Tech Forum

I was recently asked to give a family a balance sheet for their missionary's fund. This was no problem except the report included donations with names of other members of the ward who had donated. My understanding is that the donations of other members is confidential, so I used a marker to redact the other member's names on the form then photocopied it to be sure it couldn't be read.

It would be nice if MLS had a way to do this in the software, or am I missing something?

As you probably know, if you do a summary report, you get only the bottom line and not all the individual donor info, but this is sometimes too vague as to what is going on, and as you pointed out, the detailed report can contain more information than what is wanted. I know of no other way, other than to manually reproduce your own report in a word processor or spreadsheet and printing it that way. (Then you must either delete it, or safeguard it from being opened by others.)

Take a black sharpie and mark out the names. The detail report is nice for the family to plan how much more is needed to fund the remaining part of the mission. But, I do agree it would be nice if you could blank the names out automatically or if there were a separate report for families of missionaries.

You could just print a year-to-date detailed donation statement like at tithing settlement. You'd have to print one for the prior year too if the missionary is in year two.
The donor would have to compare that to the months served times the monthly payment.
{Maybe easier to just cross the names out}. Just a thought though.

I'm not sure if this solves the reporting problem, but in our ward, we create a sub-category under Ward Missionary for each missionary. This is very helpful as it helps the family know if they are ahead or behind in payments, and it helps the stake know which funds are allocated to specific missionaries so they don't ask for surplus ward missionary funds as often. As I recall, you can then print a report just for each sub-category/missionary, which won't include other people's donations.

bcpalmer60 wrote:As I recall, you can then print a report just for each sub-category/missionary, which won't include other people's donations.

The problem is that a report for the subcategory will include all donations credited to that missionary's support, whether they are from the missionary's family or not. The original question was posed out of concern that the family would then see the donation amounts and donor names for non-family members who had contributed to that missionary's support.

If you are wanting to print a total that is due you need to go to finance in mls, then finance reports, then income and expense reports. Pull down the summary by sub-category and pick the missionaries name from the list. This will give the balance foward from last year, the donations, expenses, transfers, and the balance.

Kyle03 wrote:If you are wanting to print a total that is due you need to go to finance in mls, then finance reports, then income and expense reports. Pull down the summary by sub-category and pick the missionaries name from the list. This will give the balance foward from last year, the donations, expenses, transfers, and the balance.

Thank you for the input. However see Alan_Brown's post. The concern is not how to get a donation summary but that there is donation information provided that is confidential and should not be provided to even the missionary's family.