Tech Forum

I am a stake clerk. We have a couple missionaries in the MTC whose initial payments were taken from the YSA ward, rather than their home ward. I have already called the Missionary Department to change the ward that is to make future payments. I know I can ask the "home ward" bishop to write a check to the YSA ward to reimburse for the mistaken payment.
Is there another way? Can I as the stake clerk transfer funds from the home ward to the YSA ward without anyone writing a check? Obviously, all the bishops know about it, but some people don't want to wait for a check -- they want it done now. The YSA ward has a negative balance, because they don't have a large budget allotment.
Thanks

At the time that you made the change with the Missionary Department, they should have asked you when the change was to be effective. They've always asked that question when I have made similar changes. The Missionary Department has the ability to make the change retroactively according to the timing the two bishops agreed upon. That will have the effect of creating a credit in one ward's Ward Missionary account and a debit in the other's.

I'm sure you can call again after the fact and explain that the change that was recently made needs to be made effective in a particular month. That's the cleanest and quickest way to fix the imbalance.

I will be more forceful the next time I call. I talked with a young man in the MD who insisted it would be easier to ask one ward to write a check to the YSA ward than it would be for him to transfer me to the appropriate office and ask them to fix the problem from their end retroactively.

A few details about this are unusual to me. First, whenever I've dealt with changing the financial responsibility from one ward to another, the change was requested by a ward clerk (or assistant clerk) or by a Bishop. We never got the stake leaders involved. Second, we called the normal "help line" using the phone number on the financial statements. We didn't call "The Missionary Department." Third, the person at the other end of the phone could very easily take care of retroactive adjustments. In fact, they wanted to take care of it on their end and discouraged us from writing checks to transfer missionary funds between wards.

This is an old thread, but I actually called Local Unit Support with a very similar question yesterday. I was told to have the ward finance clerk transfer the funds from the missionaries account in that ward to the other wards general missionary fund. Then the receiving ward could apply that amount to the specific missionary. No check was needed in the process.

BStodd wrote:to the other wards general missionary fund.

Just to be clear, it needs to go to the top-level "Ward Missionary Fund". If it ends up in the "General Missionary Fund", it will be swept by CHQ and never seen again. (And not credited to the missionary.)

russellhltn wrote:

BStodd wrote:to the other wards general missionary fund.

Just to be clear, it needs to go to the top-level "Ward Missionary Fund". If it ends up in the "General Missionary Fund", it will be swept by CHQ and never seen again. (And not credited to the missionary.)

Although that is true, if I remember right when I was looking at doing a similar transfer between wards, MLS does not give the option to transfer to the "General Missionary Fund". In fact when transferring from a local ward missionary sub-account to another ward I think the only option is to transfer to the top-level ward missionary account.

That makes sense, since there's really no reason to transfer money to another ward's "General Missionary". "Ward Missionary" is a different deal.

Thanks!!

I have $213. Dollars in one missionary funds that is off her mission. When I go to transfer it to another missionary it says insufficient funds to be transferred!
In my action items it says she has the money