Arthur wrote:All of the expenses from all sub-categories were "rolled up" into the top-level category while the incomes remained in the sub-categories. (Why?? This part has never made sense to me, but I trust there is some good reason...)
That's not really what happened, although I know that it appeared that way. What really happened is that CHQ took its record of all the transactions and sent them back to MLS, replacing the existing transactions. But CHQ only knew the major category and had no knowledge of the subcategories for any transactions (except for income transactions, which is why we ended up with subcategories of Budget Allocations that had only income transactions in them), so they could only lump all the transactions into one subcategory of the major category.
I would have preferred a more nuanced merging of CHQ data with local MLS data instead of a wholesale replacement, but it would have been challenging to reliably link each MLS transaction with a CHQ transaction, so that would have been a lot of work and might not have had better results, anyway. In any case, it's all in the past now.
Arthur wrote:Of course, this can be prevented by not having long-lived categories. I advise my units that this is the best way to handle other (or AMFA) categories, but I also asked MLS support if it was wrong to have long-lived AMFA categories and was told that it is ok to do this way in some situations.
We have had long-lived Other categories for years, and never had a problem. As the year closed out, the transactions of the year being deleted were added up and the subcategory beginning balance adjusted accordingly. That's a very straightforward process, and it has always worked just fine in every subcategory I have ever examined. At least that was the case until the transition into 2011, when there were definitely some problems. Those problems should be addressed, but I don't see any reason why that MLS bug should change practices.
The problem is not with long-lived Other categories
per se, but rather with any subcategory that has transactions that span a year boundary. It could be a subcategory that has two transactions in it, one on December 28 and another on January 2. The entire life span could be less than a week and still have this problem.