opee wrote:In our Stake MLS, we have budget categories for each unit in the Stake. The categories have a Budget "allotment" that we have entered into MLS, but each month there obviously is never anything taken out of the budget category for the units because the Stake financial does not pull from the ward financial numbers.
Our Stake Financial Clerk was wondering if you could just add an "expense" (not a check) each month during the reconciliation for each Unit's expense so that it will show up in the MLS Budget category as the expenses that are incurred. If this "expense" is created during reconciliation (like is done with Distribution Center orders), will money be taken out of the Stake's funds from SLC (as an actual expense) or will it just be a "phantom" expense that only shows up locally on MLS? If the latter, then it would allow a Stake to track the expenses of the units from month to month.
Creating an expense record in MLS does
not pull any funds from your stake account -- it's only an MLS entry. So the technique you propose would not create any problem of that sort, and so it could be a viable way to track ward budget expenditures at the stake level. You would just create an expense entry for each ward each month. On your reconciliation you would immediately check it off as cleared.
Personally, I would find this technique to be quite confusing. I want the stake MLS financial records to match the actual stake account. Every transaction on the CUFS shows up in MLS somewhere, and almost all MLS transactions show up on the CUFS (the only exceptions would be transfers between subcategories of a single account, such as a transfer from Other to Other:Scouts because a check had been incorrectly categorized).
I also do a regular reconciliation of the Budget category against the CUFS YTD figures, and this would become rather unwieldy with the phantom categories and expenses. So I'll probably stick with my current system, although I can see some benefit in looking at the entire stake budget as a whole from within MLS.
I would prefer to see a new feature of MLS that would help stakes in tracking the entire stake allocation, broken down by wards, with ward expenditures (probably just a monthly summary) downloaded automatically to stake MLS.