Missing Budget subcategory

Interesting quirk when writing checks and I have already sent a MLS message to SL. I was writing checks in the clerks office and had a request for an expense to be taken out of a budget category that was not in the dropdown. I was certain that we had designated that sub-category so I checked the budget report and it was listed. The report said that it has been a few months since the subcategory was used but it is listed. Not sure why it is not available in the expense drop down.

wrigjef wrote:Interesting quirk when writing checks and I have already sent a MLS message to SL. I was writing checks in the clerks office and had a request for an expense to be taken out of a budget category that was not in the dropdown. I was certain that we had designated that sub-category so I checked the budget report and it was listed. The report said that it has been a few months since the subcategory was used but it is listed. Not sure why it is not available in the expense drop down.

Is there any chance that subcategory is inactive? Inactive categories will not appear in the dropdown list when entering expenses, but they will appear on the budget report if they have any activity or a balance forward on the budget report.

I have had issues where patches from CHQ have deactivated seemingly random budget categories, even ones that were being used and carrying a balance. As ae_brown stated, all it takes is making the subcategory active again. This can be done in Finances under add/update categories, select Budget and then navigate to the appropriate subcategory. Once it is selected, make sure the check box in the right panel that says "Active" has a check in it. If it doesn't, click on it once so it does. Then save and exit and you can now cut checks against that subcategory.

For awhile, this was happening so frequently that I made it a point to check each time I turned on MLS to reactivate the ones we are using (and deactivate the ones we are not that have mysteriously been activated). It seems to have calmed down a bit in recent weeks, but for awhile there were about half-dozen of each type each week.

Yes I found this category as inactive and checked it's box again. to the best of my knowledge it deactivated itself so it may be a good tip (for me) not to freak out immediately when a category is not available but check and see it's active first.