Filing of Membership info

drkelly · #1

Every membership update results in paper. What info should the membership clerk be filing and what can be thrown away after it is acknowledged by those who need to know about it? Our Ward Clerk wants to save EVERYTHING which I feel is unnecessary because the information is stored in MLS and backed up (not to mention the master copy in Salt Lake). Do we need to save a paper copy of all our membership? (I think saving everything has been carried over from the days before MLS).

kd7mha · #2

these threads may answer your question

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1181

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=823

mkmurray · #3

drkelly wrote:Every membership update results in paper. What info should the membership clerk be filing and what can be thrown away after it is acknowledged by those who need to know about it? Our Ward Clerk wants to save EVERYTHING which I feel is unnecessary because the information is stored in MLS and backed up (not to mention the master copy in Salt Lake). Do we need to save a paper copy of all our membership? (I think saving everything has been carried over from the days before MLS).

The practice of filing all that paper work is likely carried over from the MIS days. But what if your bishop wants you to look up some information about a member that has since moved away or if one who is the Membership Clerk needs to look up the date when something changed or a previous value of a record item before it was changed?

From my own experience of just a year and a half (in a highly transient family ward), I have had to look in the filing cabinet for almost every type of report that MLS has printed membership-wise (Transaction Reports, Membership Records, Membership Updates, etc). I've had at least one case for each type of report where looking through the filing cabinet at these past reports was the only way to obtain the info I needed. In my experience, MLS just does not carry nearly enough history for the needs of some wards.

#4

An alternative to killing all those trees is to print the record or information to a PDF document that can be saved on a CD-RW, DVD-RW or some other media for retrieval when needed.

mkmurray · #5

jdlessley wrote:An alternative to killing all those trees...

And yet McAfee released a report today regarding the carbon footprint email (especially spam email) leaves on the environment; so even electronic storage isn't full-proof. You can never win at this game!

Just kidding...