Using Ward Donations To Purchase BOMs

I'm a new Financial Clerk, so perhaps this is not a complex problem. But it is new to me.
Our ward collected donations for Book of Mormons for our ward. Evidently there previously was a Ward Mission sub-account for this, but during the system update sometime in the last few months, (b4 me) it got rolled into the Ward Mission category.
Our Bishop would like to spend that amount on a supply of BOMs for the ward. How do we place an order with distribution for the books, and make sure the money comes from the Ward Mission account?

papajohnallen wrote:How do we place an order with distribution for the books, and make sure the money comes from the Ward Mission account?

You don't. Distribution Center expenses are automatically charged to the Budget: Distribution Center Expenses category. As I understand it, and as CUBS has forced, Ward Missionary is only for supporting missionaries. Expenses for your local ward mission plan come from budget.

If you did in fact have members donate for the specific purpose of buying Book or Mormons for the ward, these should have been collected in Other instead of Ward Missionary. What I would suggest doing, then, is going back and editing each of those donations, changing the donation category from Ward Missionary to a subcategory you create in Other for this purpose.

This however still leaves you with the problem of having the money in one major category and the expense for it in another.

Once the expense appears, you might be able to recategorize it to this Other subcategory. It seems at least some of the old barriers to allowing this have been removed. While it seems the easiest would be to recategorize the donations to Budget, this is expressly not allowed per church policy. Hopefully a couple other replies can give you some additional ideas as well.

You could take crislapi's suggestion. It is possible to recategorize a distribution expense to an Other category. I just did it this week.

Another approach you could take is to document the episode on paper and include it with the expense documentation. Then change the category from Distribution Orders to Ward Missionary. I'm sure the system will allow it, although I haven't tried it. If you are going to do this though, I recommend lots and lots of detail. Go back to the original donation slips and identify every penny that was donated for this purpose. Mark the dates, the donors, and the amounts on documentation you supply with the expense record. If an auditor comes through and finds the expense, you want a clear explanation and easy trail to follow showing where every penny came from. However, be forewarned that going this route may be easier, but you'll probably get chastised for it during the audit.

crislapi wrote:Hopefully a couple other replies can give you some additional ideas as well.

I suppose that after you recategorize the donations to "other", you could then just write a check from the other account and deposit it in the distribution center account.

mlh78 wrote:I suppose that after you recategorize the donations to "other", you could then just write a check from the other account and deposit it in the distribution center account.

Thank you all for your responses, this is very helpful. Going through months of slips will be a pain, but after that it is straight forward.