Tracking stake budget and expenses and allotment

Does anyone have a form or spreadsheet that allows a Stake Clerk to track the status of the Budget, Expenses, and Allotment for the Stake?

I am looking for a "simple" way to track what the Stake budget expenses are, what the units have spent in a month, and compare those numbers to the annual budget allocations, and the future allotments based on Quarterly Attendance...

The Financial Clerk in my Stake is putting one together, but I wondered if anyone already had something put together that they would like to share.

I am doing it inside the Stake MLS. Very tedious, but it does work.

I enter the allotment as well as the information from the Stake President's report. Same info that would go in a spreadsheet.

We are purely experimental at this point, but so far so good.

Can we make this a Feature Request for MLS? By the time the Stake President's report comes in, the information is getting pretty stale. Then I would have to hand-enter the data into a spreadsheet to make much use of it. It would be wonderful if each unit budget showed as a line item on the Stake budget, with MLS making the adjustments as Ward financial data is sent to Salt Lake City. The Stake Budget in MLS would then be much more meaningful.

It is definitely a feature that could be used. I am doing it, but it is terribly time consuming the way it is.....

wadeburt wrote:I am doing it [tracking ward expenses] inside the Stake MLS. Very tedious, but it does work.

Could you please clarify what you are doing? I suppose one option is that you are entering expense and income records for each ward by category into Stake MLS. However, that not only sounds tedious, but it would also make it impossible to track the stake budget (by that, I mean the portion of the total allocation that is allocated to the stake unit), because ward expenses would be jumbled in with the stake expenses. But perhaps you have a clever way to handle that issue I haven't thought of.

I personally use a spreadsheet. It was a bit of a challenge to set up, but the work each month, quarter, and year is very minimal now. Each month I enter the expenses for each ward and the stake account. Each quarter I enter the attendance figures for each quarter into one worksheet, which automatically calculates the budget allocation for each ward and for the stake account. The spreadsheet also automatically creates the letters that I send to each bishop each quarter letting them know what their quarterly budget allocation is, detailing the source of those allocations (general, youth, primary, YSA). Each year I create a new spreadsheet and clear out the values I entered, calculating any carryforward of unsued allocations.

I see no reason to do any of this in MLS, since I would still have to create a summary page for my stake president each month, and generate budget allocation letters for the bishops each quarter. If MLS had separate accounting for each ward where the financial summary data was automatically downloaded to Stake MLS, it would save me a minute or two per month. But there is no way that MLS would implement our stake's particular method for dividing the budget allocation among the wards and the stake account, so I would still have to do the vast majority of this work in a spreadsheet anyway.

I don't see why we shouldn't ask for features in MLS so that the work can be done within it. It's going to take multiple features to do it all, but that's no reason not to ask for it.

Alan_Brown wrote:I personally use a spreadsheet.

Would you mind sharing your spreadsheet template here on the forum for others to use? (Taking all data out...)

RussellHltn wrote:I don't see why we shouldn't ask for features in MLS so that the work can be done within it. It's going to take multiple features to do it all, but that's no reason not to ask for it.

I agree with Russell. MLS is a tool. It is not a fully useful tool if it does not provide the functionality the users (that would be most of us) need from it.

Alan_Brown wrote: But there is no way that MLS would implement our stake's particular method...

Granted stakes have flexibility in handling the allocations. Our stake doesn't do monthly allocations to units. Rather the presidency sets an annual allocation based on 3Q numbers. Some units grow or shrink during the year, but it tends to even out somewhat and there is a mechanism in place to accommodate a unit that might need an increase in allocation mid way through the year due to growth. And, no, we don't take back money if a unit shrinks; at least we haven't so far.

MLS is software. It can be programmed to deal with flexibility. Might not be easy or the highest priority, but it is reasonable to have it on the list, wherever that list is.

JLRose wrote:MLS is software. It can be programmed to deal with flexibility. Might not be easy or the highest priority, but it is reasonable to have it on the list, wherever that list is.

MLS used to be a Planning section on the Stake side of MLS for deciding unit budget amounts (by attendance and a "fudge" factor). Unfortunately it (1) does not use the same formula for attendance as the reports we get from SLC, (2) does not link to the budget numbers created in the form to the budget, and (3) does not pull expense totals from the units for Stake Financial clerks to see what the % of expenses are for each unit on a monthly basis. I did not see the function in the 2.7.2 version of the TEST STAKE 2224445.

Was this taken away? If it is still there, the functionality seems to be programmed into MLS, it just isn't "there yet".

opee wrote:Would you mind sharing your spreadsheet template here on the forum for others to use? (Taking all data out...)

Here is the spreadsheet I use. It certainly assumes certain practices unique to our stake. For instance, our stake president has a standard practice of allowing wards to carry forward a maximum of $x (I set this to $1500 in the sample spreadsheet) of unused budget funds into the next year. The stake takes a standard percentage of the total allocation for stake purposes (I set this to 25% in the sample).

This has been helpful for me -- it takes just a few minutes each month to maintain, and sending out letters to the bishops for new quarterly allocations is a breeze. Maybe others will find it helpful, too.

Alan_Brown wrote:This has been helpful for me -- it takes just a few minutes each month to maintain, and sending out letters to the bishops for new quarterly allocations is a breeze. Maybe others will find it helpful, too.

Thanks for sharing. I will have the Financial Clerk play with it and let you know if he has any questions or give you any feedback. I like what you put together.

Yes, very nice. Thanks for sharing it with all of us.

The spreadsheet has been nice to use--thanks again for sharing.

In our Stake MLS, we have budget categories for each unit in the Stake. The categories have a Budget "allotment" that we have entered into MLS, but each month there obviously is never anything taken out of the budget category for the units because the Stake financial does not pull from the ward financial numbers.

Our Stake Financial Clerk was wondering if you could just add an "expense" (not a check) each month during the reconciliation for each Unit's expense so that it will show up in the MLS Budget category as the expenses that are incurred. If this "expense" is created during reconciliation (like is done with Distribution Center orders), will money be taken out of the Stake's funds from SLC (as an actual expense) or will it just be a "phantom" expense that only shows up locally on MLS? If the latter, then it would allow a Stake to track the expenses of the units from month to month.

(Hope this make sense)

opee wrote:In our Stake MLS, we have budget categories for each unit in the Stake. The categories have a Budget "allotment" that we have entered into MLS, but each month there obviously is never anything taken out of the budget category for the units because the Stake financial does not pull from the ward financial numbers.

Our Stake Financial Clerk was wondering if you could just add an "expense" (not a check) each month during the reconciliation for each Unit's expense so that it will show up in the MLS Budget category as the expenses that are incurred. If this "expense" is created during reconciliation (like is done with Distribution Center orders), will money be taken out of the Stake's funds from SLC (as an actual expense) or will it just be a "phantom" expense that only shows up locally on MLS? If the latter, then it would allow a Stake to track the expenses of the units from month to month.

Creating an expense record in MLS does not pull any funds from your stake account -- it's only an MLS entry. So the technique you propose would not create any problem of that sort, and so it could be a viable way to track ward budget expenditures at the stake level. You would just create an expense entry for each ward each month. On your reconciliation you would immediately check it off as cleared.

Personally, I would find this technique to be quite confusing. I want the stake MLS financial records to match the actual stake account. Every transaction on the CUFS shows up in MLS somewhere, and almost all MLS transactions show up on the CUFS (the only exceptions would be transfers between subcategories of a single account, such as a transfer from Other to Other:Scouts because a check had been incorrectly categorized).

I also do a regular reconciliation of the Budget category against the CUFS YTD figures, and this would become rather unwieldy with the phantom categories and expenses. So I'll probably stick with my current system, although I can see some benefit in looking at the entire stake budget as a whole from within MLS.

I would prefer to see a new feature of MLS that would help stakes in tracking the entire stake allocation, broken down by wards, with ward expenditures (probably just a monthly summary) downloaded automatically to stake MLS.

Alan_Brown wrote:Every transaction on the CUFS...

CUFS = Church Unit Financial Statement?? Not sure if that it the correct acronymn...

opee wrote:CUFS = Church Unit Financial Statement?? Not sure if that it the correct acronymn...

CUFS does stand for Church Unit Financial Statement.

My marvelous asst. clerk has prepared a bunch of spread sheets. The budget page shows each ward by month and year to date expenditures compared to assigned budget and over/under year end and YTD totals. Fast offering page shows contribution by month, disbursments by month and store house $ by ward and year end totals. Missionary page shows ward $ on hand in the missionary budget so we can send excess to HQ. On the Quarterly report page he tracks each wards statistics by quarter for the last 5 rears. Great info when it's time to divide wards. You aught to see this stuff!!! Real ammo for the Stake Pres. when he ppi's the bishops. I guess you can do this kind of stuff when you are retired. All this stuff comes right off the monthly financial reports and quarterly reports and reports from the store house. Let me know if any one wants to use Super LEE's Excell forms.

Nice!

If you want, you should be able to attach it to your message.

Merlin Oleson wrote:Real ammo for the Stake Pres. when he ppi's the bishops.

Yikes, tough Stake President! j/k

Attached are SUPER LEE'S SPREAD SHEETS

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