Annual Budget does not equal quarterly stake allocations

[crislapi]

But since there is no way to see those sub-category balances anymore I don't see any point in making transfers at the end of the year. To me they only confuse the records.

Definitely a valid point. I developed my approach before realizing the budget report would not show carry-over. Also, to me these zeroing transfers clean up the year's account so that when I come back to it, the year is neatly closed out. Just my opinion, not policy. With the functionality currently employed in MLS, it would appear it was designed to be used as you do.

I also tend to be a skeptic (or experienced with MLS releases ). Just because it does not currently cause any issues doesn't mean that in some future release this will not come back to bite you.

[jdlessley]

I am fairly certain categories do not automatically zero. At least, they didn't at the beginning of 2011 and I spent time Jan 3 performing transfers to all my subcategories to zero them out.
...
The budget report will show them all as having starting balances of $0 because the budget report does not carry any information over from previous years. However, in actuality, unless each category is actually zeroed, subcategories can have a running balance you are unaware of.

This did not happen to us as you explain. We had subcategories with positive balances and some with negative balances at year-end 2010. Beginning 2011 all subcategories were zero. We have not had any problems with those previous year-end balances affecting any subcategory balances for 2011. I think the issues you experienced where an effect of actions taken between the CUBS conversion and year-end 2010 and not how budget subcategories are intended to work in CUBS.

You used to be able to view this by inspecting budget categories with the I&E report. I still wish that functionality had not been removed.

I think that this functionality doesn't exist because that is not how the CUBS handling of budget subcategories is intended to work.

[tylerchristensen]

crislapi,

Thank you for your helpful suggestions. I understand now that the negative carryover balance from the prior year did come from one budget subcategory being overspent the previous year, but at year end the budget subcategory balances were zeroed out and the negative balance was carried over in aggregate to our current year budget, thus, it makes sense that the Budget Allowance Summary Report shows the negative carryover but that this amount does not show up in any one budget subcategory as you noted.

You are also correct in your suspicion that the former finance clerk created a ward budget using the View/Edit Budget screen but then he also would take each quarterly allocation and then transfer the amount received from the stake FROM the Budget Allocations category into various budget subcategories resulting in a "doubling" of the budget.

I now know that we should not need to transfer any money from the Budget Allocations subcategory.

My understanding is that as long as we ensure the total amount of budget expenses does not exceed the 4 quarterly allocations from the stake (minus the negative carryover from the prior year) the ward will not overspend. Next year we will forgo the transfers and jsut create the budget correctly.

Thanks again for all your help!

Tyler Christensen

[crislapi]

I now know that we should not need to transfer any money from the Budget Allocations subcategory.

...Next year we will forgo the transfers and jsut create the budget correctly.

Just a little follow-up to close up this discussion. A soon to be released patch to MLS will remove the ability to transfer funds within budget categories clarifying once and for all that transfer of budget allocation funds to subcategories whether to create subcategory budgets or to zero them out at the end of the year are not to be done. This means this problem should no longer occur.