are no automatically created ones. If they had income in them over the past 4 years, then they should be showing so you can clean them up as well. I did notice that CHQ sent my stake MLS all sorts of weird transfers, etc on Jan 6 2011 that duplicated all my Budget:Miscellaneous sub-categories and undid a lot of my transfers and category adjustments, messing up a lot of the work I had done to re-organize the finances in CUBS.

ckmcdonald wrote:Prior to 3.3 my I/E Summary by Sub-Category screen looked correct, other than the old (pre CUBS) budget sub-categories that I zeroed out earlier (as per instruction) which are said to go away someday.

All zeroed out subcategories will eventually go away. In the case of the subcategories of Budget Allocations (which is what I think you're referring to), you should really be making them inactive so that they don't show up on your reports anymore. Now that you are on 3.3, you can deactivate those subcategories.

ckmcdonald wrote:After I installed 3.3 a bunch (13) new entries showed in this report, all of them are our old Other sub-categories which are now labeled "Authorized Member Financed Activities". Is having these on the report expected?

Are you saying that categories appeared that were not there before post-CUBS? For my stake (and the wards in my stake) the subcategories of Other pre-CUBS became subcategories of AMFA post-CUBS. Nothing changed with subcategories simply because we installed MLS 3.3.

RussellHltn wrote:Many reported those showing up a month or so ago. Yes, this is normal. Part of it is to avoid confusion with "Budget-Other" category.

There is no "Budget-Other" -- that was renamed to "Budget:Miscellaneous" a while back. And the AMFA category appeared with the CUBS transition, so I don't see how this has anything to do with avoiding confusion.

One thing I noticed with MLS 3.3 is that the sub-categories display differently than they did before. Instead of displaying as Other:AMFA:Boy Scout Camp (for example), the subcategories only show 2 levels deep. So the list displays Other: AMFA, and separately (at the top because AMFA comes first alphabetically), I see AMFA:Boy Scout Camp. IIRC, the Fast Offerings subcategories appear similarly.

aebrown wrote:All zeroed out subcategories will eventually go away. In the case of the subcategories of Budget Allocations (which is what I think you're referring to), you should really be making them inactive so that they don't show up on your reports anymore. Now that you are on 3.3, you can deactivate those subcategories.

I would wait at least a week after making the transactions before I inactivated the categories. I think this is part of what messed up my finances. On Jan 2 2011, I zeroed out all my Budget:Budget Allocation subcategories and inactivated them all. I also made transfers from Budget Allocations to my other budget sub-categories to zero out expenses. I then inactivated the subcategories I no longer wanted to use and transmitted. The next time I was on the computer to do a send/receive (Jan 6), everything got messed up. I think it's because I had transmitted my transfers and adjustments to CHQ on the 2nd, but when they came back to confirm them on the 6th, some of the categories were inactive.

I would at least wait until the status of all expenses and transfers within the sub-category is "cleared".

crislapi wrote:You have 13 new subcategories that showed up under AMFA that were not there before?

aebrown wrote:Are you saying that categories appeared that were not there before post-CUBS?

Yes, they weren't there after CUBS but showed up a couple of weeks ago when I installed 3.3. The list of categories in this report is alphabetical. The top category was "Book of Mormon" prior. When I installed 3.3 the 13 new AMFA categories are now at the top of the list - that's primarily how I noticed them. There is a slim possibility they were there before if 3.3 renamed them from old names that were down near the bottom of the alphabetical list. I doubt it though - seems like I would have noticed 13 of them regardless of their names.

aebrown wrote:All zeroed out subcategories will eventually go away. In the case of the subcategories of Budget Allocations (which is what I think you're referring to), you should really be making them inactive so that they don't show up on your reports anymore. Now that you are on 3.3, you can deactivate those subcategories.

Thanks for the tip. I wasn't aware 3.3 added this feature.

ckmcdonald wrote:The top category was "Book of Mormon" prior. When I installed 3.3 the 13 new AMFA categories are now at the top of the list - that's primarily how I noticed them. There is a slim possibility they were there before if 3.3 renamed them from old names that were down near the bottom of the alphabetical list. I doubt it though - seems like I would have noticed 13 of them regardless of their names.

That is probably what happened, though. Before 3.3, they were called Other:AMFA:XXXX. 3.3 shows them as AFMA:XXXX. Because they are now at the top of the list, they are much more noticeable. Before they seemed to hide down with the Reimbursed Expenses.

allenjpl wrote:One thing I noticed with MLS 3.3 is that the sub-categories display differently than they did before. Instead of displaying as Other:AMFA:Boy Scout Camp (for example), the subcategories only show 2 levels deep. So the list displays Other: AMFA, and separately (at the top because AMFA comes first alphabetically), I see AMFA:Boy Scout Camp. IIRC, the Fast Offerings subcategories appear similarly.

Yes, that's how they display. But note that they may still actually reside deeper in the hierarchy. For example, what is displayed as "AMFA:Scout Camp" is actually "Other:AMFA:Scout Camp". Or what is displayed as "Miscellaneous:Cub Scouts" is actually "Budget:Miscellaneous:Cub Scouts".

Since we're only allowed to add subcategories down one level from a standard category, this new way of displaying subcategories is unambiguous but takes less room. However, it does require some vigilance because the alphabetical sorting means that subcategories in a major category (such as "Budget") no longer group together.

So if you want to create an Income and Expense Report, Summary by Subcategory, for example, and you want to include all subcategories (however deep) of Budget, you need to make sure you include all the subcategories, even though most of the Budget categories are up with the B's, but the Miscellaneous are down with the M's and if you have a "Young Women:Beehives" subcategory, it's down in the Y's. When you check the box by "Budget:Young Women" MLS will automatically check all subcategories of "Young Women", so this isn't too hard, but you need to be aware that you might be including subcategories you can't even see on the screen right then.

aebrown wrote:There is no "Budget-Other" -- that was renamed to "Budget:Miscellaneous" a while back. And the AMFA category appeared with the CUBS transition, so I don't see how this has anything to do with avoiding confusion.

I had to go back to the old threads. I remembered the confusion but not the order. Yes, AMFA came first. I think it may be in part to provide instruction on how "Other" was to be used, and to distinguish it from things such as adjustments.