Tech Forum

We receive a number of donations mainly for contributions to missionary funds from people in other states. The donor records were entered into the system as nonmembers (as all we had was a name and an address). With the new tithing slips, we have membership record numbers now. It wasn't possible to update a record from nonmember to out-of-unit so new donor records were created as out-of-unit donors using the record number. However, the merge donors feature does not allow you to select an out-of-unit donor to merge into. Being able to merge donor records from nonmember to out-of-unit would be a great feature we could make use of.

It's not possible to change a nonmember donor to something else?

russellhltn wrote:It's not possible to change a nonmember donor to something else?

I have tried to deal with this issue before. I got no response from headquarters using the MLS messaging system that was of any value. Telephone contact with LUS only garnered a response to create a new donor record for the donor once the MRN was provided. There is no way to merge a nonmember donor record with an out of unit donor record - or at least it is not possible locally. There is also no way to add a MRN to a nonmember donor record to change it to an out of unit donor record.

I contacted MLS Clerk support on this issue as well. They told us there is no way to merge records this way, but they said they would forward this to the tech guys. The only way I've been able to get around it, is to create a new out-of-unit record with the MRN and then reassign any donations made to the nonmember record to the new record (a big pain if you don't catch these early). The donation slip was changed specifically for the out-of-unit member donations (Missionary Support etc...), but the system does not support entering these very well, at least not if you have to make changes later.

If everything goes well, the out-of-unit member should see all their donations to your unit on their tax statement they receive at the beginning of the year.