December 2009 Reconciliation
Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 3:58 pm
Thought I would give the Stake Clerks here on the forum a heads up. The December Unit Financial Statements have been posted to MLS. I printed our stake financial statement today to do the monthly reconciliation. When I got to block three on the statement I saw we had a bunch of debits for Qwest Communications. The financial report debited those charges against our other account. In our case it was a debit for $1477.73. It made our "other category" a negative balance of over $900. I called Salt Lake as I thought telephone bills were paid by the church rather than by the stake and maybe something had changed. I was informed that there has been an error in the charges between Salt Lake and Qwest and they (church headquarters) are busy working on reversing the charges.
I hung up and went ahead with the reconciliation and at the MLS help desk recommendation added a temporary adjustment for the Qwest charges (one large adjustment of $1477.73 rather than 19 different charges adding up to that amount). After adding the adjustment the report came out with no unreconciled differences which is good.
However, trying to think ahead, I wondered what this would do when I get audited next month. I called Salt Lake again and asked if once they cleared the issue up with Qwest if they would be resending a corrected Unit Financial Statement - their answer was no - no corrected statement. So the December financial report is the one that the auditor will be seeing when he does the audit next month. I sat down and did the typical "Other category" list as you would do on the audit form (page 9 in the new Stake Audit form) and balanced everything out. After entering what MLS shows in our Other accounts, writing in what Financial Statement shows and the difference it all came to total up to the Qwest charges which I listed in the next section on the audit form. I plan on keeping this to show the auditor as I don't want to have to explain why I have a large inbalance in the Other account.
So a heads up to fellow stake clerks. Be aware of the Qwest charges. Church finance folks are working the issue. The finance statement that is in MLS for December is apparently what you will have to live with. To get ahead of the game it may be worthwhile to fill out the audit page that has you reconciling the Other account and keep a copy. It will be a whole lot easier to explain to the auditor if you figure it out now rather than when the auditor shows up and you try and remember what happened.
Jim
I hung up and went ahead with the reconciliation and at the MLS help desk recommendation added a temporary adjustment for the Qwest charges (one large adjustment of $1477.73 rather than 19 different charges adding up to that amount). After adding the adjustment the report came out with no unreconciled differences which is good.
However, trying to think ahead, I wondered what this would do when I get audited next month. I called Salt Lake again and asked if once they cleared the issue up with Qwest if they would be resending a corrected Unit Financial Statement - their answer was no - no corrected statement. So the December financial report is the one that the auditor will be seeing when he does the audit next month. I sat down and did the typical "Other category" list as you would do on the audit form (page 9 in the new Stake Audit form) and balanced everything out. After entering what MLS shows in our Other accounts, writing in what Financial Statement shows and the difference it all came to total up to the Qwest charges which I listed in the next section on the audit form. I plan on keeping this to show the auditor as I don't want to have to explain why I have a large inbalance in the Other account.
So a heads up to fellow stake clerks. Be aware of the Qwest charges. Church finance folks are working the issue. The finance statement that is in MLS for December is apparently what you will have to live with. To get ahead of the game it may be worthwhile to fill out the audit page that has you reconciling the Other account and keep a copy. It will be a whole lot easier to explain to the auditor if you figure it out now rather than when the auditor shows up and you try and remember what happened.
Jim