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Fast Offering Report

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2012 7:58 pm
by bcheney11
Is there a way to generate a report that identifies households that have not contributed a fast offering over a custom date range? Clearly there is a report that identifies households that have contributed a fast offering, but we have been unable to determine an efficient non-manual way of identifying households that have not contributed a fast offering over a custom date range. Any guidance in this regard would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2012 8:49 pm
by johnshaw
While not sitting in front of a ward level MLS, I recall a report I used to use quite frequently, I think it was a donor report, it was basically a spreadsheet with the contributions in columns and rows. I would print that and note any tithe payer that didn't have a corresponding FO. The financial data in MLS used to be exportable to a spreadsheet where much could be done with the data, but in Finance, we are limited to the reports out there. Maybe someone else has a better idea.

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2012 11:11 pm
by aebrown
JohnShaw wrote:While not sitting in front of a ward level MLS, I recall a report I used to use quite frequently, I think it was a donor report, it was basically a spreadsheet with the contributions in columns and rows.

I don't think MLS has such a report -- that was available back in the FIS days, but I can't find any such report in MLS.

Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2012 5:00 am
by johnshaw
The report I'm thinking of is in the Tithing Settlement area of MLS Finance. Select Print Donor Statements, for the Current Year, and the Type of Report is Year-to-Date Donor Summaries by Category. The Tithing and FO columns are separated a bit. Additional benefits from the report show you contributions to other areas as well.

Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2012 5:30 am
by aebrown
JohnShaw wrote:The report I'm thinking of is in the Tithing Settlement area of MLS Finance. Select Print Donor Statements, for the Current Year, and the Type of Report is Year-to-Date Donor Summaries by Category. The Tithing and FO columns are separated a bit. Additional benefits from the report show you contributions to other areas as well.
Thanks for those details. I got hung up on the term "Donor Report" which made me think of the old FIS days.

Yes, the Year-to-Date Donor Summaries by Category will give you the raw data that may help answer the original post's question. It will still require a fair amount of manual work:
  • That report is only a YTD report. It allows you to select a fiscal year, but not a custom date range as was specified.
  • That report has a checkbox for "By Household", but that only basically groups together husband and wife; you'd still have to manually exclude children who are FO donors.
  • You'd also need to check the box "Show Reports with Zero Amount" to include households that did not donate at all during the year, since the goal is to identify households that did not contribute.
If the custom date range is important, an alternate approach is to use an Income and Expense Detail Report, specifying "Fast Offering" as the category:
  • This report does allow you to select "Custom" from the Date Range dropdown
  • You could click on the "Donor" column heading to sort by donor name
  • This will list one line per donation, so you might have to sift through a lot of rows to determine which households had donated.
  • You would then have to manually determine which households had not donated, probably by generating a list of households and checking off all those listed on the I&E Detail Report.
Neither approach is ideal, and both require manual work. But as JohnShaw noted, you can't copy and paste from the Finance area, so I think you're going to be stuck with some manual work to get this done.

Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2012 10:47 am
by bcheney11
Gentlemen,

Thank you for time and experienced insights. You have been very helpful.

Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2012 8:02 pm
by ecotim
This might be late but in finance the income and expenses area (where you see what is in the other categories). If you select detailed report on fast offerings you will see all that have contributed. We used this to figure out who we were going to have the deacons visit when we started having them do fast offering collections on fast sunday.