Budget balances

Can anyone tell me why the Actual Balance in MLS does not equal the Balance Available shown when issuing a check? It is off by a relatively small amount.

Also, the Allocation Categories for YOUNG WOMEN, YOUNG MEN, and GENERAL? do not show a balance in the Budget Report, but when I tried to inactivate these categories, a message indicated that this could not be done because they had negative balances. I thought these categories were zeroed out earlier.

One more item: The output from the Income and Expense Report shows a balance of 25.00 for an "other account" called "Temple Patron Assistance." It does not show up as an option to transfer and it is not swept out by Headquarters each month. It just sits there. I would like to get rid of it. It is included in the total for Other in the Income and Expense Report, but not in the bank statement.

khasay wrote:Can anyone tell me why the Actual Balance in MLS does not equal the Balance Available shown when issuing a check? It is off by a relatively small amount.

What do you mean by "Actual Balance" -- where are you seeing that? And when you say "Balance Available" are you talking about the "Remaining Budget" that is printed on the "Expense Report" that is printed right after a batch of checks are printed?

khasay wrote:Also, the Allocation Categories for YOUNG WOMEN, YOUNG MEN, and GENERAL? do not show a balance in the Budget Report, but when I tried to inactivate these categories, a message indicated that this could not be done because they had negative balances. I thought these categories were zeroed out earlier.

When you say "Allocation Categories" are you referring to subcategories of the "Budget Allocation" subcategory of Budget? If so, then it is good that you are trying to inactivate these categories. You think these were zeroed out earlier, but there may have been some activity in the meantime (and some of that activity may have been initiated by CHQ via CUBS with no action on your part). You could print out a Detail report to see the transactions for each of the subcategories.

But in any case, when you try to inactivate these categories, a message will pop up showing the actual balance. You can use that balance to tell you the correct amount to transfer in or out of that subcategory to truly bring it to zero. Then you can inactivate the categories.

khasay wrote:One more item: The output from the Income and Expense Report shows a balance of 25.00 for an "other account" called "Temple Patron Assistance." It does not show up as an option to transfer and it is not swept out by Headquarters each month. It just sits there. I would like to get rid of it. It is included in the total for Other in the Income and Expense Report, but not in the bank statement.

You'll need to call Local Unit Support to get help with that Temple Patron Assistance balance.

khasay wrote:Can anyone tell me why the Actual Balance in MLS does not equal the Balance Available shown when issuing a check? It is off by a relatively small amount.

If you mean the "Remaining Budget" figure on the Expense Report, then note that the amount shown there is the actual dollars in your Budget category. That number can no longer be seen anywhere else in MLS directly, now that we can't see the Budget category on the Income and Expense Report. But you can calculate it as follows:

1. Under Finances, go to View/Edit Budget. Then take the Total number at the bottom of the Actual column (that will be the sum of the balance forward, any quarterly allocations, and any "Miscellaneous" values).
2. From a Budget Report (Summary) for the Current Year, take the sum of Income, Expenses, and Transfers (or subtract Balance from Budget, which should give you the same number).
3. Subtract the second number from the first. That should equal the number on your Expense Report for "Remaining Budget".

If the value in step 1 above equals your Budget (the amount shown as "Budget Assigned by Unit" on the View/Edit Budget screen), then you will see the same number on your Expense Report as on your Balance for a Budget Report. If they are different, that difference will be reflected in your Remaining Budget figure.

khasay wrote:Also, the Allocation Categories for YOUNG WOMEN, YOUNG MEN, and GENERAL? do not show a balance in the Budget Report, but when I tried to inactivate these categories, a message indicated that this could not be done because they had negative balances. I thought these categories were zeroed out earlier.

I don't mean to disagree with aebrown, as it usually means I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that, with CUBS, you cannot make any of the CUBS default sub-categories inactive. You can only do that with custom categories you created. The error message might be just be a generic warning that hasn't been updated for CUBS yet.

crislapi wrote:I don't mean to disagree with aebrown, as it usually means I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that, with CUBS, you cannot make any of the CUBS default sub-categories inactive. You can only do that with custom categories you created. The error message might be just be a generic warning that hasn't been updated for CUBS yet.

I wasn't referring to the built-in subcategories -- for those you are correct; they cannot be deactivated. I was talking about subcategories of Budget Allocations (which I assumed was the topic because of the reference to "Allocation Categories" -- but that could be an incorrect assumption). They were supposed to be deactivated by the upgrade to MLS 3.3.1, but if they are still around and have balances, they need to be dealt with.

I don't think I have expressed myself clearly. A setup file was initiated by Headquarters to correct a minor problem with the other accounts. This triggered a mess in the other accounts as was shown in the Income and Expense Report. Sub Categories were added that had previously been zeroed out and negative and positive values were assigned to these categories. I was able to correct this problem through a series of transfers and all is well there now. The balances in the two remaining other categories are correct.

However, another situation was created in the Budget area. As you know, three Budget Allocation categories showed up after CUBS was initiated (BU-GENERAL WARD FUND, BU-YOUNG MEN, and BU-YOUNG WOMEN. Very early on, these Budget Allocation categories were zeroed out and eventually, we were able to setup the budget, and everything is functioning fine. However the three Budget Allocation categories eluded to above are now showing up in the budget report. The Detailed Budget Report reveals that the balance for each of these categories is zero. However, when I go to the "Add/Edit Budget Categories' (may not be exact name, I am writing this from home), and try to inactivate these categories, I am not allowed to do it. The reason given is that each of these Budget Allocation Categories has a negative balance. Remember the balances are zero in the Detail Budget Report. I am almost certain that this was not the case before the setup file was initiated. It is discouraging since everything was going well before the setup file. I really think this is a problem that should be dealt with at headquarters, and I have sent a message to them. Please disregard the other situations that I described in my original message. By the way, we have upgraded to MLS 3.3.1 and I don't think the three Budget Allocation categories showed up in the Budget Report before the Setup file. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

khasay wrote:As you know, three Budget Allocation categories showed up after CUBS was initiated (BU-GENERAL WARD FUND, BU-YOUNG MEN, and BU-YOUNG WOMEN.

Any category preceded by "BU-" and listed as a sub-category in Budget:Budget Allocations are carryover categories from your pre-CUBS budget. They carried forward because at some point in the previous 4 (now 5) years deposits (income) had been put into these categories. Still, it sounds like you zeroed them as you were supposed to. The point I'd make is that this did not happen in every unit, and in those that it did, the carry-over categories are unique to their pre-CUBS budget categories.

khasay wrote:The Detailed Budget Report reveals that the balance for each of these categories is zero. However, when I go to the "Add/Edit Budget Categories' (may not be exact name, I am writing this from home), and try to inactivate these categories, I am not allowed to do it. The reason given is that each of these Budget Allocation Categories has a negative balance. Remember the balances are zero in the Detail Budget Report. I am almost certain that this was not the case before the setup file was initiated. It is discouraging since everything was going well before the setup file.

Budget reports cannot cross fiscal years, so a detailed budget report will not show you the running total in your subcategories. Try running a detailed budget report for each fiscal year available (2008-2011) to see if one of these years has a balance. Once you've identified it, you can correct it.

The most likely problem is that a check was cut from one of these categories instead of the correct category (the one NOT listed under budget allocations). Fixing it is simply a matter of correcting the category the check is drawn from.

khasay wrote:The Detailed Budget Report reveals that the balance for each of these categories is zero. However, when I go to the "Add/Edit Budget Categories' (may not be exact name, I am writing this from home), and try to inactivate these categories, I am not allowed to do it. The reason given is that each of these Budget Allocation Categories has a negative balance. Remember the balances are zero in the Detail Budget Report.

I did indeed understand your situation, and the advice I gave will indeed fix the problem. I did leave out one detail -- the date of the transfer. Let me explain in more detail.

Each Budget subcategory has two balances:

1. One is the Budget allowance balance, which starts each year at zero. On the Budget Report, it works with the allocated budget amount (in View/Edit Budget) and the various income, expense, and transfer transactions to produce a remaining balance.
2. The other is a hard number balance, but this is not visible hardly anywhere in MLS. It used to be visible in the Income and Expense Report, but with MLS 3.3.1, we are no longer allowed to see Budget subcategories on that report. The only place you can see that balance that I know of is when you try to delete or deactivate a category -- then you are shown the balance if it is not zero.

It's this second number that has to be zero in order to deactivate a subcategory. The fact that the Budget report shows it with a zero balance is irrelevant. So what is the fix?

First check to see if there is a transaction (it will certainly be in last year) that affects the balance. You can use a detail report to try to track it down. That's basically what crislapi suggested in his post. And it is sound advice that you should try first. But if you can't find the transaction, you can still fix the problem as follows:

1. Create a transfer to bring that balance to zero. If the balance is negative, transfer money into it; if it is positive transfer money from it.
2. Here's the important detail I omitted in my last post: Date the transfer 31 Dec 2010 (or any date in last year). A transfer dated last year will have no effect on this year's Budget Report, but it will bring the hard balance to zero, which is the essential prerequisite to deactivating a subcategory.
3. Then you can deactivate the category in Add/Update Categories.

aebrown wrote:Create a transfer to bring that balance to zero. If the balance is negative, transfer money into it; if it is positive transfer money from it.

Thank you. I will try that today. I know that I did that earlier and had them zeroed out. Now my worry is that all three numbers are negative and for a substantial amount (total ~ $1,500.00). Won't transfers into these categores affect the carry over from 2010? It would most certainly be negative.

Our balance in the Bank Statement now agrees with the balance in MLS. A negative carry over would have a major impact on the MLS balance, what about the Bank Statement????

khasay wrote:Thank you. I will try that today. I know that I did that earlier and had them zeroed out. Now my worry is that all three numbers are negative and for a substantial amount (total ~ $1,500.00). Won't transfers into these categores affect the carry over from 2010? It would most certainly be negative.

For budget subcategories, there is no carry over from 2010 (each budget subcategory balance starts at zero for each new year, as seen on the Budget Report), so you can't possibly affect it by creating a transfer dated in 2010. There is a carry forward for the Budget category as a whole, which you can see in the View/Edit Budget screen. But since you will be transferring from one Budget category to another, there will be no net change in that carry forward amount.

khasay wrote:Our balance in the Bank Statement now agrees with the balance in MLS. A negative carry over would have a major impact on the MLS balance, what about the Bank Statement????

Again, since you are only moving money between subcategories, there will be no impact on the MLS balance, or the balance at CHQ as reported on the Unit Financial Statement.

I am going over to the Church this morning to make transfers dated 31 Dec 2010. I wont be transferring among the three Budget Allocation categories since they are all negative. I assume I will be transferring from Budget Allocations to each of the three subs i.e., BU WARD GENEAL FUND, BU YOUNG WOMEN, AND BU YOUNG MEN. The three negative values are included in the Budget Allocation Balance so transfers among them will have no effect .. right?

khasay wrote:I am going over to the Church this morning to make transfers dated 31 Dec 2010. I wont be transferring among the three Budget Allocation categories since they are all negative. I assume I will be transferring from Budget Allocations to each of the three subs i.e., BU WARD GENEAL FUND, BU YOUNG WOMEN, AND BU YOUNG MEN. The three negative values are included in the Budget Allocation Balance so transfers among them will have no effect .. right?

Right. As long as your transfers are within the realm of Budget Allocations, the total of Budget Allocations will be unaffected, which is definitely what you want. So given that the subcategories have negative balances, the right approach would be to transfer from Budget Allocations to Budget Allocations:BY YOUNG MEN, etc.

I have gone back to 31 Dec 2010 and made transfers from the three Budget Allocation Subcategories to Budget Allocations and zeroed them out. I was able to inactivate these sub categories in Add/Edit Categories as their values are now zero. These sub categories no longer show up on the Budget Reports and all appears to be in great shape. I really appreciate your help!!!!!

I would like to mention one thing. Earlier, (before my communications with you) when I made the transfers in my "Other" sub categories to correct balances generated by the Set up file, I did not go back to 31-Dec-2010. However, I was able to inactivate all but the two sub categories that I wanted to remain. The balances in these two sub categories are correct. I hope that is OK. Thanks again.

khasay wrote:I would like to mention one thing. Earlier, (before my communications with you) when I made the transfers in my "Other" sub categories to correct balances generated by the Set up file, I did not go back to 31-Dec-2010. However, I was able to inactivate all but the two sub categories that I wanted to remain. The balances in these two sub categories are correct. I hope that is OK. Thanks again.

It's best to analyze the situation completely and determine what the date of the transactions is that you have to adjust to bring the balance to zero. If you can do that, then you can correct the transaction; that may involve a category adjustment, or a transfer with the same date.

But the transfer method we have been discussing in the last few posts is a reasonable shortcut to bring the balance to zero. The reason I recommend using a date in last year is that it has the effect of adjusting the balance for the subcategory you want to deactivate without producing any transactions that will affect the current year's reports. But the Budget Allocations subcategory is specifically excluded from Budget Reports starting with MLS 3.3.1, so even that is not an issue in this particular case.

Thanks again. You have been a great help.