Tech Forum

I printed a MLS report Sunday showing all Prospective Elders in our ward. The bishop asked why three non-member husbands showed up. I was investigating that at home today and find that the PE list on-line does not include these husbands. A coding error? Have others encountered this issue?

showseason wrote:I printed a MLS report Sunday showing all Prospective Elders in our ward. The bishop asked why three non-member husbands showed up. I was investigating that at home today and find that the PE list on-line does not include these husbands. A coding error? Have others encountered this issue?

How did you get the list of Prospective Elders out of MLS? I can think of three ways: from the quarterly report, the unit statistics or as a custom report. Which one did you use? Or is it available somewhere else?

Thx for turning on a light in my head. Indeed it was a custom report so most likely it has something to do with the set up of this report. I'll check that out when next at church. Thanks again.

Keep in mind, while you may have added some non-member records to MLS, they will not be transmitted to CHQ. Consequently, they won't show up on -line.

But.... the church sometimes takes information from the marriage record and you'll see non-members husbands show in the directory when you don't have an individual record in MLS for them.

showseason wrote:I printed a MLS report Sunday showing all Prospective Elders in our ward. The bishop asked why three non-member husbands showed up. I was investigating that at home today and find that the PE list on-line does not include these husbands. A coding error? Have others encountered this issue?

The Quarterly report defines a prospective elder:
If you made a custom report with exactly that criteria, (note the definition says "a member") I suspect it would have the same numbers as on your LDS.org counts, but tedious to make that custom report. It's far easier to get the Prospective list from the LDS.org Unit statistics or MLS Unit statistics functions. Do those two PE counts differ for you?

It's been noticed before that counts can differ between MLS and LDS.org: Quarterly report differences between MLS and lds.org? and Quarterly Reports info MLS/WEB do not match but the reasons may be tough to track down.

kisaac wrote:It's been noticed before that counts can differ between MLS and LDS.org: Quarterly report differences between MLS and lds.org? and Quarterly Reports info MLS/WEB do not match but the reasons may be tough to track down.

The statistics for the quarterly report seen in Clerk Resources are calculated early in the morning (unit time) on the first day of the month. MLS statistics are generated when MLS runs the stat generation routine, so they are based on what MLS has in its database at that moment.

There will be changes to the quarterly report process for the first quarter of 2014 (the report you complete in April, not the one you complete in January). There was a letter from the First Presidency on December 15 announcing the change. "Additional information about the reports will soon be available."