Fast Offering Reports

I was in a Bishop training meeting last Sunday and they asked me how to get year-to-date information regarding fast offering receipts and expenditures. I am a stake finance clerk so I don't have fast offering options in MLS. I recall trying to figure out this question several weeks ago while visiting a ward, but was thrown off by the double fast offering categories. Any ideas on how to produce this information?

They can run an Income and Expense report for the Fast Offering category and all sub-categories. That will indicate the amounts received and paid out.

allenjpl wrote:They can run an Income and Expense report for the Fast Offering category and all sub-categories. That will indicate the amounts received and paid out.

That is what I first suggested, until I found out that they all have two fast offering categories, neither of which seem to be accurate.

mlh78 wrote:That is what I first suggested, until I found out that they all have two fast offering categories, neither of which seem to be accurate.

Although I have seen a unit with two fast offering categories, every transaction is indeed there, although it seems to be arbitrary which of the two categories a particular donation or expense has. But if you add the two categories, you do get a correct balance. You should be able to check this by comparing the sum of the two categories for a specific period (say the month of January) with what you see on the stake's Consolidated Financial Statement. If they match, then the challenge is simply to get all the transactions in one category. You can run a I&E detail report for each of the categories to see where the bulk of the transactions are, and recategorize the others to be in that category.

That's tedious, but should work. I imagine that Local Unit Support can also help sort this out. Ultimately that really needs to happen, since there's no good future in having two fast offering categories.

aebrown wrote:You can run a I&E detail report for each of the categories to see where the bulk of the transactions are, and recategorize the others to be in that category.

That's tedious, but should work. I imagine that Local Unit Support can also help sort this out. Ultimately that really needs to happen, since there's no good future in having two fast offering categories.

I have been operating on the assumption that the duplicate fast offering category is a temporary glitch that will eventually be solved without involvement by the clerks. I guess that is not the case. Something that would be tremendously helpful to me would be a list of common CUBS problems and which ones need clerk involvement and which ones only require patience as LUS and the software people patch things up.

aebrown wrote:You should be able to check this by comparing the sum of the two categories for a specific period (say the month of January) with what you see on the stake's Consolidated Financial Statement.

On a related note - does anyone know why the Consolidated Financial Statement does not contain year-to-date comparisons of fast offering receipts to disbursements for each unit? That information, which was contained in the Stake Financial Summary, was invaluable to our stake president in monitoring fast offerings.

mlh78 wrote:I have been operating on the assumption that the duplicate fast offering category is a temporary glitch that will eventually be solved without involvement by the clerks. I guess that is not the case.

I did not mean to imply that the problem with two fast offering categories is anything but a temporary glitch. I was simply giving a potential workaround that may improve reporting if the reports you mentioned are needed before the problem gets fixed.