Tech Forum

A problem discovered during audits in our stake is clerks putting funds in the top level other category as opposed to a subcategory. Why does this ability even exist? It seems to me that you would always want to be able to identify the purpose for donated funds and the easiest way to avoid the unidentified problem would be to have some software block requiring other funds to go into a new or existing subcategory.

wrigjef wrote:A problem discovered during audits in our stake is clerks putting funds in the top level other category as opposed to a subcategory. Why does this ability even exist? It seems to me that you would always want to be able to identify the purpose for donated funds and the easiest way to avoid the unidentified problem would be to have some software block requiring other funds to go into a new or existing subcategory.

My guess is that the top-level Other category is accessible to facilitate dealing with certain transactions such as deposit shortages, which may temporarily be charged to Other, or to deal with issues that appeared in the transition from FIS. So it seems like it does need to be available for transfers (either those created as Other Items during reconciliation or using Enter Transfer).

But I agree that it would be helpful to disable the ability to receive donations into or to write checks from the top-level Other category. Such a restriction would eliminate most if not all of the misuse of that top-level category.

Alan_Brown wrote:My guess is that the top-level Other category is accessible to facilitate dealing with certain transactions such as deposit shortages, which may temporarily be charged to Other.

I have often wondered why the Other-Other category was shown and what it's purpose was. Your comment above may have answered my question. Whenever I have had to deal with deposit shortages or other items as such, I have always just made the temporary adjustment in one of the other subcategories that contained funds so as to never show a negative balance in any category. The downside to that is remembering where I put the temporary adjustment when it is finally cleared so I can make the "re-adjustment". I guess I just never thought about putting the temporary adjustment in that top-level Other category - but it makes sense to do it that way so perhaps that is the real reason why that category even exists.