Pilotfly wrote:And just to further clarify (at least from what I have experienced as a Ward Clerk and now the Stake Clerk), if an individual fills out their donation slip and puts money into a budget item it goes to Salt Lake, it does not go to the ward budget. One of our wards found that out the hard way. That is why following the Handbook and looking at the online lessons is well worthwhile.
Alan_Brown's reply:
Alan_Brown wrote: If you physically write a check from Other and deposit it into your ward's budget you definitely are increasing your budget allowance.
I wanted to point out a clarification to Pilotfly and Alan_Brown's comments (as I currently understand it).
Credits to the budget category, whether from a deposit, voiding a check, or changing categories (ie correcting categories for a fast offering check accidentally cut from budget), are credited against the budget expenses. You shouldn't increase the budget allocation by the credited amount.
For example, say our activities budget is $1000 and our total expenses are $450. We have $550 remaining for the year. Then say we deposit $200 into it. the activities budget is still $1000, but now the total expenses is $250, meaning we now have $750 remaining for the year. The adjustment is automatically made by MLS to the expenses when the deposit/correction/whatever is created. Not knowing that, a clerk may try to compensate for the credit by increasing the budget. So if I also increase my budget by $200 so it is now $1200, the total expenses are still $250, but I've artificially increased my budget an extra $200 (2X the credit), meaning according to MLS I now have $950 remaining for the year. This may be how your wards managed to blow the stake's budget...
I'd also point out that at the ward level, some of these credits show up in the miscellaneous section of the CUFS and need to be manually entered in MLS. If they are not, then increasing the budget gives the appearance of doing the same thing. However, on the stake financial summary the credits and expenses are combined and the stake sees the net expenses. From their viewpoint, increasing the budget gives you double the money back.
What threw me this year was when we had two wards with a net credit instead of expense. One was from changing check categories, the other was because of a massive return of items to the distribution center.
Main point - deposits to budget don't "increase" your budget per se (the total budget stays the same), but they do offset expenses, allowing you to spend more than you were originally allotted.
Now for some questions of my own:
Alan_Brown wrote:If you transfer funds from Other to Budget or vice versa, it most definitely will show up on the Church Unit Financial Statement.
If you physically write a check from Other and deposit it into your ward's budget you definitely are increasing your budget allowance.
I'm curious how you transfer from Budget to Other. Do you use "Enter Transfer"? I meant to check last night but didn't have time, but I seem to remember than if I select a budget item in one of the fields of "Enter Transfer", I can only select a budget field in the second field. Same for other - if one field is "Other", then the second must be "Other" as well.
I was also under the impression we had to cut checks to move money between budget and other. I seem to remember once being able to finagle MLS into allowing me to transfer between the two, but it was complicated, and now I'm curious if I just tricked MLS and the money never actually moved. Any thoughts? I'll look into this one on my end to see what happened with the money.
This has been a great thread. I've had a lot of questions on this subject and I've enjoyed reading the posts. Thanks everyone.