Tech Forum

Shortly after the CUBS transition I entered transfers to zero out my remaining old budget sub-categories, as per instructions. Since Oct 17, 2010 I have not used any of these old budget sub-categories and they have remained zeroed out, until ....

Today I noticed 3 of them now magically have negative balances ($100-$300 range). I'm not sure when these balances appeared, but I'm guessing last week when I received a patch from CHQ to fix a seemingly unrelated problem.

Back in Oct, when I did the original transfers, there were funds in the parent category to offset the balances in the old sub-categories and transfers would clear them up. This is not the case now so it doesn't appears I can re-zero out my new-found balances with transfers.

I'm assuming I need to get them zeroed out again.
Any suggestions how I should deal with this?

ckmcdonald wrote:Shortly after the CUBS transition I entered transfers to zero out my remaining old budget sub-categories, as per instructions. Since Oct 17, 2010 I have not used any of these old budget sub-categories and they have remained zeroed out, until ....

Today I noticed 3 of them now magically have negative balances ($100-$300 range). I'm not sure when these balances appeared, but I'm guessing last week when I received a patch from CHQ to fix a seemingly unrelated problem.

Back in Oct, when I did the original transfers, there were funds in the parent category to offset the balances in the old sub-categories and transfers would clear them up. This is not the case now so it doesn't appears I can re-zero out my new-found balances with transfers.

I'm assuming I need to get them zeroed out again.
Any suggestions how I should deal with this?

I'd first do some research on the details. It may seem like magic when you look at the summary, but perhaps when you look at the details (the specific transactions behind the new summary balances), you may see some clues as to what is different.

aebrown wrote:I'd first do some research on the details. It may seem like magic when you look at the summary, but perhaps when you look at the details (the specific transactions behind the new summary balances), you may see some clues as to what is different.

A look at the "all time" detailed report was the first thing I did. Each of the 3 sub-categories listed just a few (2-4) expenses and then the transfer I did back in Oct to zero it out. Apparently something has changed what expenses are on the list because they no longer add to the amount of the transfers.

I plan to run down to the church today and see if I can determine what got added to the list and why. I didn't have time to do that while there yesterday. There should be a combination of 1 or more entries that add up to the new negative balance. The date of these new expense items might be my only clue.

Will return and report. I'm anxious to get this resolved as I'm under the impression that 3.3.1 will remove these unwanted sub-categories IF they are zeroed out.

ckmcdonald wrote:Will return and report. I'm anxious to get this resolved as I'm under the impression that 3.3.1 will remove these unwanted sub-categories IF they are zeroed out.

I look forward to seeing those details.

But I see no evidence that 3.3.1 will remove any subcategories. With MLS 3.3 you can deactivate those subcategories once you set the balances to zero, but I have neither read anything nor heard anything that says this, except for a second-hand report in the thread MLS 3.3.1 What is coming?. As I indicated in that thread, I don't believe that is true.

ckmcdonald wrote:A look at the "all time" detailed report was the first thing I did. Each of the 3 sub-categories listed just a few (2-4) expenses and then the transfer I did back in Oct to zero it out. Apparently something has changed what expenses are on the list because they no longer add to the amount of the transfers.

I'll take a guess that you lost the 2007 expense(s) when they were purged as part of the year-end closeout. As a result, your 2010 transfer to zero it out is now too much.

RussellHltn wrote:I'll take a guess that you lost the 2007 expense(s) when they were purged as part of the year-end closeout. As a result, your 2010 transfer to zero it out is now too much.

If that were the case, that would indicate a bug in the year-end close procedure. What is supposed to happen is that all 2007 transactions for a subcategory are added to the beginning balance on 1 Jan 2007 to create the new beginning balance for 1 Jan 2008. If MLS did that properly, any adjustments would still be correct.

I think the problem is much more likely to be in 2010 or 2011 transactions, but it's worth checking the balance forward.

Update, and slight correction to my prior post. The 3 old budget sub-categories had a positive balance after Oct 17th so I transferred money out to zero them out. They were positive because after CUBS they only contained deposits made to them prior (CUBS removed the expenses).

So 1 or more deposits to each of these old sub-categories has been removed, making the transfer I made in late Oct now too much. It's rather difficult to find something that has disappeared. It appears it's possible this was caused by 2007 records being purged.

A report "all" shows no carry-over from 2007 in any of the 3 guilty sub-categories. If there were deposits deleted from 2007 there should be a carry-over. However, I still can't tell if this happened or if deposits happening in 2008 or later were somehow removed.

Working with LUS I was able to resolve this issue. I'll post it here in case it's of any use to other weary travelers on the same path.

Looking closer, all 3 non-zeroed sub-categories summed (coincidence) to a nice even number of hundreds of dollars. The equal and opposite value was indeed in my budget allocation category but it only changed the total by one digit - which I overlooked. I stated earlier there wasn't an opposite value somewhere that I could do transfers with to zero out these 3 sub-categories. This was incorrect, there was.

So I entered the transfers (back-dated to last Oct) and re-zeroed out these 3 old budget sub-categories.

I still don't know what altered these balances and LUS couldn't tell me either. It appears it would be a long process to figure it out, so I dropped it.