Authorized Member Financed Activites ballance not in sync with HQ

We are finishing up our mid-year audits and discovering rampant spreading of the previously discussed issue with the MLS balance in the Other/Authorized Member Financed Activities not being in sync with the amounts reported on the Unit Financial Statement.

The problem is recurring in units where it has been corrected with calls to CHQ, and expanding to units that have not been previously affected. 75% of the units in my stake are currently out of balance. In one unit, MLS shows they have a total AMFA (parent and subs) balance over $1500, but the unit financial summary reports a negative balance.

As far as I am concerned, this must be a programing error in MLS. There is no action a clerk can take to create or correct the problem since the implementation of CUBS.

I am becoming far beyond mildly irritated that these bugs are so persistent nearly a year past the CUBS rollout. Is there a contact or office where some pressure can be placed to get these ongoing CUBS issues solved beyond the rinse and repeat process of contacting MLS support for each unit?

daveywest wrote:Is there a contact or office where some pressure can be placed to get these ongoing CUBS issues solved beyond the rinse and repeat process of contacting MLS support for each unit?

You could try to call LUS and ask to talk to a supervisor. (I've not tried that myself).

Or, sometimes the best way to deal with a problem is to make it someone else's problem. <evil grin> "Rinse and repeat" as often as possible to tie up the support people and have the call log reflect how much time is being spent dealing with it. Since there seems to be nothing you can do at your end, you'll pretty much have to go this route anyway.

You might ask each ward clerk to help you out by each one making a call for their unit. (If support questions this, they should reply that they have consulted the stake but calling support is the only recourse.)

daveywest wrote:We are finishing up our mid-year audits and discovering rampant spreading of the previously discussed issue with the MLS balance in the Other/Authorized Member Financed Activities not being in sync with the amounts reported on the Unit Financial Statement.

The problem is recurring in units where it has been corrected with calls to CHQ, and expanding to units that have not been previously affected. 75% of the units in my stake are currently out of balance. In one unit, MLS shows they have a total AMFA (parent and subs) balance over $1500, but the unit financial summary reports a negative balance.

After the October 2010 changeover, did the clerks of the affected units verify their Other:AMFA balances? For example, in my ward we had (not real numbers) $18,000 in the parent category, but -$16,000 in the subcategories, resulting in an overall balance of $2,000. I then had to recreate the AMFA categories and appropriately transfer from the parent account to the subcategories to recreate the pre-changeover balances. Any amounts out of balance with the previous week's account balance should have been investigated. When did the out-of-balance condition reveal itself? Did the amounts match up with the partial October-November 2010 CUFS?

RussellHltn wrote:(If support questions this, they should reply that they have consulted the stake but calling support is the only recourse.)

For this issue, they actually prefer working with/through the ward clerk while he is sitting at the computer. They typically have the clerk perform a send/receive in which they pull in a backup. That is sent on to the programmers, and within a day or two, a setup file is sent down to correct the issue.

crislapi wrote:For this issue, they actually prefer working with/through the ward clerk while he is sitting at the computer. They typically have the clerk perform a send/receive in which they pull in a backup. That is sent on to the programmers, and within a day or two, a setup file is sent down to correct the issue.

I did exactly this a few months ago. When the process finished, our balance discrepancy was greatly reduced but still not eliminated. Afterward the stake financial clerk and I did a follow-up review of our records and finally noticed that the AMFA out-of-balance amount exactly matched our donations in the Temple Patron Assistance category. He's also found the same problem in other units in our stake. LUS told him that this is a known issue, and to date it isn't solved for us.

I can provide another stake where this is seen. By the end of February, we had cleaned up ALL 13 of our unit Finances and balances matched between MLS and Finance statements. We have found about 75% of the units in this last round of audits with balances that do not match anymore... in the stake this happened in the month of June.

I can only assume that the church finances department is till cleaning up from the cubs transition. I still have items in my finances statement that have the leading zeros... in the transaction number for instance a check shows outstanding from October 2010, the transaction number is 00001234 (for example) I've called several times and have been told that anything with those leading zeros are issues that Finance is still researching.

Specifically with my stake, I fought with the church for several weeks over approximately $5000 that the MLS balances were off after the transition, but the balances matched prior to the transition... the church took that 5K... as of June, it is back in my account...

I really wish we could know about changes like this... a message to clerks indicating that changes were made and they need to work with LUS to fix MLS rather than it being a surprise

86Bengal wrote:Afterward the stake financial clerk and I did a follow-up review of our records and finally noticed that the AMFA out-of-balance amount exactly matched our donations in the Temple Patron Assistance category.

That could explain a lot. IIRC, the Temple Patron Assistance is a special catagory of "Other". I think it's supposed to be swept. It sounds like that functionality isn't working right.

I seem to remember having an issue with TPA as well. The donations all got recategorized to just other, if I recall. To correct this, I seem to remember just going back through the donations and recategorizing them to Other:TPA again.

As I work with unit financial clerks around our stake to clear up audit issues and balance other accounts, I ask them to get into the habit of monthly matching the ending balance of other on the CUFS with the balance of AMFA on MLS. I show them how to run an I/E report on AMFA using the custom date selector to change the end date to the closing date of the statement. That way if (or when) there is a glitch in the system causing a problem, it should be caught soon enough that it MAY be corrected before causing a problem with the next audit.

Why is it every tiny membership change generates an entry on a transmission report,
but for all financial transactions from CUBS to MLS come in silently ?
If CHQ wants to change something in MLS to match CUBS, shouldn't a transmission
report actually list what the changes are ?