Tech Forum

Our Bishop would like to setup a missionary account in MLS for a young man who is preparing to submit his mission papers in 8 months. The Bishop would like to be able to have the young man and anyone else who is going to financial support this missionary be able to make donation on their tithing slips. I know that we wont receive an official missionary account for donations to processed to until the young man is official called as a missionary.

Can we just create an "other" account and call it Bro_______ Missionary Fund and then once we receive his official account transfer the funds to it?

I would not recommend using an Other:AMFA category to collect the funds. Any donations made to an Other:AMFA category will not appear on the year-end tax valid statement. Funds cannot be transferred across major categories, ie from Other to Ward Missionary. A check would have to be written from the Other:AMFA category and deposited into the Ward Missionary subcategory for the missionary once the missionary category was created.

If the period of time was short enough to occur within the same year you could hold the donations in an Other:AMFA category. Then once the missionary's subcategory was created each of the donations could be recategorized rather than transferred. But when the donations span the transition from one year to the next this recategorization still creates a problem for the year-end tax valid statements in the first year. The recategorization causes the donations for the first year to appear in the second year as though all the donations were made in the second year.

Funds can be collected in the Ward Missionary category and then transferred to the specific missionary's category once it is created. Note that any donations made to the Ward Missionary category are not refundable, the same as any other tax deductible donation. But the donors donations done in this manner are tax deductible and will appear on their year-end tax valid statement. If you were to end up collecting donations for more than one missionary in this same situation in this manner you may need to track the donations outside MLS since there is no way to specify to what missionary the donations are intended.