Tech Forum

We are trying to be paper and budget minded in our ward, not to mention more resource wise, and find that there is a great deal we need not print. The difficulty comes in that send / receive in MLS batches financial and membership items together. Thus the membership clerk receives financials, and the financial memberships. It would be great if the two batches could be sent / received separately based on calling. That way the membership clerk could determine what to and not to print and the finance clerk could more easily do likewise. Maybe the batches could save similarly to the email system with a folder / filters for the membership, finance clerk, and ward clerk.

accampbell wrote:We are trying to be paper and budget minded in our ward, not to mention more resource wise, and find that there is a great deal we need not print. The difficulty comes in that send / receive in MLS batches financial and membership items together. Thus the membership clerk receives financials, and the financial memberships. It would be great if the two batches could be sent / received separately based on calling. That way the membership clerk could determine what to and not to print and the finance clerk could more easily do likewise. Maybe the batches could save similarly to the email system with a folder / filters for the membership, finance clerk, and ward clerk.

I see some problems with this suggestion:

• There is not as clear a separation between membership and financial data as you suggest. In particular, many membership changes affect the financial side of MLS (name changes, new members, members moved in/out, marriages, etc.). That fact alone seems to make your suggestion unworkable.
• A less important point is that it requires more transmissions to get the required information into MLS.
• And there are some people who have both roles (ward and stake clerks, bishopric and stake presidency members, assistant clerks). And many smaller wards and particularly branches don't have the specialized clerk roles at all.

In case it helps what works for me (and what I encourage the wards in our stake to do) is to just check for messages on their first login regardless. We do not print out anything if we can help it, and when viewing all of the messages the list can be (and maybe is by default) sorted in descending order by date which means new stuff is on time with the date right there. If anything is unrecognized or was received since the last time whomever is checking was in the office, check it out. Done.

Financial Statements are similar, but are not sorted by date by default so you need to click on that column header, twice I think, to get the stuff you want on top. Membership clerks, of course, don't care about this section. In the end no trees killed, takes about fifteen seconds if nothing is new to check both Messages and Financial Statements manually, and is certainly faster then multiple Send/Receive processes or checking a physical folder of some kind for the same stuff.

Hope it helps,
AB

The big issue is membership record data. Could MLS send / receive it and then only pull it up for printing when the membership clerk is logged in? Every address and phone number and email address change wants to print endless amounts of paper and these types of changes occur frequently. Maybe what pops up for printing could be changed and the rest could come up view only?

accampbell wrote:The big issue is membership record data. Could MLS send / receive it and then only pull it up for printing when the membership clerk is logged in? Every address and phone number and email address change wants to print endless amounts of paper and these types of changes occur frequently. Maybe what pops up for printing could be changed and the rest could come up view only?

This has been discussed in a couple of other threads. This is one of them - Wasteful Transmission & Printing of Unchanged Records