Donations not showing up on members' Donation Statements?

Discuss questions around local unit policies for budgeting, reconciling, etc. This forum should not contain specific financial or membership information.
nrajeff
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#11

Post by nrajeff »

crislapi wrote:Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't checked there. Also, there are so few married couples in my stake that I'm not a good person to verify this (YSA stake). However, what I do have is recently married couples, so I can check some of those Sunday and see if the check box is automatically selected. However, I was recently helping out a family ward clerk who was not very familiar with MLS and the spouse was showing on donor statements in his ward. I'm fairly confident he did nothing to include her.

All I know is that I can get spouses to show up if I select "individual statement" rather than the "family" mode.
jdlessley
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#12

Post by jdlessley »

A spouse's name may be included on the the other spouse donor or tax-valid statement by checking "Show spouse on donor report" in the donor record of the spouse who's statement or summary is being printed. This is not automatic and can be changed at any time before a donor statement or tax-valid statement is printed. But be aware that if the spouse who is to be included on the donor report or tax-valid statement for the other will not have any contributions they made during the year merged onto that one report. Rather the first spouse's donor report or tax-valid statement will only include contributions made in that first spouse's name. The report will merely include the other spouses name but will not include any contributions made to his or her donor record.

If a couple wants all their contributions to be included on one statement or summary, the contributions of one spouse will have to be changed to the other so that only one spouse has contributions. Also the donor record for the spouse who now has all the couples contributions will have to have "Show spouse on donor report" checked prior to printing the statement or summary.

When printing donor statements or tax-valid statements there is an option, "By Household", that when checked will only show the record for the head of household on the list of names from which to select. Checking that option has no affect on the printout of the statement. It is possible to inadvertently leave out printing a contributing spouse's statement or contributing children statements with this option selected.
JD Lessley
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lajackson
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#13

Post by lajackson »

About once a year, one of my large donations will be credited to one of my children, who make small donations. This year, one of my donations did not show up among any of the family records printed out in preparation for tithing settlement.

Before tithing settlement, I reviewed my yellow donation slips and made sure the check for the missing contribution had cleared the bank. It had, and I was able to figure out which weekly batch would probably have the donation.

The finance clerk went directly to that batch, and found that the donation had been credited in the name of my wife. For a reason unrelated to MLS, her contribution records did not print out with the rest of the family this year.

The clerk corrected the name on the donation and all was well.
nrajeff
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Location: WV, USA

#14

Post by nrajeff »

I have an update on the situation I asked for help about: We located the "missing donations" of the new convert--his donations during the first half of the year were categorized as "non member" so when once we discovered that and merged the "non member" version of him with the "member" version, his donation summary was complete and accurate.

So thanks for the help in clearing that up, everyone.

As for the family who claimed their summary was incomplete, we are still looking into it. They haven't been able to verify that they indeed donated during the first half of the year, so it is possible they made no donations and just forgot. Their checkbook register got lost so there is no easy way for them find out. There is also the possibility that they donated but I accidentally credited their donations to a family with the same last name. I intend to go through the actual paper trail, to find out.

Thanks again to all of you for your helpful suggestions.
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gregwanderson
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#15

Post by gregwanderson »

If you're just trying to sort through two families with the same last name then it will be easy to find all of the donations in question on MLS. Then you'll simply look for the white, original donation slips (which should be in your files) from those donations and correct anything in MLS that doesn't match the donation slips. Should be fairly easy.

Also, if the family lost their checkbook register AND they lost their bank statements it still might be easy for them to obtain duplicates of cancelled checks from their bank. Depending on the bank, those could be available online going back a few months and, if not, they could probably just go to the bank and request them. I did this once at my local bank and, while it took a day or two for someone to finally email the PDF copies to me, it was easy and there was no charge. In my case, I needed information about my personal account activity from about two years earlier.
nrajeff
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Location: WV, USA

#16

Post by nrajeff »

mrrad wrote:If you're just trying to sort through two families with the same last name then it will be easy to find all of the donations in question on MLS. Then you'll simply look for the white, original donation slips (which should be in your files) from those donations and correct anything in MLS that doesn't match the donation slips. Should be fairly easy.

Also, if the family lost their checkbook register AND they lost their bank statements it still might be easy for them to obtain duplicates of cancelled checks from their bank. Depending on the bank, those could be available online going back a few months and, if not, they could probably just go to the bank and request them. I did this once at my local bank and, while it took a day or two for someone to finally email the PDF copies to me, it was easy and there was no charge. In my case, I needed information about my personal account activity from about two years earlier.
Thanks, mrrad. My wife came up with your first suggestion as well. My reasoning processes lag behind hers. But then, she's the Stake Primary President, so it's no surprise. :)
Lbmango
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#17

Post by Lbmango »

We ran into this issue when initial donations were received prior to membership records being received. There ended up being two records for that individual once the membership records were received. We merged the donors and then everything showed up in the statements.
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