atticusewig wrote:In our stake, our auditors are instructed to use the "Custom" option for the date range in the Income/Expense report, and set it to the audit period. That way any changes made after the audit period won't affect balancing the "Other" account.
Unfortunately, the above statement is not true. In MLS you can make corrections to checks and donations after the fact (even after the year end), which will affect reports for earlier time periods.
For example, I can generate an Income and Expense report for Jan 1-Jun 30 and print it out. Then on August 20 I notice that a check written for $100 against the Other category on April 15 really should have been in the Budget category. I go to the check and change the category of the check.
If I now run that same Income and Expense report, I will find that there is $100 less in expenses, and a resulting balance that is $100 higher. This happens because the MLS transaction that makes the correction has a date of April 15, even though the transaction that shows the correction on the Church Unit Financial Statement will have a date of August 20. In my opinion, this is incorrect. A transaction automatically generated in MLS should have the same date it will have on the CUFS.
This odd way of doing accounting creates a moving target. You can't have a consistent month-end close, you can't have a reliable Income and Expense Report for a past time period, and you can't go back and reconcile a previous month and expect to see the same numbers you saw when you reconciled it the first time. I just spent two hours with a ward financial clerk trying to dig through a maze of transactions and corrections, some affecting the previous year, and many affecting previous months, and it was a lot harder than it had to be, since I could not generate reports that corresponded properly to any CUFS.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.
