MLS 3.4.1 Setup File effects

I just completed installing the setup file released yesterday. It unleashed havoc. The balances in my budget subcategories bear precious little resemblance to the reports I printed on 10/16. I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet, but it looks like this is going to be a lot of work.

mlh78 wrote:I just completed installing the setup file released yesterday. It unleashed havoc. The balances in my budget subcategories bear precious little resemblance to the reports I printed on 10/16. I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet, but it looks like this is going to be a lot of work.

As near as I can determine, the primary problem is that I used a technique that was a great idea at the time: I adjusted opening balances for 2011 by creating transfers dated 31 Dec 2010. That way I had 2011 opening balances that were exactly right. Unfortunately, with the new philosophy of MLS, those transfers are dated in 2011, since that was when I posted the transfers. So those transfers that were once in 2010 are now in 2011, and now my budget subcategory balances are almost all wrong.

The good news is that all the overall budget totals are correct. Thus all I need to do is to create transfers dated in 2011 (I have no choice the way MLS works now) to move the funds between budget subcategories, and all should be well. I won't be able to run any reports for portions of the year that will make any sense, but my YTD reports should be fine.

The one balance I can't understand is one of my AMFA subcategories, where the opening balance simply disappeared. The money that used to be in that opening balance is now in the parent AMFA category. That one is not explained by the change in using the posting date, rather than the specified transaction date. But again, one simple transfer will fix it.

Just took a closer look and it appears that we have the same issue. Not a big deal to fix at the stake level, but when 12 wards come calling, it could be a bit of a time issue.

aebrown wrote:So those transfers that were once in 2010 are now in 2011, and now my budget subcategory balances are almost all wrong.

If all they did was change the dates of the transactions, that shouldn't affect the current balance, right? Granted, it would make some of the reports messy, but I'd expect it to come up with the same totals (as long as I'm not going back before those transactions).

Did the system fail to properly re-calculate the year's opening balance?

RussellHltn wrote:If all they did was change the dates of the transactions, that shouldn't affect the current balance, right? Granted, it would make some of the reports messy, but I'd expect it to come up with the same totals (as long as I'm not going back before those transactions).

Did the system fail to properly re-calculate the year's opening balance?

We are talking about Budget reports here. Budget reports don't have an opening balance column -- instead they have an "Annual Budget Assigned by Unit" column that shows the portion of the total Budget Allocation assigned to each subcategory. So a Budget report will essentially always have a balance forward of 0, but the assigned budget acts sort of like a beginning balance -- but one that is assigned for the new year, not calculated based on the previous year.

Also, Budget reports have always had a specific time period -- by default they show the current year, which starts of course on 1 Jan. So they don't include any transactions from the previous year. Thus if a transfer from the previous year suddenly moves to this year (as just happened with the Setup file), it will indeed change the current balance for the affected subcategory(ies).

EDIT: I suppose you're wondering why I made adjustments to opening balances for Budget categories at the beginning of 2011 when they don't even show up on Budget reports. That's because the Budget reports were different back then. They actually did include a balance forward. It wasn't until 3.3.1 (released in February) that the balance forward column was removed for yearly Budget reports.

aebrown wrote:As near as I can determine, the primary problem is that I used a technique that was a great idea at the time: I adjusted opening balances for 2011 by creating transfers dated 31 Dec 2010. That way I had 2011 opening balances that were exactly right. Unfortunately, with the new philosophy of MLS, those transfers are dated in 2011, since that was when I posted the transfers. So those transfers that were once in 2010 are now in 2011, and now my budget subcategory balances are almost all wrong.

As I dug into our stake Budget categories last night, I discovered an additional issue that is throwing off balances.

In some categories, I am seeing credits for checks written in 2010. They have the following attributes:

• The original checks were all written between 1 Sep 2010 and 15 Oct 2010.
• But these credits have a Posted Date in January 2011. I'm guessing I did something with their categorization back then, but I thought I did all that work back in 2010.
• They all have reference numbers that start with 00 (e.g., a credit associated with check #2345 would be 002345).
• They are all credits amounts.

In order to get my balances correct, I would have to create a transfer moving the amounts of these credits from their current category to Budget:Administration (that seems to be the category that is short, when so many other categories have balances that are too high).

I've seen other posts (I can't find any right now) that indicate that transactions with reference numbers that start with 00 are still being worked on in the CUBS system. I don't know if that's true. But if it is true, then I probably should be patient. If it is not true, then I might as well go ahead and fix my balances.

Is anyone else seeing a similar issue affecting their balances after the Setup File has been processed? Any thoughts on what the best course of action is?

I had a similar problem. In the original conversion, I found that a number of October 2010 checks had been deducted twice at headquarters. LUS corrected the double posting, but the corrections were posted in 2011. These checks now show up as a credit balance in 2011 because of the posting date. I restored the proper balances with a transfer (using budget allocations as my plug account). Assuming no future "fixes" come down, I think this is the right course of action.

Same situation here. I did a corrective transfer and dated it in 2010 that has thrown my budget out of whack.

mlh78 wrote:Just took a closer look and it appears that we have the same issue. Not a big deal to fix at the stake level, but when 12 wards come calling, it could be a bit of a time issue.

I have the same issue. I'm very grateful that I printed budget expense reports in detail, because I could quickly compare the before and after. I made a few quick transfers, and everything is as it should be. For now, at least.

I have the same issues being described above. Post setup file, Income/Expense looks OK - matches my CUBs Statement and all Income/Expense/Budget totals are correct. But, my Aux/Quorum budgets are all messed up as has been described.

I called LUS and was told that this is expected behavior. I asked if I should do Transfers to re-balance my accounts. I have told "absolutely not". I asked if this is a result of something I did wrong earlier - I was told "no". I was then told that this will "magically correct itself" when we roll into 2012. I was told not to touch a thing in the way of correcting budget category balances between now and 1/1/2012. I asked if this was a known problem and if all wards would see this, and was told "yes". Lastly, I asked if this meant, like last year at this time, that I wouldn't have accurate budget reports for my Aux/Quorums for the remainder of the year, and was told "yes".

Just reporting what I was told.....

jerrobertson wrote:Same situation here. I did a corrective transfer and dated it in 2010 that has thrown my budget out of whack.

...Still trying to figure out what a "whack" is - I have a similar animal in our system. However, thus far (I'm only about 1/4 the way through the discrepancies) my problems are NOT related to a 2010/2011 issue between transaction date and posting date.

Example: One young woman paid a little extra her the YW Camp Other account, and asked for the excess to be used for someone else "who needed it." At the Bishop's direction, I transferred the funds from her Other account to another Young Woman's account (Note: very long and painful story on why we have multiple Other Accounts- let's just say that I tried to rationalize with my new Bishop but in the end just gave up and set it up as he wanted it; let's just not bother to go there at this point). After the set-up file, the original YW's Other account correctly shows the transfer, but the Set-up file has it transferred to the top-level Other-AFMA account and the original recipient's Other account is showing negative by that amount. This all happened in June so is unrelated to the 2010/2011 theory.

davesudweeks wrote:This all happened in June so is unrelated to the 2010/2011 theory.

Well, I've seen a couple of issues that seem to be simply categorization problems in AMFA, also unrelated to the change in transaction date vs. posting date.

I ran into a similar situation as davesudweeks in that there is Other:AMFA sub-account activity that appears to have been undone. I had to re-categorize contributions to a AMFA sub-account due to an incorrect donations batch entry back in February 2011. Following the setup file processing the re-categorization had been undone yet the transaction adjustments remained in the View/Update Donations screen. Fortunately for me there was only one adjustment to which this happened. I can simply correct this again using a transfer instead of a re-categorization.

My first posting... hope this works.

I have noticed that the setup file (mine processed on Tues Oct 18) did not take into account the donation batch from Sunday Oct 16th. Totals in General Missionary, Perpetual Education, Temple Construction, etc. are off by exactly the amounts donated on Oct 16th. Tithing and Fast Offerings are off as well, but I haven't figured these out yet. Any advice here would be welcome.
I also have similar issues with sub-accts under Other:AMFA as described earlier in this thread.

Welcome to the Forum!

Good point on the deposits. I think ours took, but will check again the next time I am up at the church.

rcpilot wrote:I have noticed that the setup file (mine processed on Tues Oct 18) did not take into account the donation batch from Sunday Oct 16th. Totals in General Missionary, Perpetual Education, Temple Construction, etc. are off by exactly the amounts donated on Oct 16th. Tithing and Fast Offerings are off as well, but I haven't figured these out yet.

Since you are posting nearly a week later, did you notice after your Sunday batch send/receive on 23 October whether the 16 October batch was processed? If it is still missing you may need to contact LUS to have them verify the batch was processed.

I am repling to post of date October 23rd 2011 6:44 pm. Why did LUS not let everyone know this would happen? And was expected.

#$$%^@@

terrellthomas wrote:I am repling to post of date October 23rd 2011 6:44 pm. Why did LUS not let everyone know this would happen? And was expected.

That's a good question, and by no means the first time it's been asked in this context. I figure it's like death, do we really want to know the day we will die? Some things are best left as surprises!

Seriously, I've asked myself that same question several times over the past year of MLS changes. In many instances there have been things I could have done to better prepare for what came down. It's tempting to think that maybe the MLS development team themselves don't know in advance either. But that's a scary thought.

As an additional side-effect of the setup file, some of the payees have apparently been reset. Any member in my ward that was added as a payee *after* last year's CUBS transition has their *payee name* in the format First Name Last Name (i.e. Joe Member). While cutting a few checks tonight, I noticed that Joe Member's payee address information has been eliminated. I had to go back and re-link the payee name to the member's record before it would show up. As I sit here now, I don't remember how the payee's name appeared after I linked it.

I haven't gone deeply into the payee list to see if the effect was more wide-spread, but it affected 2 out of 5 checks I cut tonight. It doesn't appear to affect payees in the format Last Name, First Name.

I have budget report problems similar to those reported on this thread, except that totals are very different now. We appear to have many thousand dollars less than before. Try as I might, I cannot make heads or tails of any of the differences.

Should I be concerned or just wait until bugs get worked out?

My budget report in MLS is unrecognizably different from what I had before 3.4.1. My CUBS statement seems to be fine. Shall I wait for 3.4.2 and hope it's right again??

GaryLawlor wrote:My budget report in MLS is unrecognizably different from what I had before 3.4.1. My CUBS statement seems to be fine. Shall I wait for 3.4.2 and hope it's right again??

The theory of 3.4.1 is that the MLS reports will now match your CUBS statement. Your MLS reports may very well not match the pre-3.4.1 MLS reports, but that's not a problem if they match your CUBS statement, and your CUBS statement is fine.

If your MLS reports don't match your CUBS statements, then you need to work with Local Unit Support to make them match. I don't think 3.4.2 will magically fix those kinds of issues.