Tech Forum

Just want to know everyone's thoughts about the possibility of being able to see your Tithing history online (possibly associated to your LDS Account) to be able to check at any given time how much you have paid that year, or in years past, as well as making sure that your tithing was processed correctly.

I always have hated going in at the end of the year to tithing settlement and saying "Gee... this looks about right..." but not being completely certain that everything was entered in 100% correctly.

Enigma1 wrote:Just want to know everyone's thoughts about the possibility of being able to see your Tithing history online (possibly associated to your LDS Account) to be able to check at any given time how much you have paid that year, or in years past, as well as making sure that your tithing was processed correctly.

I always have hated going in at the end of the year to tithing settlement and saying "Gee... this looks about right..." but not being completely certain that everything was entered in 100% correctly.

This would be awesome. General membership doesn't realize they must keep in touch with all wards they donated to that year in order to get all of their statments. I would think it feasible to do something like this and a natural evolution of the movement to being online with LDS.org.

It will be wonderful! There are many benefits to membership giving a opportunity to accomplish a summary of their donations.

mkmurray wrote:This would be awesome. General membership doesn't realize they must keep in touch with all wards they donated to that year in order to get all of their statments. I would think it feasible to do something like this and a natural evolution of the movement to being online with LDS.org.

I like the idea in principle. (Would like even better the idea of allowing people to pay their tithing and other donations online and have that transaction propagate to the ward accounting in MLS.)

But I'm not that optimistic about feasibility anytime soon. All the movement I have detected about migrating MLS functionality to the web has involved the membership data, not financial data. Nice to dream though.

boomerbubba wrote:I like the idea in principle. (Would like even better the idea of allowing people to pay their tithing and other donations online and have that transaction propagate to the ward accounting in MLS.)

I agree and before this thread starts shifting from the original Idea I will be creating another thread about this exact topic that you mention in about 5 minutes (after my snack break)

I'll post the link here when it is up

boomerbubba wrote:But I'm not that optimistic about feasibility anytime soon. All the movement I have detected about migrating MLS functionality to the web has involved the membership data, not financial data. Nice to dream though.

But it seems to me that all financial data seems to get transmitted to Church servers; that's more true of financial data than of membership data currently. Right?

mkmurray wrote:But it seems to me that all financial data seems to get transmitted to Church servers; that's more true of financial data than of membership data currently. Right?

No. Very little detailed financial information regarding donations is transmitted to Church servers (except for the MLS backups, which don't really count, since they are not stored in a way where individual data are accessible). The Church knows a lot of detail about checks that are written, but only category totals are transmitted for weekly deposits.

Even the tithing declaration report at the end of the year only contains totals. So implementing this idea would imply transmitting and storing huge amounts of data that are not currently sent to CHQ. Although I too think it's a cool idea, I share Boomerbubba's opinion that it's not going to happen anytime soon. There are just too many implementation and security concerns for it to be a high priority.

boomerbubba wrote:I like the idea in principle. (Would like even better the idea of allowing people to pay their tithing and other donations online and have that transaction propagate to the ward accounting in MLS.)

If you want to write about this topic, here is the Link to the new thread.
http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.ph ... #post35411

Enigma1 wrote:Just want to know everyone's thoughts about the possibility of being able to see your Tithing history online (possibly associated to your LDS Account) to be able to check at any given time how much you have paid that year, or in years past, as well as making sure that your tithing was processed correctly.

Some mixed feelings. As a feature, I like it.

But I see some downsides. First, the LDS Account now has access to sensitive financial information. As a result, we'd have to be more careful about membership numbers and birth and confirmation dates. This could cause information to go missing from the MLS membership export.

Secondly, I'd see this only working if each ward correctly associated donations with membership records. That may be fine in most cases, but what about someone who visits a ward for only 2 months (I believe there's still a 3 month rule for moving membership records)? How does "missing" donations get resolved?

RussellHltn wrote: That may be fine in most cases, but what about someone who visits a ward for only 2 months (I believe there's still a 3 month rule for moving membership records)? How does "missing" donations get resolved?

If this was associated with LDS Account it would be reflected on that account no matter what ward you visit or how long you are there (MRN can be tied into the lds account).
for that reason I mentioned this being part of lds account because the church (at least church employees) are having the ldsaccount act as more of a universal account for each person (it works with more and more church applications and authentications.)